Loading...

How large successful companies achieved Agility at Scale

Posted on

A summary with infographic of how large successful companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Spotify, LinkedIn, Netflix and HP LaserJet Firmware achieved agility at scale with tangible and lasting business benefits.

Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Spotify, LinkedIn, Netflix and HP LaserJet Firmware, they all achieved Agility at Scale, with tangible and lasting benefits for their business.

Agility as being fast, dynamic, innovative, flexible, adaptive, and resilient. For these companies, their agility has been instrumental for their business, financial and commercial success, and for keeping their edge and innovativeness while growing and at scale.

Some of those companies had that agility from the outset and maintained it while they grow (Google, Facebook, Spotify, Amazon) while others at some point in time went through some kind of change or transformation to achieve or recover such degree of agility (Microsoft, LinkedIn, Netflix and HP LaserJet Firmware).

Their pursuit of Agility has been driven both bottom-up and from the top, with a lot of autonomy as well as responsibility for the teams. The balance between the bottom-up and the top drive vary from company to company.  People, their autonomy, their mastery, their involvement, and team-work have been fundamental ingredients.

None of these companies even remotely refers to, uses practices from, or takes inspiration from any one of the commercial scaled agile frameworks (e.g. SAFe, DaD, or even LeSS).
None of these companies adhere to just one of the official Agile framework, not by the book, not by imitation, nor in a prescriptive or uniform and standard way for all the teams with a cookie-cutter or cut-and-paste approach.

All these companies have grown their own ways of working internally, in a continuous process of experimentation-learning-adaptation-evolution, in order to suit their specific circumstances and needs (no scaling by imitation, no copycats).
All these companies’ ways of woking take inspiration or are congruent with many of the Lean and Agile principles, values and mindset. With a few exceptions for two of them on sustainable pace, psychological safety, and daily collaboration with the business.
In their pursuit of agility, all these companies have a strong focus on technical excellence with a strong engineering culture. All of them consider the company culture as an important ingredient of their agility.
All these companies’ have some technical practices at scale that have their roots in Agile and specifically in Extreme Programming (e.g. Trunk Based Development, Continuous Integration, Test Automation, Continuous Delivery).

Some of these companies (Microsoft, Spotify, HP LaserJet Firmware) explicitly define themselves as Agile (as in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development). None of these companies talks about scaling Agile (as in any of the Scaled Agile frameworks).

Read the full account with all the sources: https://www.smharter.com/blog/how-large-successful-companies-achieve-agility-at-scale/


Turbocharge your scaling initiative.


See how we can help.
You, your team, your organisation.