Conventions for Coordinating Large Agile Projects

There is no universal way to coordinate Agile teams in large development projects because they have unique challenges. This suggests that the best way to coordinate the teams is to ask them how they want to be managed given a set of constraints. This requires particular communication and negotiation skills in the leadership team, which we discuss in this article. We describe the skills as a set of conventions, founded on the argument that every organization is a complex adaptive system and should therefore be analyzed from multiple system perspectives. We investigate scientific models for managing complexity and evaluate their usefulness through qualitative interviews with 14 managers in large private and public organizations in Saudi Arabia. We conclude that a set of proposed conventions could facilitate coordination by functioning as a supportive context enabling managers to apply various system perspectives simultaneously