Organize your team with an Agile scaling frameworks comparison

Another alternative for scaling Agile is to pick and choose pieces from frameworks to suit your needs.

All frameworks are strong in one area, but weak in others, according to Nizar Khoja, director of Agile at Royal Bank Canada (RBC) and Ardita Karaj, president of Industrial Logic Canada, presenting at Agile and Beyond 2019. Most process frameworks are neither customer-centric nor do they emphasize product and market fit, they said. Business frameworks, like Lean Startup, lack comprehensive support for enterprises. Industrial Logic and RBC partnered to look at value with no Agile or other framework in mind. Rather than build an Agile team, for example, the companies defined the tenets of a purpose-driven team. Rather than teach employees to follow Scrum, they emphasized purposeful routines. RBC reframed their software development approach from frameworks to principles and found a path to get where they needed to go.

#NoFrameworks pros and cons

With no Agile framework, there's no guidance from external experts, gurus or methodologists who specialize in that framework. Without a specific framework to dictate choices, it's up to the workers to make decisions around scaling up large and complex software development; and they will have no easy answers to lean on.

However, an external expert might never see or interview your team, so they may not be the right person to be in charge anyway. Software development organizations can still contract with knowledgeable Agile, business and process coaches, as RBC did with Industrial Logic Canada. But the challenge remains to build organizational knowledge without a long-standing structure to turn to for guidance.