While official experts paint pretty pictures about how large organizations can adopt agile, the reality is that these approaches need tailoring. Having a water cooler where you could hang out with experts on the topic would seem priceless—and there is one. Many of the people leading large initiatives are talking on Twitter.
Whether you want to preview some of the people who will be speaking on the enterprise track at Agile 2017 Conference or just want to have conversations online, you'll find plenty of options for following some smart folk. Here are 19, in no particular order, plus two institutions.
Em Campbell-Pretty
The author of Tribal Unity: Getting from Teams to Tribes, Campbell-Pretty is a SAFe fellow and a partner at Context Matters. She is known for stories around creating release trains, specifically related to PI planning events and large retrospectives.
Ken Schwaber
Best known as a co-creator of Scrum, Schwaber is also the creator of Nexus, a Scrum-focused alternative to the other big frameworks. His recent tweets are focused on the impact of agile and Scrum but include several nuggets on making large agile projects succeed.
Eric Willeke
Willeke, Principal at Eric Willeke & Associates, has been implementing and supervising major adoptions for nearly a decade. His vantage point of mentoring and leading dozens of agile coaches allows him to speak from both deep personal experience and group experience. Willeke is also a SAFe fellow, multi-time Agile Conference speaker, track chair, and former program chair.
Jennifer Fawcett
As a “fellow,” Fawcett is roughly the equivalent at Scale Agile of what a distinguished engineer is at Microsoft or IBM. A SAFe trainer, Fawcett uses exercises and simulations to teach concepts about human performance in organizations. Her tweet stream is mostly retweets of important community events and announcements, along with well-curated tweets about scaling organizations.
Robert Galen
Galen is primarily known as an agile coach with a testing focus, but lately he’s spent more time helping organizations at the program level work through the very real change-management issues involved in stand-up programs and release trains.
Joe Vallone
A SAFe trainer and frequent conference speaker, Vallone tweets mini-excerpts from his own presentations and information on upcoming training events and conferences.
Malcolm Isaacs
A senior researcher in HPE's Software Application Delivery Management Group, Isaacs focuses on enterprise DevOps, curating the best ideas in a newsletter called “Moving Tech Forward.” He is also a TechBeacon contributing writer.
Daniel Meziak
The Agile Manifesto is all about self-organizing, self-directed teams that respond to change, yet most large-scale agile adoptions seem to be about following a big plan up front. Meziak suggests a different approach, one of invitation and self-organizing. His method is OpenSpaceAgility, which has worked for organizations as large as Walmart.
Clarke Ching
The author of Rolling Rocks Downhill, Ching looks at the software organization as a system. His most recent posts are on behavioral economics: how humans respond to incentives. He also likes a little bit of silly humor and uplifting stories, typically involving animals.
Joshua Kerievsky
The CEO of Industrial Logic, Joshua Kerievsky's "Modern Agile" provides a simple framework to begin the discussion around where the organization actually is, where it wants to go ... and how to get there.
Joshua Lewis
An agile coach at Kaizania I.T Services in South Africa, Lewis is always curious, seeking new ways to think about delivery and questioning if the existing dogma can be improved—respectfully.
Martin Burns
Another SAFe fellow and trainer, Burns works for CA as a transformation consultant. He is often drawn into conversations about “problems” with SAFe that tend to be very poor implementations, which leads to discussion about why so many implementations go bad.
Esther Derby
Long known as an expert on the “people side” of management, Derby teaches coaching beyond the team and was an instructor at the famed Problem Solving Leadership course founded by Gerald M. Weinberg.
Michael Feathers
Feathers is a the director at R7K Research & Conveyance. A former member of technical staff at Groupon, Feathers was a programmer and programming coach for many years. After early success with his book Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Feathers more recently shifted to draw connections between his experience scaling software to large numbers of simultaneous users and scaling teams and organizations to larger numbers of staff members.
Marc Burgauer
A transformation consultant at ISBAN, Burgauer tends to address the issues that middle management has with adopting agile methods.
Karl Scotland
An early adopter of Scrum and Kanban, Scotland recently has been interested in strategy deployment—a way to get the whole team to row in the same direction, across divisions, continents, and even company boundaries.
Johanna Rothman
Rothman is a consultant with decades of experience, leading and coaching at the executive level. She is also the author of three majors book in this area, Agile And Lean Program Management, Manage Your Project Portfolio, and Predicting the Unpredictable. Follow her to learn how to manage large, multi-team projects and multi-project portfolios.
Ron Quartel
The creator of OpenSpaceAgile, Quartel is currently a full-stack agile coach and code craftsman at Premera Blue Cross in Seattle. His focus is on using concepts such as mob programming and open space to let ideas emerge and cross-pollinate between teams.
Israel Gat
A fellow at Net Objectives, Gat specializes in talking to executives in their own language. He mostly tweets links to resources, along with commentary on who should read them and why.
The institutions
LeSS Works
Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) is a framework to do work at scale. The less_works Twitter stream covers events, training, conferences, and where to go to find out more about LeSS.
Open Space Agile
Ron Quartel’s Scaling Concept, Open Space Agile, is based on the idea of open space technology—conferences where the attendees build the schedule, just in time, and plan the work they are going to do next through emergent leaders and self-direction. The quiet voice in the room, Open Space Agile is not particularly commercial, choosing to tweet ways to think about adoption that are more personal and motivational.
Go deeper
For more experts to follow on Twitter, consider our recent articles "22 lean software engineering pros to follow on Twitter," "Top 18 Scrum experts and accounts to follow on Twitter," and "40 leading IT ops experts to follow on Twitter." Also, leave a comment to let us know whom this article missed and who you think is overhyped, and share links to the core conversations about scaling that people should be following on Twitter.
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