A single Scrum team can self-organize its way to good outcomes. Ten Scrum teams building one product cannot do that without deliberate coordination — PM5336 is about what changes when Agile has to scale across an entire organization, not just live inside one team's sprint.
Scaled Agile frameworks
PM5336 surveys scaled Agile approaches designed for multi-team coordination, most prominently the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), which introduces Agile Release Trains (ARTs) — groups of Agile teams that plan, commit, and deliver together on a synchronized cadence — along with roles like Release Train Engineer and events like PI (Program Increment) Planning. The course also touches on alternative scaling models (LeSS, Scrum of Scrums) and teaches students to evaluate which scaling approach fits an organization's size, structure, and culture, rather than assuming SAFe is the default answer.
Leading Agile transformation
The course's capstone focus is organizational Agile transformation: moving an entire organization historically built around Waterfall project management, functional silos, and annual planning cycles toward iterative delivery, cross-functional teams, and continuous planning. Students study common transformation failure modes — "Agile in name only" (keeping Waterfall governance and reporting while renaming ceremonies), leadership that talks Agile but still manages by rigid deadlines, and treating a framework rollout as a training event rather than a genuine culture change.
Key topics in PM5336
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): Agile Release Trains, PI Planning, and the SAFe portfolio level
- Alternative scaling models: Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Scrum of Scrums
- Coordinating dependencies across multiple Agile teams building one product
- Organizational Agile transformation: common failure modes and success factors
- Agile governance and metrics: velocity, cumulative flow, and outcome-based (not output-based) measurement
- Blending Agile delivery with traditional program and portfolio governance
- Change leadership specific to Agile transformation, building on Kotter's change model
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Worked example: diagnosing an "Agile in name only" transformation
- Symptom: Teams call their bi-weekly status meetings "sprint reviews" but still report to a steering committee expecting a fixed, upfront annual project plan
- Root cause: Leadership adopted Agile vocabulary and ceremonies without changing governance, funding cycles, or how success is measured
- Diagnosis: This is Agile theater, not Agile transformation — the underlying operating model never actually changed
- Correct intervention: Shift funding from annual project budgets to rolling, incremental funding tied to demonstrated value each Program Increment, and retrain leadership on outcome-based (not output-based) reporting
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Scaled-Agile analyses, transformation case studies, PI-planning assignments.
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Frequently asked questions
An Agile Release Train is SAFe's core organizational construct for scaling Agile: a long-lived team of Agile teams (typically 50-125 people) that together plan, commit to, and deliver value on a synchronized cadence, usually a Program Increment lasting 8-12 weeks. Rather than each team planning independently and hoping their work integrates, an ART aligns all its constituent teams through a shared PI Planning event, a common cadence for releases and demos, and a Release Train Engineer role who acts as a chief Scrum Master for the whole train, facilitating cross-team dependencies and removing organizational impediments. PM5336 teaches ARTs as the answer to the coordination problem that emerges once an organization has more Agile teams than can fit in a single daily stand-up or sprint review — synchronization has to be engineered deliberately, it doesn't happen automatically.
"Agile in name only" (sometimes called "Agile theater" or "cargo cult Agile") describes an organization that has adopted Agile vocabulary and ceremonies — calling meetings "stand-ups" and "sprint reviews," creating backlogs — without changing the underlying governance, funding, culture, or decision-making structures that actually determine how work gets done. It's a common failure because implementing Scrum's mechanics is relatively easy to train, while changing how an organization funds projects (annual budgets vs. incremental funding), measures success (deadline compliance vs. delivered value), and distributes decision authority (centralized approval vs. team autonomy) requires sustained leadership commitment and is much harder. PM5336 treats recognizing this failure pattern as a core capstone skill, since a project manager leading a transformation needs to diagnose whether resistance is coming from surface-level process confusion or from a deeper governance mismatch that ceremony training alone will never fix.