J.P Morgan How to use the less framework to implement mass agility

How do large organizations in the top financial services enterprises adopt a large-scale scrum framework (less)?

Background

J.P Morgan's global core processing technology group, led by Simon Cooper, is an organization of more than 3,000 people around the world. The group decided in 2013 to change to (real) scrum and adopt the large-scale scrum (less) framework, which means that changes in the organization's design are to be made accordingly.

They have previously fragmented "scrum-but" and various agile engineering techniques, mainly in the development team, but the existing power and organizational structure has not changed significantly, as is the interaction with the business-still "contract negotiation" rather than "customer collaboration." There is still a research and development project manager, team leader, a single functional expert role responsible for delivering the contract, and a separate component and functional team (such as a Test team).

At the beginning of the year, Craig had a strong conversation with Simon Cooper and his direct subordinate manager, and then they decided to transform the organizational design into a less scrum framework.

This leadership dialogue recognizes the current dynamics of "contract games" in the organization, which hinders the Organization's ability to improve agility and improve customer-centric delivery of features.

This leadership dialogue is also geared towards a truly feature team--across components and cross-functional teams, which delivers customer features end-to-end, without handover, dependency, or latency. This requires eliminating the barriers within the organization, such as functional and component teams, and the corresponding manager roles.

Managers are receptive to these ideas because they think it is possible to improve agility, streamline planning and coordination, focus more on value, and reduce delivery problems. Now that they realize that to turn into the scrum framework, they need to adjust their organizational structure and learning accordingly, rather than "scrum is just team practice" as previously thought.

Changes within the core Securities processing group

On the way to scrum, they decided to restructure Mike Goldverg's securities organization first. This means that the securities team had to first eat crabs to consider far-reaching organizational changes. The group decided on the following priority levels:

Clarify the relationship between the products supported by the Department, identify the product owner, and authorize him to determine the release date, content, and priority in each iteration (Sprint).

Set up the feature team and close the division by function.

Eliminate line manager roles.

Change the mindset and behavior of the remaining manager and change from command and control to coaching and mentoring.

Identify and develop skilled programmers as teachers, working directly with the team to mentor Extreme Programming (XP) technologies, such as TDD.

Make important decisions on your own by Self-organizing feature teams (feature team), such as the election of scrum Master.

Traditional component teams and corresponding plans

The securities group was previously organized in accordance with the traditional pattern of architectural components, each of which had a manager in charge. Component owners are accustomed to making decisions with multiple business units, primarily as part of an annual planning cycle. Because customer-centric features typically span multiple components, multiple component owners need to agree on schedules and priorities in order to deliver end-to-end customer-centric features. Top-down Coordination for planning (appearing in various events but often difficult to realize) is often time-consuming and involves multiple rounds of conversation and negotiation, as different business units (and attributes) compete for the availability and priority of component teams as well as the "their" calculus.