The European Business Review - July-August 2019

24 The European Business Review July - August 2019

amongst the teams and the projects, some

teams may need the work of others as inputs.

Projects of different teams may work with a

common data asset. Teams may fight for the

same scarce resources and talent. And, what if

there’s a great deal of legacy around, which the

teams need to somehow work with?

This situation easily ends up in chaos, espe-

cially when the change has to come fast or very

fast as in the digital age.

You will have to find ways to align the

different team and project objectives, coor-

dinate resource allocation, and manage to

integrate the results without jeopardising the

agility of the teams and that is quite a chal-

lenge. The challenge is referred to as scaling

agility or creating agility at scale.

You have mentioned the need for aligning,

coordinating and integrating work as critical

to making agility at scale work. These things

are essential in achieving the goals and

focus of organisations. Over the years, what

changes did you notice in terms of the goals

and objectives of different organisations?

The importance of aligning, coordinating and

integrating work is not new. It goes back to the

very essence of making organisations work.

What has changed though, is the backdrop

against which we are organising: turbulence,

catalysed by digitalisation.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, you

could say that in the past, we organised for focus,

cost, efficiency and stability. Today, we are still

aiming for focus, but with emphasis on creating

speed (speed-to-market), flexibility and choice.

It does not mean that the former set of

objectives is less important in turbulent times,

quite the opposite I would say, but the challenge

has shifted very much towards combining these

former objectives with the latter ones.

This immediately brings us to the paradox

involved in scaling agility: introducing fast flexi-

bility as well as stability at the same time. That is

what makes it so hard to get it right. We’ll have

to effectively figure out where stability matters

and where it can be relaxed.

However, one thing is clear: with the speed

at which things are moving today, we are

no longer able to achieve the right balance

between flexibility and stability by relying on

our human abilities alone. We’ll have to work

creatively with digital technologies to help

us find and install the right balance between

stability and flexibility.

As you have said, stability and flexibility

are two major components that should be

achieved through scaling agility. How will

leaders be able to apply the concept of scaled

agilityintheirrespectiveorganisations?

There are several practice frameworks avail-

able for scaling agility to the enterprise level.

They are all relatively new.

For example, there’s “SAFe” which stands

for “Scaled Agile Framework,” but there’s

also “LeSS” – for “Large Scale Scrum,” DAD

which is “Disciplined Agile Delivery” and

At the risk of oversimplifying things, you could say that in the past, we organised

for focus, cost, efficiency and stability. Today, we are still aiming for focus, but

with emphasis on creating speed (speed-to-market), flexibility and choice.

Agility