The Scalable Agile process is a way to manage a big project with a big group of contributors. It is designed to include teams and contributors even if they do not have the same organization and cycle (for example, they are not all Scrum teams with the same two-week schedule). As your projects get bigger, they will come to resemble the diagram below.

1) You prioritize the work in a sorted backlog. To make this more scalable, you can use the "Epics and Allocations" technique to include multiple planners and programs.

2) Your contributors go to work. They can use their own team management methods (including Scrum). There are no fixed resource constraints. New contributors can join and take tasks.

3) Contributors get their own test environments. They use a distributed continuous delivery process to test and submit changes.

4) You assemble a release by taking the contributions that are ready and meet all of your standards. You can release at any time, or continuously. You can precisely control contributors, quality, and standards.by deciding what to take.

Why does this work?

You are in many cases managing code, rather than people. Code can be precisely managed and controlled, accepted or rejected. People are very difficult to manage and impossible to control. It's much easier to focus on motivating them.

There is less planning. There is no iteration plan. You plan at the end with a "take what's ready" approach. Instead of planning, you prioritize, which is easier.

There are several powerful control points. You control the backlog. You control the allocation of tasks to contributors by approving, rejecting, or setting time and budget limits. You control the code and changes that you accept into the final release. This gives you a much more effective way to enforce code, test, and architecture standards, compared to an approach which relies on policy and education.

Advantages

• Fast. Release when ready. Take the right duration, long or short
• Distributed and Dispersed teams. No big meetings or requirement for mass consensus
• Scales to more contributors. No centralized iteration planning or testing. Include new contributors and many types of contributors
• Scrum compatible. If you have productive Scrum teams, they can work as contributors with zero process change.