Where does it come from?

Elevator Pitch

For people who lead and support organisations or are responsible for complex products or services, who want to enhance the capability of their organisation or part of their organisation to respond to changing customer needs, and require multiple collaborating teams to do so, ELSE guidelines provide a set of principles for sustainable scaling with options and examples.

Unlike other scaling approaches, these guidelines are non-prescriptive and recognise that there is value in elements of many of them.

This wiki provides guiding principles for dealing with large complex problems that are beyond the scope of a single team. Rather than being a prescriptive framework with concrete practices, it provides options to enable fit to different contexts and continuous evolutionary improvement.

A real-world agile adoption will require finding the right balance between contending principles. For example:

• Limit Product Owner Mental Workload (which implies more product owners)
• Minimum Viable Product Owners (which implies few owners)

As well as describing the principles, the wiki includes a comprehensive set of references and a glossary that defines important terms and concepts.

Approach

Since October 2020, a group of Scrum Alliance guides has been meeting weekly to work on the material. The process has been the following:

• Brainstorming on end-stage (Mural)
• Multiple iterations on elevator pitch (Mural)
• Consolidate elevator pitch (Mural)
• Brainstorming principles (Mural)
• Consolidating principles supported by examples
• Migration to a wiki