Big Agile: It’s not just for small projects anymore

Jesse Fewell is an author, coach, and trainer in the world of modern management. He founded the original PMI Agile Community of Practice, co-created the PMI-ACP® agile certification and co-authored the Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide®.

  Agile   PM Network  

One of the stereotypes for agile approaches is that they only work for small projects. Ten or 15 years ago that might have been the case, but things are vastly different today. Agile techniques now are used as part of the day-to-day project operations of major organizations around the world.

Over the last two years, e-commerce giant Tesco.com has implemented agile approaches across all its technology initiatives, from internationalization to mobile. A Chinese telecom recently used a blended approach of agile and enterprise methods to execute a project involving 40,000 team members. Salesforce.com transformed the whole 6,000-plus-person company to agile approaches as the official company standard.

How do they do it? Here are the most popular techniques for scaling agile approaches beyond a single-team project.

Get it right at the team level

For the last several decades, management science has told us that the ideal size of a single team is seven people, plus or minus two. Teams of four or fewer don’t need the overhead of a dedicated team leader; anything more than nine, and the complexity curve flies off the chart.

With that in mind, it would be ideal to decompose a project of 700 people into a collection of seven-person teams. Each team needs to implement an agile approach with discipline and intention in order to consistently produce a highquality …

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