Agile methodologies have become central to modern business operations, enabling organizations to respond faster to change, deliver value continuously, and enhance collaboration across teams.
But enterprise agile at scale is more than team-level practices; it is a system, and that system needs to be nurtured by a formal agile transformation framework. For enterprises seeking to pick up agile in a meaningful way, it is important to understand these common frameworks and how they influence organizational change.
Understanding Agile Transformation Frameworks
An agile transformation framework provides a structured roadmap for organizations transitioning from traditional workflows to agile practices. It defines principles, processes, roles, and metrics that help guide leadership, teams, and operations toward enterprise-wide agility. Unlike individual agile methodologies, which often focus on software development or project management, transformation frameworks consider culture, strategy, governance, and scaling challenges.
These methodologies enable businesses to strategize, implement, and evaluate the results of agile integration. They detail how teams are structured, how cross-functional teams collaborate, and how portfolios are managed, as well as how agile ways of working can be infused throughout an organization. Providing a uniform way of working, frameworks prevent the possibility that adoption becomes fragmented, which could lead to a different level of agility in each part of the company.
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
A popular choice among the agile transformation frameworks is the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). SAFe is a multi-layered method that is based on lean principles and agile processes, which allow you to apply agile throughout an entire enterprise. It allows for more than one team to work on the same project (which is large and complex) by establishing organization-wide roles and responsibilities and planning cycles.
SAFe promotes alignment, transparency, and collaboration to help organizations hold onto strategic focus and enable teams to iterate with speed. It provides prescriptive guidance on portfolio, program, and team-level workflows that make it a good choice for companies looking for a structured solution to make the entire enterprise agile.
Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS)
Large-Scale Scrum, or LeSS, is another prominent agile transformation framework designed to extend Scrum principles beyond individual teams. LeSS focuses on simplifying processes and reducing overhead while maintaining agile values such as transparency, empirical decision-making, and iterative delivery.
LeSS supports organizations with multiple Scrum teams working on a single product, encouraging coordination and shared learning. Its framework emphasizes minimal roles and artifacts while promoting a culture of continuous improvement, making it well-suited for companies that want to scale agility without introducing excessive complexity.
Disciplined Agile (DA)
Disciplined Agile (DA) is a process decision framework and a people-first, learning-oriented hybrid agile approach that provides straightforward guidance to help you choose your way of working (WoW) at the enterprise level. DA supports an organization to select the best-fit lifecycle and way of working for individual teams and teams of teams, and also provides guidance around governance, architecture, and lifecycle management.
With a process decision framework rather than a prescriptive approach, DA empowers organizations to tailor the agile principles to their unique context while ensuring structure and alignment. This adaptability also renders DA especially useful for organizations that seek a middle ground between uniformity across teams and team-level freedom.
Spotify Model
The Spotify model is a way to apply agile, inspired by the way of working of the company behind the music streaming service. It is based on autonomous squads, tribes, and guilds to increase innovation, collaboration, and accountability. Though not as prescriptive as SAFe or LeSS, it challenges the organizational culture of large enterprises by promoting greater decentralization of decision-making and empowering teams.
It is powerful in that it promotes cross-team collaboration and continual improvement, and still aligns with overall organizational objectives. Several organizations are taking the best pieces of the Spotify model and mixing and matching them with other frameworks to form a kind of hybrid solution.
Implementing Structured Approaches
Agile transformation frameworking organizations are able to use structured methodologies that provide direction for planning, performing, and measuring. For more information on how to successfully adopt these frameworks, see the guidance on structured agile transformation approaches for detailed approaches to incorporating frameworks, establishing roles, and scaling agile practices across teams and departments.
Structured methodologies enable organizations to evaluate readiness and the best-fit framework for their needs, while ensuring that cultural, strategic, and operational aspects are considered. They also include means to track progress, surface bottlenecks, and continuously improve the transformation.
Conclusion
A good starting point to enable agile transformation is an agile transformation framework. Frameworks such as SAFe, LeSS, Disciplined Agile, and the Spotify model define, to a certain extent, roles and processes at the team level, but also governance and culture, which help enterprises to define how to apply agile in a more structured and repeatable way. When scaled with these frameworks and methodologies, organizations can realize improved alignment, faster delivery, and foster a culture of continuous improvement, bringing sustainable business value as a result of agile adoption enterprise–wide.