Standardisation and governance are crucial for the success of large-scale agile organisations since there are several concerns like UX design, security, technology stack decisions and architecture principles that have to be solved consistently across all teams. Recently, the adoption of digital platforms in organisations or new regulatory requirements, for example, in the financial industry make this even more important. Standardisation in large-scale agile organisations is typically failing for two reasons.
First, there is a common misinterpretation that agile teams don’t have to adhere to standards and guidelines; agile frameworks struggle to find the right balance between emergent and intentional architecture design. Second, traditional governance processes established in many organisations are slowing down agile teams and decisions are detached from development teams since they are discussed and decided only on the management level.
(by M. Hauder, O. Frank and B. Perkens-Golomb)