Agile Scaling with Nexus | A Framework for Large Teams

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, scaling Agile practices across large teams and complex projects presents significant challenges. Enter the Nexus Framework—a sophisticated, straightforward solution that extends Scrum principles to multi-team environments. 

Developed by Ken Schwaber, one of Scrum’s co-creators and introduced by Scrum.org, Nexus builds upon Scrum’s foundational strengths while adding minimal but crucial enhancements. Released in 2015 and refined in 2018 and 2021, the Nexus Guide outlines this framework's role in harmonizing efforts across multiple Scrum teams. 

Listen to our podcast, which discusses Nexus's recent updates, for a deeper understanding of its evolution. This blog will delve into how Nexus facilitates Agile scaling, compare it to Scrum, and offer practical tips for successful implementation.

What is the Nexus Framework?

The Nexus Framework is an extension of the Scrum framework specifically designed to address the complexities of scaling Agile across multiple teams working on a single product. It was developed by Ken Schwaber, one of Scrum’s co-creators, and released by Scrum.org in 2015. 

The Nexus framework introduces minimal but essential enhancements to Scrum, ensuring that it can effectively coordinate and integrate the efforts of several Scrum teams.

Nexus aims to maintain Scrum's core values of transparency, inspection, and adaptation while providing additional structures to manage dependencies and ensure seamless collaboration. 

The key to Nexus is the Nexus Integration Team, which oversees the coordination of work among various teams, helping resolve integration issues and align efforts toward common goals.

Benefits of Nexus for Large Teams

Scaling Agile with Nexus offers several compelling benefits for large teams:

• Enhanced Coordination: Nexus facilitates improved collaboration between multiple Scrum teams, helping to synchronize their efforts and ensure that their work aligns with the overall product vision.
• Increased Transparency: By introducing Nexus-specific artifacts and events, teams gain better visibility into the progress and challenges of their collective work, allowing for more informed decision-making.
• Improved Quality: Nexus emphasizes the integration of work across teams, which helps maintain high standards and reduces the risk of defects or misalignment.
• Efficient Issue Resolution: The framework provides mechanisms to identify and address integration issues early, reducing bottlenecks and ensuring smoother project execution.

How to Implement Nexus: A Detailed Guide with Examples

Implementing the Nexus Framework for large teams working on a single product requires a clear understanding of its processes and roles. This step-by-step guide outlines how to adopt Nexus for Agile scaling, using real-world examples to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Establish a Nexus Integration Team (NIT).

At the heart of Nexus is the Nexus Integration Team (NIT), a specialized group responsible for ensuring the integration of work across all Scrum teams. This team handles dependencies, resolves integration issues, and ensures that all teams are aligned toward a unified product goal.

Example: Consider a company developing a new e-commerce platform with six Scrum teams. One team focuses on the backend, another on the front end, while others handle payment processing, product catalog, and user experience design. Without proper coordination, these teams might end up creating features that don’t seamlessly integrate with each other. 

The Nexus Integration Team steps in to ensure that the code developed by each team integrates smoothly and that dependencies (e.g., between the backend and frontend) are managed.

The NIT typically includes representatives from each Scrum team—often lead developers or technical experts—who understand the product and can oversee the technical integration. The NIT Product Owner manages the overall product backlog, ensuring that it reflects cross-team priorities.

Adopt Nexus Artifacts

Nexus builds on the existing Scrum artifacts (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Increment) by introducing Nexus-specific artifacts. These artifacts help manage the increased complexity of coordinating work across multiple teams.

Nexus Integration Team Backlog: This backlog is a prioritized list of integration work that must be completed for the teams' individual work to come together into a single product increment.

Example: If one Scrum team has developed a new user login feature and another team has built a database integration, the Nexus Integration Team Backlog might include tasks to ensure that the new login system interacts correctly with the database.

Nexus Sprint Backlog: This artifact merges the sprint backlogs from all participating Scrum teams into one consolidated view, ensuring transparency about who is working on what and identifying dependencies early.

Example: Imagine five Scrum teams, each focusing on different parts of a complex healthcare platform. The Nexus Sprint Backlog consolidates all their work, ensuring that dependencies like data exchange between the billing and scheduling systems are accounted for early.

Conduct Nexus Events

Nexus introduces several Nexus Events, building on the Scrum framework. These events ensure that integration, communication, and feedback loops are maintained across all teams. Each Nexus event follows the same principles of Scrum but is scaled to multiple teams.

Nexus Sprint Planning: During this event, all teams plan their sprints together, ensuring that each team’s work aligns with the overall product goals and with other teams’ work.

Example: In a large-scale CRM development project, one team is responsible for the lead management module, while another team works on the customer support dashboard. During Nexus Sprint Planning, both teams coordinate to ensure that the features they are building will integrate properly, discussing key dependencies and potential challenges.

Nexus Daily Scrum: This is a daily meeting where representatives from each Scrum team come together to discuss progress, identify bottlenecks, and ensure continuous integration. This meeting supplements the individual teams' daily Scrum events.

Example: If the database team is experiencing delays, they might notify the other teams during the Nexus Daily Scrum to adjust their own work accordingly. This early identification prevents a bottleneck from cascading through all teams’ progress.

Nexus Sprint Review and Retrospective: These events focus on reviewing the work done by all teams and addressing any integration issues. The Nexus Sprint Review brings together the combined product increment for stakeholder feedback, while the Nexus Retrospective looks for improvements in how the teams collaborated and integrated their work.

Example: After a sprint in which six teams worked on different parts of a mobile banking app, the Nexus Sprint Review might reveal that the new user interface doesn’t properly sync with the core banking systems. The Nexus Retrospective would then focus on improving how these teams coordinate and test their features before the next sprint.

Train Teams on Nexus Practices

Adopting Nexus across teams requires training to ensure that all Scrum teams understand their new roles, responsibilities, and the additional Nexus elements they need to follow.

Example: A financial services company transitioning from traditional Scrum to Nexus needs to train its six Scrum teams on how to use the Nexus Integration Team Backlog. Each team member needs to understand how dependencies are managed and why the Nexus Daily Scrum is critical for preventing bottlenecks in their project.

Teams should be trained on:

• Handling dependencies: Understanding how to manage interdependencies between teams.
• Continuous Integration: Ensuring that the work of different teams is continuously integrated and tested.
• Communication and collaboration: Nexus places a high emphasis on coordination, and team members need to communicate effectively to avoid silos.

Implement Cross-Team Continuous Integration

A fundamental aspect of Nexus is continuous integration. Since multiple teams work on different parts of a product, it’s essential that their work is continuously integrated and tested to avoid delays or issues at the end of a sprint.

Example: In a software project with five Scrum teams, continuous integration tools like Jenkins or CircleCI might be used to automatically integrate code from each team into a shared repository multiple times a day. This allows early identification of integration problems, giving teams more time to resolve issues before they become roadblocks.

Continuous integration practices also foster early detection of bugs, reduce rework, and improve the overall quality of the product being developed.

Nexus vs. Scrum: Key Differences with Examples

While both Nexus and Scrum share the same foundational Agile principles, Nexus is designed to scale Scrum for larger teams and more complex projects. Here’s a comparison highlighting the differences:

• Scope: Scrum is designed for one team working on one part of a project, while Nexus is built for multiple teams collaborating on a single product.
• Example: A small startup developing a new social media app might use Scrum for their single development team, whereas a large enterprise developing a complex ERP system with multiple interconnected modules would benefit from Nexus.
• Complexity: Nexus introduces additional roles (such as the Nexus Integration Team) and events to manage the complexities of scaling Agile practices. Scrum, by contrast, focuses on optimizing the performance of a single team.
• Example: A retail company using Nexus to scale its development across marketing, inventory, and customer service modules needs extra coordination between teams. This complexity isn’t necessary when one Scrum team is developing a simple web app.
• Coordination: In Nexus, the emphasis is on integrating and coordinating the work of multiple Scrum teams, while Scrum is primarily concerned with the efficiency and output of a single team.
• Example: For a car manufacturing company implementing a new software system to connect suppliers, inventory, and distribution, Nexus helps to coordinate work between teams that handle different parts of the supply chain software, ensuring the whole system works cohesively.

When to Use Nexus in Agile

Nexus is particularly beneficial in scenarios where:

• Multiple Teams are Involved: When several Scrum teams are working on a single product, Nexus helps manage their interactions and integration.
• Complex Projects Require Coordination: For projects with intricate dependencies and integration needs, Nexus offers a structured approach to handle these challenges.
• Scaling Agile Practices: Organizations seeking to scale Agile practices beyond individual teams to larger, more complex environments can leverage Nexus to achieve effective results.

FAQs on Agile Scaling with Nexus

What is the Nexus Framework, and how is it different from Scrum?

Nexus is an extension of Scrum designed to help multiple teams collaborate on a single product. While Scrum focuses on one team, Nexus adds roles, events, and artifacts to manage cross-team dependencies, making it suitable for larger projects involving several Scrum teams.

When should a company use the Nexus Framework?

Nexus is ideal when an organization has more than three Scrum teams working on the same product. It helps ensure that their work is coordinated and integrated effectively. If your business is scaling and experiencing challenges with inter-team collaboration, Nexus can streamline the process.

What role does the Nexus Integration Team (NIT) play?

The Nexus Integration Team is responsible for ensuring that the outputs of multiple Scrum teams integrate into a cohesive product. They resolve cross-team dependencies, manage the Nexus artifacts, and oversee continuous integration throughout the Sprint.

How does Nexus improve Agile scaling for large teams?

Nexus enhances Scrum by adding structured events like Nexus Sprint Planning and Nexus Daily Scrum, ensuring aligned teams. It emphasizes continuous integration, cross-team collaboration, and the early detection of potential issues, which helps larger teams work together efficiently on complex projects.

Bottom Line

The Nexus Framework builds on Scrum principles to help large teams coordinate effectively on a single product. By introducing new roles, events, and continuous integration practices, Nexus ensures that multiple Scrum teams work together seamlessly, making it ideal for scaling Agile across complex projects. Whether you’re in software development or another industry, Nexus can help improve collaboration, streamline processes, and enhance product quality.