We often talk about agile with small, cross-functional, empowered teams. Scrum recommends team size between 4 and 8, XP is similar. I would bet most agile teams today are quite small, co-located and using manual, simple office or wiki-based process facilitation tools.

But how do we scale agile up?
Many companies are beginning to increase the scale of agile in their organizations through the use of multiple agile teams. Jeff Sutherland introduced Type C Scrum and a Scrum of Scrums in his paper Future of Scrum presented at the Agile 2005 Conference this past summer. Many I know are doing this successfully today.

Rally Software is beginning to scale agile in enterprises through the use of its lifecycle process and collaboration tool. This provides a central aggregation point for shared status and reporting for companies with teams distributed across multiple buildings, across the country or across the globe. They have some recognizable big names in their customer list – BMC, Novel, Verizon, etc.

But what about really big enterprises?

EDS announced its Agility Alliance just one year ago to a lukewarm reception due to the fact that it was touting yet another all talk and no action “alliance” and “partnership” program. However, EDS went further. They opened a 145,000 square foot development center facility to host technology experts throughout their alliance in a collaborative work environment. Inside this facility is a 20,000 square foot “collaboration center”, featuring a series of conference rooms and group discussion areas equipped with audio and visual systems to stimulate and support productive idea generation and problem resolution.

EDS is moving beyond just ‘technology integration’ towards the integration of the actual process of delivering solutions. They call this innovation integration or ‘innogration’. I worked for EDS for 5 years some time ago and know the difficulties of instigating change within an organization of this size - or even within one of its divisions. I was able to help drive agility on one single account, but that gets us back to the beginning of this topic.

The companies that have formed this alliance you would not be the first that come to mind when thinking about agility – Cisco, Dell, EMC, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Siebel, Sun, Xerox and more. These represent the biggest heavyweights in their industries. Yet, through the initiative of EDS, they are all participating in cross-functional collaborative teamwork to drive new and innovative solutions using more agile techniques. Is this just hype or is it real?

Combine this with the recent news out of IBM with the open sourcing of their Rational Unified Process to the Eclipse Platform to drive a more unified agile methodology and the recent major upgrade of their Software Best Practices exposing a very agile focus, and you have some major trends occurring in our small agile world. If its not real yet, it will be soon.

Is this good for the agile community?
I believe some in the agile community are here because we like being different, we like to stand out and shout out at the rest of the world that is going “backwards”. But what happens when the rest of the world recognizes this and has jumped on the bandwagon? Does our message get lost? Watered down? Do we lose our passion for agile because everyone else is doing it?

I don’t propose to have the answers to these questions, but I am enjoying watching the changes before our eyes. If you have experience with the EDS Agility Alliance or other Enterprise Agility efforts, I would love to hear about them.