Scrum at Scale — overview

Scrum, as originally outlined in the Scrum Guide, is designed for a single team to be able to work at its optimal capacity while maintaining a sustainable pace. Since its inception, the usage of Scrum has extended to the creation of products, processes, and services that require the efforts of multiple teams.

As the number of Scrum teams within an organisation grew, two major well-known issues usually emerge:

• The original management structure can become ineffective for achieving business agility. Issues arose like competing priorities and the inability to quickly shift teams around to respond to dynamic conditions.
• The volume, speed and quality of the output (working product) per team began to fall, due to issues such as cross-team dependencies, duplication of work, and communication overhead.

To counteract these issues, a framework for effectively coordinating multiple Scrum teams can provide:

• Linear scalability: a corresponding percentage increase in delivery of working product with an increase in the number of teams Business agility: the ability to rapidly respond to change by adapting its initial stable configuration
  Separation of the “what” (product) from the “how” (process) accountability are expressly understood: this eliminates wasteful organisational conflict that keep teams from achieving their optimal productivity.
• Better decision latency: alignment of team norms and guidelines for consistent output reduce the time spent to make decisions Cross-team dependencies mitigation to ensure they do not become impediments

Scrum is a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering viable products of the highest possible value.

The Scrum Guide describes the minimal set of components that creates a team environment that drives innovation, customer satisfaction, performance, and happiness. Scrum utilizes radical transparency and a series of formal events to provide opportunities to inspect and adapt a team and its product(s).

Scrum@Scale is a framework in which a network of teams operating consistently with the Scrum Guide can address complex adaptive problems, while creatively delivering products of the highest possible value. These “products” may be physical, digital, complex integrated systems, processes, services, etc.