Last week I referenced Alistair Cockburn, and this week I want to go a step further into his work.

If you don’t know Alistair, he was representing his Crystal framework at the signing of the Manifesto in Snowbird 2001, and later created the Heart of Agile movement.

Sitting in his talk at a 2010 Agile conference, I saw something in his teaching that wasn’t prominent in other Agile approaches. This diagram provides a visual overview.

When planning organizational structure and process, he suggested leveraging this grid. Up the Y-axis is the level of criticality: near the bottom is something like a simple mobile gaming app, while the top represents systems where life may be at risk, such as software used in an operating room. Across the X-axis is organizational scale: on the left is one agile team of 6 people, and on the right is an organization with 20+ teams and 100+ people.

His point was simple: if you are building a mobile app with a single team, you clearly need a different process than if you are building clinical healthcare systems with 25+ teams.

This is obvious once one pauses to ponder it.

The agile movement has since evolved, and we now have scaled frameworks intended to adapt team-level Scrum to larger, more coordinated organizations. But taking a “placemat” framework and applying it as a rubber stamp across every team goes against the above realization. If you force every team in your organization to follow the same framework and pattern structure, then you are inhibiting teams, not enabling (or protecting) them. You might need more governance in some areas, but don’t impose this on all teams because of the few.

Allow teams to leverage a process that is fit for purpose. 

Add governance and complexity to processes that demand it. Simplify and streamline for the teams that don’t. This may be more complicated than managing a tidy one-size-fits-all approach, but the goal of your organization should be to enable efficient delivery of value with appropriate quality, not to make the PMO easier to manage.