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Scrum and Agile at Scale Needs a (Meta) Scrum Master

When the going gets tough, the tough get meta

What should you do if you want to do Scrum at Scale (i.e. for more than one Scrum, for groups of Scrums, or for groups of groups of Scrum). This is what I was thinking today — actually I woke up thinking about it:

I can think of two differences between Scrum and other Agile methodologies

Scrum has a role which is just dedicated to facilitating the process
Scrum has a clear set of time-boxed meetings with clear goals that implement iterative software delivery: stand-up, planning, show and tell and retrospective.

So. If you’re wanting to do Scrum on a larger scale, rather than drawing a pretty picture, like they do at SAFE. You might want to:

Have a role which is dedicated to making Scrum work at Scale
Have a clear set of time-boxed meetings with clear goals that implement iterative sofware delivery across multiple teams.

What would the meetings be that this Meta Scrum Master (MSM?) would facilitate? I think there would be three of them.

Scrum of Scrums: (every day) The Scrum Masters from all the Scrum teams get together and tell each other what they’re up to and what’s slowing them down. They also get chance to coordinate what’s happening with scarce resources, like test environments, release slots.
Brown Bag: (every Sprint) The development teams get together and share what they’re up to. If any team is the first to solve a problem (e.g. how to do authentication) they talk through it.

Steering Committee: (once a month) All the stakeholders who are interested in this programme can attend. This meetings got three bits to it — each of which you would need if you were really steering something

Where are we now?
Where are we going?
What’s stopping us getting there.

What would a Meta Scrum Master do when he/she wasn’t running these meetings? Basically enable feedback, make sure that feedback is flowing from the development teams to the senior stakeholders, from senior stakeholders to the development teams.

That’s the problem that I have with the SAFE diagram — it looks too waterfall — too one-way.
That’s the problem I have with SAFE — I can’t see any feedback lines.

SAFE seems to paint a compelling picture for many people — but information seems to flow only one way — where’s the feedback? One of the things I really like about “planning onion” from Extreme Programming is the idea that feedback happens at every level of granularity.

The Planning and Feedback loops advocated in Extreme Programming — to really get this to work at the weeks and months level you need a Meta Scrum Master If Safe wanted to draw all these feedback loops all over its one-way lines and boxes, I’d feel a lot more comfortable trying to use it.