Most attempts to scale Agile struggle because the IT
leadership attempts to scale up (vertical) rather than scale out (horizontal).
Scale-up is old school management. It involves context-free management by
numbers, standardized metrics, reports and dashboards and workforce motivation
by targets and incentives. Inside IT, this approach usually ends up scaling
supervision (not management) without improving IT performance. This is why we
find managers functioning as supervisors and Scrum masters functioning as
taskmasters in self-proclaimed Agile enterprise IT.
“Individuals and interactions” is not a marketing buzz
phrase. It has to be taken seriously in the pursuit of agility. The
organization has to be designed for intrinsic motivation and unscripted
collaboration. Chapter three of Agile IT Org Design elaborates on this. Individuals respond to an
environment of autonomy, mastery and purpose. Leadership balks at autonomy
because it worries about loss of alignment with strategy and weakening of
accountability. Chapters six and seven of the book explain how to allow autonomy
and yet preserve alignment and accountability (using decision records, for example). This is the basis of scale-out
management.