scrum

Scaling Scrum is easy, have a look at the Scrum guide at http://www.scrumguides.org . You have a number of teams that each operate as normal and a member from each of the team attends an additional daily scrum. Yes, it all makes sense, but it is a lot easier to say than do, even on a small scale. There are a few practical things that newer teams and organisations need to think about and do other things will descend into a state of anarchy.

By and large there are two sets of circumstances where you need to scale.

Have a look at the scrum guide and you will see that the team is expected to spent around 10% of their time reviewing the backlog. With all the will in the work, this is not easy to achieve. Even a highly disciplined team will find this difficult, especially when trying to spread the time across the iteration. Sure it is a little easier near the tail end of the iteration, but what this means is that there is a lot of work on the backlog very close to the start of the new iteration.

It is unfortunate that this is all too often the perception of Agile methods, at least initially, in an organisation. What it does highlight though is that unless there is an organisational change in thinking and culture, you are forever going to have problems and be fighting a losing battle. Agile needs to be accepted and understood across the entire organisation including management.