Scaled agile - Law of diminishing return

| June-2015 | Arijit Sarbagna | India | Agile&DevOps
Your business technologists. Powering progress © Confidential
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Scaling Agile
Law of Diminishing Returns

Agenda
▶ Overview of Scaled Agile
– What is Scaled Agile?
– What are the options?
– Are they good or bad?
▶ Law of Diminishing Return
▶ Deeper Look in to Agile at Scale
2
Objective:
1. We will try to understand how Scaling Agile could go wrong
2. And how we should try doing it right

Overview of Scaled Agile

▶ What is Scaled Agile:
– In simple words, it’s a framework for adopting Agile at Enterprise level
▶ What are our options:
– SAFe (Dean Leffingwell)
– DAD - Disciplined Agile Delivery (Scott Ambler and Mark Lines)
– LeSS – Large Scale Scrum (Craig Larman)
– Scrum at Scale (Alex Brown and Jeff Sutherland)
– Scaling Scrum (Ken Schwaber)
– Home Grown?
– …
▶ Are these options Good? Bad?
– We will discuss
– But…
Scaled Agile
4

Law of Diminishing Return

Law of Diminishing Return
In economics, diminishing returns (“law of diminishing returns”) is the decrease in
the marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single
factor of production is incrementally increased, while the amounts of all other factors
of production stay constant.
Example:
Assume we have a plot of land growing corn. We wish to use fertilizer to get the
maximum yield (while other conditions such as sunlight, water and oxygen are
steady). Here, fertilizer is the input and yield is the return. Here, we need to
understand two principles:
▶ Every additional unit of fertilizer generates a different increase in yield. The first few
units probably gives a burst in yield compared to without fertilizer. Sub sequentially,
adding more fertilizer will still give more yield, but at a decreasing rate.
▶ There is an optimal point where adding X amount of fertilizer which will give us
maximum yield. This is known as the point of diminishing returns. Any additional
fertilizer beyond that will lead to a smaller increase in yield which does not justify the
cost of buying more fertilizer. This is where the law of diminishing returns kicked in
6

Example: How Much Time to Spend Estimating?
7
 A little effort helps a lot
 A lot of effort only helps a little
50%
100%
Accuracy
Effort

Too many cooks spoil the broth
8
Image Source: photomoskoo.com

Scaling Agile - Diminishing Return

Parameters to decide Scaling
▶ Readiness
– Are we ready to scale (from organization maturity perspective)?
▶ Timing
– Are my business drivers aligned for Scaling?

Scaling Agile: When SHOULD we scale?
▶ When we have a CONFIDENT Team
– We can’t drive a team which doesn’t have confidence to take the plunge
▶ When we have a STRONG Base
– When an existing practice has been producing good results and we wish to
spread the values to a wider group/practice – across multiple levels of the
organization
11

Scaling needs Confidence
Tom Cruise scaling the sheer glass of the Burj Khalifa building in MI4
12

Scaling requires Strong Base
▶ Scaling can’t happen on a weak foundation
13

Do we have the Business Drivers?
14
Is this what the Doctor ordered?

How much return are we getting?
▶ Claimed returns from Scaled Agile:
– Transparency increased on all levels
– Delivery cycle time down from >12 months to 3 months
– Increased predictability (e.g. 92% successful releases)
– Need for patches decreased
– Less defects in main branch
▶ Claimed returns from Scrum:
– Productivity improvement by 60-70%
– 20% decrease in time to market
– 50% improvement in code quality
– 70% reduction in system downtime
15
Data Source: Average data collected across randomly picked case studies

How is Scrum different from Scaled Agile?
16
Team
Program
Portfolio
• Throughout it is a combination
of one or more Agile
methodologies – with Scrum
being at core
• Program & Portfolio comes
with additional baggage – for
better management and
maintenance

Role of Scrum in Agile Scaling
17
Scrum Agile at Scale
Success
IncreasingScrumMaturity

18
Success

19
MoreSuccess
With fast growing popularity towards “Agile at Enterprise”, we are
seeing a growing practice of “jump started” Scaling – mostly
without much required strong foundation.

Why Diminishing Return?
▶ Lack of Strong Engineering Foundation
– Absence of strong engineering practices (we can't scale crappy code) makes
life difficult for all
▶ Missing Management Buy-In
– Without strong support from Management, it’s extremely difficult to drive
any change in any Organization
▶ Too many Consultants (“we too have done Agile” – type*)
– If there are just handful practitioners, we risk spreading them too thin –
which simply doesn’t work
20
*Statutory Warning

Diminishing Return: Marketing Gimmicks
21
Agile Manifesto
Unfortunately, no one will
publish it – as it is too small to
be a book.

Diminishing Return: Symptoms
▶ Unsure about the difference between Agile Adoption vs Transformation
▶ Agile Transformation initiated – with a detailed Big Bang Plan
▶ Indecisive as how to initiate the drive – bottom-up or top-down?
▶ Open Questions:
– How do we create complete cross-functional teams?
– How do we make teams self-organized?
– Do we have one or multiple backlogs?
– Should we plan and then act?
– Or do we act and learn from practice?
– How do we manage dependencies across/within organizations?
– …
22
From CEO/CTO Perspective

Diminishing State:
▶ The moment an organization/team starts putting too much focus on being Agile
– there comes a stage of being “prescriptive”
– Prescriptive format leads to a weaker team moral, loosened engineering
practices and overall poor foundation to scale
– Quality falls, Scrum becomes monotonous flow
– Scaling is doomed
▶ Similarly, if a team or organization becomes too focused on Program Portfolio
Management (PPM), there will be too much of “wait time” for teams to get
answer to.
– Day-to-day decision flow becomes crooked
– Scrum Master roles move towards PM
– Agility dries up from teams
23

Diminishing Return: Solution
▶ Bottom-up
– Don’t lose focus from the basics
– Basics should help us to build strong practice and team
– A strong team helps scaling – not only by being a model to follow, but also
sharing its confidence with others
▶ Top-down
– Management buy-in should be easy, once team starts performing at ground
– There should a rigid governance structure, with flexible minds driving
it
– Encourage all to take the dive – it’s never too late
24

Never Ending Frameworks to Scale
25
Winners don’t do different
things, they do things
differently!

atos.net
Atos, the Atos logo, Atos Consulting, Atos Worldline, Atos Sphere, Atos Cloud and Atos WorldGrid
are registered trademarks of Atos SA. June 2011
© 2011 Atos. Confidential information owned by Atos, to be used by the recipient only. This document, or any part of it,
may not be reproduced, copied, circulated and/or distributed nor quoted without prior written approval from Atos.
Thanks
For more information please contact:
Arijit Sarbagna
M +91 9830547677;
Email: arijit.sarbagna@atos.net
Linkedin: https://in.linkedin.com/in/arijitsarbagna

Scaled agile - Law of diminishing return

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