Scaling Agile: The Small-is-Beautiful of Hubs

GOTO Copenhagen 2021

Jim Coplien is executive consultant in the areas of organizational development and software architecture with more than 40 years' experience.

Scaling agile is all the rage these days, and especially popular with laggard adopters who want to broaden their management span of control. Most scaling frameworks are just classical military hierarchies suitable to command-and-control: in a suitably arranged organization of 625 people, the average number of communication hops between any two people is a very un-agile seven.

Yet small-world theory says that any two of the 8 billion people on Earth are connected through about six hops, but a Scrum@Scale-like hierarchy is even worse for just 625 people. How does it work? The answer lies in self-organizing hubs, which hold the key to large group engagement— including enterprise Scrum. You know some hubs already — learn more at this talk.