Session Title

Exposing Uncomfortable Topics: Errors and Omissions with Scaling

Abstract

“Bad scaling is one of the biggest ‘agile problems’ of modern days for companies. Bad scaling is one of the three (the other two are : “agile tools” mania and falling a victim to big consultancies’ industrial model, one of the most expensive mistakes companies make, when they set themselves on a wrong ‘agile course’. Bad scaling is one of the three corners of “Trippe Taxation” triangle: Bad scaling comes in the form of trivializing agility at is core, weakening agile roles, plagiarizing and relabeling someone else’s experiments and calling them ‘operating models’, copy-pasting Scrum and Scrum roles into Fractal Geometry that look great on paper. Are there better ways to work? Probably not, if the ultimate goal is to relabel existing enterprise complexity with fancy agile terminology and then call it “enterprise scaling”. But there could be better ways to work if an ultimate goal is to simplify existing complexity (de-scale), and by doing so, improve your chances to scale agile ways of working (e.g. do Scrum, by more than one team, working for the same Product Owner, on the same product, out of the same backlog). In this session, Gene will expose some classic pitfalls of bad scaling and will recommend how, more good things could be done with less stuff,…how things could be done better, using Large Scale Scrum (LeSS).”

Bio

Gene Gendel is an organizational design consultant, adaptive & lean coach and trainer, and independent adviser to senior leadership. Almost 15 of 20+ years of his professional experience – Gene dedicated to working with companies of various sizes and lines of business, trying to help them improve internal dynamics, organizational structure and becoming a better place to work. Gene engages at all organizational levels: senior- and mid-level management, teams and individuals. In his work, Gene uses various methods, tools and techniques to amplify learning by others and to ensure that people gain autonomy after Gene “coaches himself out of the job”. Over the last decade, Gene’s big focus have been large financial institutions and consulting companies that struggle with moving from traditional budgets and portfolio/program/project work decompaction to adaptive/flexible budgeting and products (product-centric, customer-focused development).