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…