It’s not all about the team.
For Agile to work in a large program or a large organization, the cross-team issues are even more important than how well teams function individually. This is a common phenomenon in the world: that relationships between things are even more important than the things.
Transforming to an agile software delivery model is filled challenging, especially when you are working in an organization of a large scale. In large organizations, one of the most common practices to improve efficiency is to build an organization of specialists. Every specialist knows how to get their specific tasks done in the best way possible. Additionally, large companies typically have very large and complex software architectures for their systems. Between the specialists and the complex architectures, getting the entire solution delivered can be inefficient since it takes so much planning, effort, money, and time to get anything delivered.
The most intrusive inefficiency with these organizational models is that they are not designed with support for natural delivery flow.
Because of this, when transforming to a scaled agile model, there are specific guiding principles that can help determine the best organizational design to make your move to agility most effective. If planned and implemented properly, this agile transition will allow you to get the most business value delivered.
In order of importance, these principles are:
