In today’s large and complex organizational spaces there is a high interest in scaling agile. But there is also a huge amount of confusion around it.
And yet, the need to scale agile is real, isn’t it? Oftentimes, a customer value increment requires multiple teams to cocreate and collaborate.
Many companies have tried to address this challenge by adopting a kind of a scaled agile framework. However, sometimes there frameworks become the very center of finger pointing, not only because they have a hard time delivering the promise of scaling agile, but also because they seem to have contributed to dehumanizing agile and taking the very element of agility out of our institutional agile practices.
As a software, agile and organizational change consultant, I feel very sad to see software professionals not feeling empowered by agile, but rather alienated from agile. They feel that the agile processes and frameworks are something being done to them, imposed upon them topdown, rather than something they embrace voluntarily.
In this talk, I wish to share my experiences and reflections upon, how the sociotechnical lens and practice can help us rediscover the value of agile as a collaborative capacity to respond to change, to deliver and validate customer values continuously and iteratively, in an uncertain and turbulent environment.
I’d draw on some concrete examples to show how collaborative modeling and design practices like Domain-Driven Design can help us model and build ourselves as human systems around the software systems, with more intentionality, and with more visual reflective conversations.
I also hope to go beyond the buzzwords of sociotechnical design, so that we together can take a deeper look at how complex human systems are different in their dynamics compared with complicated software systems, and thus call for different design principles and design patterns. For instance, information hiding is a desirable quality attribute in designing software systems. But it could be very detrimental if we, or teams, see each other as pure abstractions.