10 Steps to High Performance Scaled Agile Teams

Only Jira Align is natively built for scaling agile teams to the enterprise. Here are ten tips for how to scale your agile teams and programs for high performance:

1. Set the terminology based on your framework
There are different versions of terminology depending on the flavor of agile you use. Ensuring a common version is used organizationally will increase efficiency and lessen disruption.

2. Connect the business to the technology
Use epics to capture intake, budget, approval, high level estimation, and business case. This will align financial, strategic and progress reporting to corporate strategy.

3. Fix the level of backlog items and estimation methods
Adhere to a standard, consistent level of backlog decomposition and sizing method. This improves predictability, visibility and communication across the enterprise.

4. Get a common planning cadence to align programs or PIs
Align the teams on a common sprint cadence. It can increase efficiency and productivity, thus
ensuring frequent and better alignment across teams.

5. Implement dependency management
Analyze dependency clustering activity to identify conflicts and gaps. You will optimize programs
and teams to reduce the amount of dependencies over time.

6. Lead by example to create a strong agile culture
Transforming an organization is the responsibility of leadership. If leaders are consistent in their
message and actions, employees are more likely to participate.

7. Prioritize facilitation as a critical skill set
At scale, lean collaboration and planning become more complex. It’s important to invest in skill
sets that create transparency and openness leading to successful outcomes.

8. Focus portfolios on outcomes rather than output
Analyze the performance improvement of the feature in the marketplace and make informed
decisions for future work. Don’t simply deliver a feature to the marketplace.

9. Empower individual decision making
Create organizational structures that facilitate allowing teams to make decisions about their work.
This improves flow, engagement, and innovation.

10. Create a toolset for self-organization
Agile transformation requires a strong tooling system that connects teams to programs to portfolio
management. Jira Align is the only platform built for scaling agile to the enterprise.

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