A Roadmap for Scrum@Scale

Agile Boston's 10th annual Give Thanks for Scrum event had a full house at Microsoft's training facility in Burlington, MA on 20 November. I delivered a keynote titled "The Holy Grail of Project Management: Linear Scalability." In my talk, I  laid out the roadmap for deploying Scrum@Scale to enable a "scale-free" architecture that works in any size project.  These are the essential steps to attaining high organizational performance.

This roadmap sets an organization on a journey which is essentially the Toyota Kata, a repeatable pattern of working that enables continuously improving organizational effectiveness without the waste of extra roles, hardening Sprints, or non-Scrum teams which cripple performance.

1. "Go See" - Scrum Coaches develop a list of organizational problems
2. Senior Management Briefing
   1. Lay-out current problems
   2. Identify the desired goal
   3. Show how Scrum@Scale can achieve that goal by delivering twice the value in half the time
   4. Identify initial agile initiatives for a small set of teams that will become a reference model for Scrum
3. Select a leadership Scrum team that with create an "Agile Operating System" for the selected initiatives - the Executive Action Team (EAT).
4. Select a leadership team that will prioritize all work on the selected initiatives - the Executive MetaScrum.
5. Train leadership, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and team members who will work within the "Agile Operating System" defined, created, managed and supported by the EAT.
6. When the Product Owner team has a backlog, form teams around that backlog to maximize organizational performance.
7. Create Scrum of Scrums with Scaled Daily Scrums as a release team to coordinate the integrated activity across teams.
8. Deliver early and often.
9. When initial initiatives are successful and a "Reference Model" for how Scrum works well in the organization has been established, expand the "Agile Operating System" to the next prioritized set of initiatives.
10. Rinse and Repeat

Read the slides here: Give Thanks for Scrum Nov 2018 S@S