By Dr. Ronen Bar Nahor.

While it is common understanding that Agile is suitable for small teams, there are many miss-conceptions regarding Agile implementation in larger groups. The following statements are sometimes heard:

• "Oh yes, Scrum is good for small teams but I don't see it working for bigger organizations" ("big organization" defined as having more than 50 people, more than 10 teams that need to integrate their work into one product or an integrated portfolio).
• "Only experts and above average developers can do it."
• "It should evolve bottom-up" (i.e., one "crazy" team implements Scrum and generates a "buzz" that pushes the rest of the organization to follow).
• "There is no visibility above the team's level as there are no project plans".
• "Teams are self-managed so team leaders and managers lose their role."
• "Agile is not good for complex systems with integrations and dependencies."
• "You can't control complex systems without doing detailed design and planning in advance; the quality will suffer and we will have chaos".
• And so on....

The truth is that ALL the above statements are WRONG!

• Large organizations should adopt Agile to reduce the bureaucracy and organizational complexity, to be able to react faster to changes and to break the organizational silos (political conflicts, different tools and methods) that lead to miss communication.
• From our experience, implementing Scrum surfaces most of the inherent problems and wastes in the existing processes. This allows management to eliminate waste and become leaner.
• Scrum is the most structured lean methodology in the market.
• Working in Scrum teams allows better leveling of knowledge, reduces (not eliminates) dependencies on specific expertise, increases flexibility in the task force and more importantly, raises employees satisfaction as it advocates personal development.
• Management support is critical. In cases where implementation was driven by management in a top-down approach, the success rates were much higher. It is much easier to change culture and mind-set by moving top-down. There is no need for multiple methodologies and progress tracking tools (waterfall and Scrum).
• Scrum provides much better visibility in all levels with almost no overhead for reporting. From team to team-of-teams up to management. From sprint backlog through release backlog up-to product/project roadmap.
• As the teams are self-managed, managers have more time to look ahead, to think, to understand customer needs and translate it to cost effective stories, to analyze the impact of new requirements on strategy, architecture etc. And, most importantly, as they have great visibility into the teams and release progress, they can focus on moving impediments to make teams more effective.

And the bottom line is: The bigger the organization, the higher ROI.