No matter how large your Team grows or what kind of project you are working on, a couple of things remain true for Agile delivery teams. One is the need to have an effective Product Owner who is 100% available to answer questions, provide direction, and keep things moving forward. The other is the need for frequent inspection and adaptation by the Team as they deliver product increments. Fortunately, several factors can be applied at scale so that you can still have this high-performing team even if it’s very big. In addition, agile scaling factors help remove impediments caused by bottlenecks in communications and coordination so that your Scrum Team can work together more effectively across larger distances allowing them to self-organize their work more effectively.
The Agile Scaling Factors (ASFs) describe 12 factors that influence how well the basic principles of the Agile Manifesto “are applied” at scale. These scaling factors are divided into three categories: Organizational, Team, and Practitioner Factors. Each of these ASFs acts like levers that you can use to help your Team grow more quickly or slowly than might otherwise be possible. By utilizing some combination of these scales, you can optimize the change management process, ensuring that your teams’ progress is continuously improving while keeping in mind that not all changes will improve performance, so knowing when to scale is just as important as knowing how to scale. The following items offer some general guidance on each factor.
Organizational scaling factors allow the management of an Agile transition to be tuned for different types of change. There are two Organizational scaling factors: Whole Team and Optimizing The Whole. Using these scales allows organizations to reduce the level of change by changing how people work together (Optimizing The Whole) or choosing whether to include multiple teams working on the same product (Whole Team). These scales are most often used during migration from Waterfall/V-Model type development where there is little cross-team collaboration. This migration can, upon occasion, lead to decreased productivity until the multiple teams start to work together more effectively.
The Team scaling factors allow a team’s self-organization and workload distribution abilities to be tuned for different types of hardware, geographical dispersion, and team sizes. There are three Team scaling factors: Smaller Cadence, Self-Organizing Teams, and Optimizing The Whole Team. Using these scales allows development teams to distribute their workflow evenly as the number of members increases (Self-Organizing Teams) and decide whether or not they want to include other people working on the same product (Optimizing The Whole). These scales are most often used when helping an Agile team migrate from Waterfall/V-Model type development where the Team was restricted to working on one product.
The Practitioner scaling factors allow for tracking work, knowledge sharing, and collaboration abilities to be tuned for different types of work, tools used, and team skill levels. There are three Practitioner scaling factors: Small Releases, External Communication, and Continuous Improvement. Using these scales enables development teams to decide whether or not they should break their release criteria into smaller chunks (Small Releases), get continuous feedback from stakeholders (External Communication), or drive improvement across multiple aspects of their process (Continuous Improvement). These scales are most often used when helping an Agile team improve productivity by adopting more effective working methods.
