1. Do not scale, in most cases it is not necessary. Create well-defined product boundaries with interfaces and most scaling efforts are futile.
2. Do not multi-site. It makes simple things complex, and hard things even harder.
3. You cannot scale what you do not have, i.e. when you have no well-functioning Scrum teams in your organization you should not talk about scaling Scrum.
4. Think products, not projects. This shift in thinking will help organizations a lot in making better decisions.
5. Continuous improvement. Never stop learning, and do not be afraid to stop what is not working.
6. Technical excellence is important for agile teams, but for scaling it is essential.
7. Take a modular approach, there is no one size fits all framework.
8. You need top-down support, i.e. management wants to change their own way of working too.
9. Change the system, the culture and people's behavior will follow.
10. Tackle one product(group) at a time.
11. Feature teams, not component teams.
12. Empower your Product Owner (or similar role) to take the decisions he/she needs to be taking in that role.
13. Building is the easy part. You should think about operating your products as well. DevOps is the way to go.
Posted on Saturday, December 24, 2016 by Henrico Dolfing