What kind of scrum scaled events do you participate in?

There’s different scaling patterns you can adopt; some of those are frameworks (eg SAFe, LeSS, Nexus Scrum) but you can also adopt whatever works in your context.

At a point, my experience is an awful lot of the “at scale” stuff deals with exposing where the scaling approach has problems, which usually boil down to

– conflicting priorities between teams
– too much work-in-progress across the organisation as a whole
– teams not organised around a value stream
– teams cannot work independently of each other

In a new transformation that’s often compounded by Conway’s Law – the architecture of the system is defined by the old organisational and team structures, so when you rearrange that there tends to be an awful lot of cross-team dependencies which grind things into mud.

SAFe has the Scrum-of-Scrums within a given value stream (ART) really just to try and deal with Conway’s Law as you start to shift, and holds up Team Topologies as your destination – that is to say a shift from highlighting and *trying* to manage dependencies between teams (or team-of-teams which SAFe calls ARTs) until you realise this isn’t working and start to refactor the architecture so teams can work independently.

Nexus Scrum has senior engineering staff working 50% on the “Nexus Team” that handles any integration work across team boundaries and ensures that things are resolved as a way of “cutting out the middle person” (ie the Scrum Masters) from the integration problem, again as you try to shift away from “dependency hell”

As for metrics, the only ones that really matter are the “DevOps” metrics of

– deployment frequency
– cycle time for new work (lead time for changes)
– change failure rate
– mean time to recovery after a failure

The key thing is that those metrics are there for the teams, so that they can shape how they improve, and highlight systemic issues for management that need to be addressed….