Agile has virtually taken over IT departments, themselves the source of countless innovations. At last count, 85 percent of software developers use agile techniques in their work… Once they have learned the basics, they can scale agile, establishing hundreds of individual teams or teams of teams to tackle large projects. Saab’s aeronautics business created more than one hundred agile teams operating across software, hardware, and fuselage for its Gripen fighter jet — a $43 million item that is certainly one of the most complex products in the world. Military analyst Jane’s has deemed the Gripen the world’s most cost-effective military aircraft.
That was from the excellent book, Doing Agile Right. The ability for a large organization to simultaneously run agile teams and stable bureaucracies creates a challenge in setting up objectives and processes. Here’s a little bit more on that:
At 7:30 a.m. each front-line team holds a fifteen-minute meeting to flag impediments, some of which cannot be resolved within the team. At 7:45 the impediments requiring coordination are escalated to a team of teams, where leaders work to either settle of further escalate issues. This approach continues, and by 8:45 the executive action team has a list of critical issues it must resolve to keep progress on track. Saab Aeronautics also coordinates its teams through a common rhythm of three-week sprints, a project master plan that is treated as a living document, and the colocation of traditionally disparate parts of the organization — for instance, putting test pilots and simulators with development teams.
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