TL; DR: Hands-on Agile #45: FAST Scaling: An Innovative Way to Scale Agile with James Shore
In this energizing 45th Hands-on Agile session, James Shore shared his experiences with scaling “agile:” first with traditional approaches and, more recently, with FAST scaling. Learn in this deep-dive what works, what doesn’t, and how you can try FAST in your organization.
📺 Watch the video now: James Shore: FAST: An Innovative Way to Scale — Hands-on Agile #45.
🇩🇪 Zur deutschsprachigen Version des Artikels: FAST Skalierung: Ein innovativer Weg zur Skalierung der Agilität mit James Shore — Hands-on Agile #45.
🗞 Shall I notify you about articles like this one? Awesome! You can sign up here for the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter and join 36,000-plus other subscribers.
🎓 Join Stefan in one of his upcoming Professional Scrum training classes!
Scaling Agile
How can multiple teams work together on a single product? The common wisdom is to carefully align teams and responsibilities to create autonomous teams. But, invariably, this approach eventually runs into cross-team bottlenecks, challenges aligning responsibilities to teams, and difficulties creating cross-functional teams.
Fluid Scaling Technology, or FAST, is an innovative new approach that solves these problems. It uses frequent team self-selection to prevent bottlenecks, share knowledge amongst teams, and ensure the right people are working on the right things. It’s simple and lightweight.
During the 45th Hands-on Agile meetup, James Shore shared his experiences with scaling Agile: first with traditional approaches and, more recently, with FAST scaling. Learn in about an hour what works, what doesn’t, and how you can try FAST in your organization.
Watch the recording of James Shore’s talk on scaling Agile with FAST now:
James Shore’s slides on FAST scaling are available on Slideshare.
Q&A
During the Q&A session, James answered the following questions from attendees:
- What if there is a specific enabler — that is common across the organization and has an impact that would be helpful for other downstream or component teams? In this case, how do we optimize the dependency for value delivery?
- How did you make sure that the teams were filled equally?
- Extension of the above: how do you ensure teams are populated based on the correct business priority?
- How do the developers focus and manage context switching if they keep changing frequently?
- How can this model be communicated to executives, etc., so they will support this and know what they want to deliver?
- Amazing how people were switching. Was there some knowledge transfer between the team members? Pair programming, etc.?
- How is performance measured [at] team and individual [levels]?
(Please note that the questions have been slightly edited to improve legibility.)
How Is James Shore?
James Shore has been leading teams in practicing Agile development since 1999. He combines a deep understanding of Agile with decades of in-the-trenches practical development experience. He uses this experience to help people understand how all aspects of Agile fit together to create outstanding results.
James is the author of The Art of Agile Development, a recipient of the Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice, and co-creator of the Agile Fluency® Model.
Connect with James Shore over FAST Scaling
📖 Related Posts
Download the Cargo Cult Agile Checklist.
Download the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide.
Download the free Scrum Guide 2020 Reordered to understand patterns.
✋ Learn More About FAST Scaling — Join the 12,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack Community and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world.
If you like to join all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.