I recently had someone pose a question to me that got me thinking about the scalability of agile success. Here was the question: "I'm part of large organization of over 1,000 people. Our small team of 40 has been using agile with a great deal of success. Now our company wants to me to extrapolate the successes we've enjoyed from agile (efficiency, value, profitability) to the rest of the company. Do you think the agile success of 40 people can be extrapolated to over 1,000 people?”
It's a great question and I don't think there is an easy answer to it. Speaking from my own personal experience, it's been difficult extrapolating the success our small team of five developers had in the past to our larger organization of about 35 people. There are many challenges as you scale agile up. Agile practices depend heavily on collocated teams that are cross-functional in nature. When you start scaling agile up, you need to consider geographic dispersion of much larger project teams that may not be as cross-functional as you'd like them to be. This is just the nature of large organizations.

