Agile At Scale

Agility on a corporate scale?

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Organizations of all sizes want to become agile. Agility may seem like a panacea for the limitations of traditional management methods, but the reality is that moving to Agile At Scale can be a complex task, not least because of the methodological gaps.

It's not just a question of switching a small IT team to agile mode, but of changing the working method and mindset of the whole company, potentially hundreds of teams.

In reality, Agile project management applies mainly to IT and marketing teams, and enables projects to progress iteratively, through sprints (production periods) which generally last 2-3 weeks, and 3-month planning timescales (PI Planning). Agile methods enable us to think more in terms of product management than project management. Teams often use Jira, a software tool ideally suited to IT project managers who adopt Scrum methodologies. This tool makes it possible to plan tasks with great flexibility, obtain a clear view of each sprint, or implement SAFe methods across several IT teams, for example. It is not, however, suited to managing the scoping and execution of a transformation program and its alignment with corporate strategy.

At Tabsters, our customers are mainly large groups with numerous teams, spanning several geographical regions, and managing multiple projects with often multi-year roadmaps. The larger the project, the more structured it needs to be to deliver the best possible results. There are very few, if any, large companies today that have switched entirely to agile management. The great difficulty for most of our customers is to coordinate different teams working with different methodologies and tools.

Many organizations are adopting the SAFe framework. SAFe provides the methodology and structure needed to avoid organizational drift and siloed work by individual teams. SAFe tries to strike a balance between long-term strategy and short-term flexibility, but it does not involve all the players in a project, all the deliverables and all the steering indicators. Today, it is mainly used at IT department level, not at corporate level.

Tabsters complements SAFe to bring on board all the players who work mainly on Excel, PowerPoint or other platforms, while integrating data from SAFe, Jira, GitHub etc., to provide a global vision for all players and general management. Certain teams can continue to manage their Epics and Stories in Jira, for example, while business teams benefit from simpler, dedicated interfaces, and central teams from a different information structure (oriented towards the company's strategic axes), complementary data (KPIs, financial gains, etc.) and a much broader time scale (several years versus 3 months of PI planning). Each player has a shared, consolidated vision, and you eliminate any gaps between your operational and strategic steering.

The larger the scale, the larger the teams, the greater the need to coordinate stakeholders and aggregate information: a centralized project management tool like Tabsters becomes indispensable.

However, the tool alone is not enough. You can provide your employees with the best software on the market, but if they don't use it, your efforts will be in vain. At Tabsters, we don't just train your teams to use a tool, we train them to adopt new ways of working, to make your company more responsive in an increasingly unpredictable environment, and to maximize your projects' chances of success.