"Handle with Care: Things to Consider before Scaling" by Dmitry Lebedev. Agile Tour Vilnius 2018

1. Handle with care
Things to consider before scaling
By Dmitry Lebedev, Citadele

2. Dmitry Lebedev
Answers the question, “Who the heck am I?”
1997
Started as Borland
Delphi programmer
2004 2010
Bought Ken Beck’s book
about XP
With couple of fellows
founded Agile Latvia user
group
2018
Head of IT development
In Citadele banka

3. What scaling is (not).

4. Why we want to `scale`?
Typical cases:
● Got no agile teams - want to have agile teams
● Got one agile team - want more teams like that
● Got several agile teams - want more alignment
● Got several agile teams - want faster delivery
General Goal:
● Create an Agile Scalable Organization

5. Org scaling
● More teams
● Fast growth
● Better alignment
● More products
● Bigger products
● Faster delivery

6. Own Experience
● Multi-site scaling
● Riga, Oslo, Bergen
● SAFe
● All team continuously implemented
only 30% of planned work
● Managerial decision - 2 weeks
sprint instead of 3 weeks sprint

7. What is Agile Organization?
CxO
Team A Team B
VPs
Middle
Management
Decisions
Feedback
Traditional org
CxO
Team A Team B
VPs
Middle
Management
Feedback
Agile org
Execution Execution
De
cisi
on
Goals
De
cisi
on
De
cisi
on
De
cisi
on
Go
als

8. Scaling challenge:
Not 'HOW?'
but 'WHAT?'

9. Why we need
to look
beyond
scaling
framework?
Photo by Ryan Magsino on Unsplash
Hiring
Onboarding
Line
management
Decision
making
Org structures
Scaling
framework
Culture & Values
Information
exchange
Tech
excellence

10. Hiring
● Takes time
● Get right people for
team
● Get right people for
the organization
● Burden of decision
making
Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

11. ● Disorganized Process
● Talent level is dropping
● Involved people are overloaded.

12. How we can scale
hiring
● Consensus
based decision
● Hiring committee
● Bar raisers
Photo by Tim Gouw on
Unsplash

13. Hiring challenges in scale
Referrals
Sourcing
Applications
Interview
process
Hiring
decision
Reference
check
Offer
Onboarding
Offboarding
Team A
Team B
Team C
Common/unified approach to hiring

14. Why bar raisers
are important?

15. Onboarding
● Getting an individual
into the team
● Getting an individual
into the organization
● Speed-up learning
● Plan for onboarding
Photo by Chris Brignola on Unsplash

17. Onboarding
challenges at scale
Explain how organisation works
Make sure to train with multiple teams
Postpone final decision till on-boarding’s
end
Demo sessions VS bugfix sessions

18. Information flows
● Vertical information flows
● Horizontal information flows
● Complexity of scale and distance
● Meetings
Photo by Matthew Guay on Unsplash

19. Communication
channels
● One-to-many
● One-on-one
● Email
● Wiki/intranet
● Dashboards
Photo by Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash

20. Message lifetime
Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
● Ephemeral
● Searchable
● Highly visible

21. Complexity of
scale and
distance
● Tool explosion
● Meeting explosion
● Email explosion
Photo by Riley McCullough on Unsplash

22. Decisions making
● Distance from decision to execution
● Feedback
● Execution monitoring
Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

23. From decision to
execution and
back
Photo by Justin Little on Unsplash

24. Feedback
● Timely
● Specific
● Direct
● Respectful
Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

25. Execution
monitoring
● Monitor throughout
● Decide what to measure
● Gather right data
● Select appropriate tools
● Assign monitoring
responsibly
● Identify who report to
Photo by Jonas Svidras on Unsplash

26. Technical
excellence
■ Testing VS Quality
■ Code review
■ Pull requests
■ Collaborative code ownership
■ Product backlog sharing
■ Technical debt management
■ Expertise sharing
■ Planning
■ Delivery
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

27. https://twitter.com/kentbeck/status/1000011818197188610?lang=en

28. Conclusions
● Find your organization’s values and
practices
● See how it fits into scaling
● Define what needs to be changed
● Design scaling plan (hiring,
management, structure,
information, decisions & etc.)
● Execute transformation for scaling
● Pick agile scaling framework (if
still needed)

29. Where to look for
the info?
Agile at Scale, Inspired by
Spotify, december 3-4 2018

30. Thank you! https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitrylebedev/
https://twitter.com/crawled_away
https://medium.com/@lebedev_dmitry/