One thing that is guaranteed to send a shiver of dread down my spine is anytime the conversation turns to ‘scaling agile’.

It is a difficult moment as on the one hand it usually means that the early experiments with working agile have had some success and it is finding believers where previously there were sceptics. On the other (white knuckling it) hand it is the moment when efforts start to make it more palatable to the ‘enterprise’ — where ‘scale’ actually means ‘risk reduction’ and ‘bureaucracy’.

For me it shows a complete misunderstanding of what agile means — but increasingly I feel I am in the minority.

See as far as I am concerned Scrum, DSDM, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS etc are NOT agile. They are toolkits to support agile but they are the means not the ends.

Agile IS the manifesto and its principles.

Do you see anything there about stand-ups, burn-down (or up) charts, kanban walls or retrospectives? All these agile rituals/ceremonies evolved to support the manifesto — nothing more, nothing less. I am a big fan of many of them (and less so of others) but →

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

..not to be great at Scrum and god knows not to be anything with SAFe.

The greatest power of agile, in my experience, is small, self organising, empowered, multi-disciplinary teams. Somebody smart once said;