Scaling agile on large enterprise level with self-service kits to support autonomous teams

Abstract

Organizations are looking for ways of establishing agile and lean delivery processes. In this paper, we propose a particular way which based on self-service kits (SSK's). The SSK approach can be used to share expert knowledge in an agile and scalable way to the teams by offering them approaches, methods and tools with background information about the addressed topic. An SSK is provided as a digital bundle of artifacts that help solving an issue related to agile teams. Built upon the pull-principle, it supports team autonomy during teams' delivery procedures. An SSK addresses generic as well as domain specific topics. As all SSK's share a common structured approach to supporting an agile organization, they help systematically scaling expert knowledge. This leverages establishing best practices elaborated by experts in a large scale organization in a native agile manner. As an SSK is structured as a 'how-to' guide including templates for learning by doing, it helps emphasizing quality aspects too. We demonstrate an example of the systematic application of the SSK approach as well as its scaling in the Volkswagen Group IT.