How do you scale agile across an IT organization with 10,000+ people and hundreds of teams? Over the last several years, many large organizations have made their attempt at transforming their IT groups into "agile" teams. I want to use this opportunity to share my experiences and the latest approach to tackling massive Agile transformations.

Too often, teams ask for agile coaching without knowing what agile means. Here are a couple of quotes from email questions I received recently, "A project that we are just embarking on has the potential to be done in Agile", or, "Could you please guide me through the Certification process for Agile. I have a few projects underway that will be managed under Agile methodology."

Usually, there are many definitions of agile when working with large organizations. I find that I am spending most of my time dispelling myths rather than getting to high-value coaching. I will share 3 tactics for jump-starting a large agile transformation:

1. The Missionaries - focus on creating some really good examples for the rest of the organization to reference and use as the example for success
2. Foundational Understanding - possibly the hardest tactic; focus on widespread education with a goal to create the same language when we talk about Agile, Lean, Scrum, Kanban, etc.
3. Leader (and team) Coaching - by far the most important tactic; agile coaches must transcend team coaching and build a sustainable and scalable coaching approach by transferring their own coaching capabilities to the organization’s leaders to make a large agile transformation stick.

It might sound crazy or unreasonable to create coaches out of leaders. But that's not the point. The objective is to build agile coaching capability in these leaders. This will benefit the greatest number of teams and increase the likelihood of widespread agile adoption. No leader will be perfect.