Close

2022-10-22

Scaling Agile: The Small-is-Beautiful of Hubs

Scaling Agile: The Small-is-Beautiful of Hubs

Scaling agile is all the rage these days and especially popular with laggard adopters who want to broaden their management span of control. Most Scaling frameworks are just classical military hierarchies suitable for command and control. In a suitably arranged organization of 625 people, the average number of communication hops between two people is a very un-agile seven.

Yet small-world theory says that any two of the 8 billion people on Earth are connected through about six hops, but a Scrum@Scale-like hierarchy is even worse for just 625 people. How does it work? The answer lies in self-organizing hubs, crucial to extensive group engagement— including enterprise Scrum. You know some corners already — learn more at this talk.

Scaling Agile: The Small-is-Beautiful of Hubs • James Coplien • GOTO 2021

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
01:39 Scale-free networks
06:22 The problem
15:15 Scaling and scoping
18:33 What are scale-free networks?
23:31 Hubs reduce graph diameter
25:13 Node degree
29:39 Examples of scale-free networks
32:22 What are they good for?
46:33 We already know some examples
49:22 Example: Amazon, Apple, FB, Google, Microsoft & Oracle
50:16 Do it at home
50:55 Conclusion
52:15 Outro

Jim Coplien is an executive consultant in organizational development and software architecture with over 40 years of experience.