Can Agile Scale Without Exhaustion?
Updated: 6 days ago
Insights from Agile Community Network Episode 115
When does coordinating the work start to crowd out doing the work? A designer supports several teams and spends the day moving between their meetings. A decision waits overnight because the person who can make it is in another time zone. People work longer hours to keep everything connected.
In Episode 115, the ACN community explored how scaling Agile can create this kind of exhaustion. The conversation included successes, disagreements about how much consistency teams need, and practical ways to reduce the load. One question kept coming back: what are we trying to scale, and what is it costing the people doing the work?
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When people become the glue
The opening discussion described what happens when an Agile framework is added to an organization without changing the systems around it. Existing approvals, reporting structures, and dependencies remain. New ceremonies arrive on top of them. People absorb the gaps through extra meetings, handoffs, and work outside normal hours.
Calling that a resilience problem misses the design problem. Protecting focus time, bringing decisions closer to the work, and reducing dependencies were offered as ways to make the system easier to work in. Another coordination meeting may help people manage a dependency, but it doesn't necessarily remove it.
How much consistency do teams need?
The community didn't offer a single answer. One practitioner, drawing on experience in life sciences and medical technology, argued that shared tools, cadences, and some common discipline help teams synchronize complex work. He also described incorporating required documentation into backlogs and definitions of done.
Another perspective focused on consistency at the boundaries between teams. Teams may need dependable interfaces without needing identical internal practices. Diana Larsen brought the discussion back to Agile values and principles as shared guidance for decisions. Valuing working software over documentation still leaves room for the documentation the work requires.
That tension is useful: where does consistency make collaboration easier, and where does it add constraints that don't help?
A success story started with organization design
One participant described a financial services organization that grouped teams around product capabilities, including banking and mortgages. That made dependencies easier to manage than when related work was scattered across separate reporting structures.
The organization combined practices that suited its needs, including communities of practice, adapted quarterly planning, and working together on integration through mob programming. In that experience, collaborative integration reduced weeks of back and forth to a few days. The example gave the conversation something concrete to examine: scaling can work when the organization deliberately changes how the work fits together.
Respect for time has to survive delivery pressure
A practical contribution challenged the community to design work around respect for people's time. Protected focus time means little if meetings keep appearing in it. A decision meeting needs a clear purpose and someone with the authority to make the decision. Otherwise, everyone may have to return for another meeting.
April Mills encouraged people to act as change agents from wherever they sit. That might mean improving a team practice or approaching the person behind a mandate with an offer to make it work better. The discussion also recognized how strongly leadership decisions shape the conditions teams work in.
Near the end, Jörg Pietruszka widened the question: are we only trying to scale throughput, or do we also want to scale flexibility and the ability to generate ideas? That changes what we look for when deciding whether a scaling effort is helping.
Questions to bring to your team
Where are people compensating for a gap in the system through extra meetings, waiting, or overtime?
Which shared practices help teams work together, and which could be simplified or removed?
What could you change from where you are before asking people to adapt one more time?
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