Scaling Agile in a Large Matrixed Organization

Two engineering teams with vastly different work styles—one waterfall and one Scrum—merged into one matrixed organization to work on a critical strategic effort. During this transition the teams experienced many problems, including growing from a small team into a large one overnight, with half of the organization now knowing nothing about agile. They had issues with how to handle communication, the right level of process consistency across the twenty-plus distributed agile teams, working through technical dependencies, a lack of subject matter expertise, and no single point of control of the codebase. But today, the team has approximately 450 people and is growing fast, supporting Red Hat’s flagship OpenShift product lines. Jen Krieger will tell the story of what happens when two vastly different software teams are glued together and told to beat the market, as well as what you can expect if you're going through a similar merge. She'll describe the short-term and long-term issues you should anticipate and tell you how to resolve them before they derail the organization.