As digital transformation become an essential element for business survival and growth, ensuring an organization-wide agile mindset and practices is critical. While Scrum and other similar frameworks work at the team level, the Nexus Framework is one approach that helps scale agility throughout the organization.
Developing a software product can be a complex process. Therefore, a development team often uses a project management method like Scrum to keep track of all the aspects and various stages.
But an organization often develops multiple connected products and has multiple teams working on them. So the organization needs to scale the software development process itself in those cases. In other words, scale Scrum.
There are many frameworks to scale Scrum. This article talks about one such framework: Nexus.
Table of Contents
What is Nexus?
The word “Nexus” means a connection or an interlink of two or more things. When it comes to Nexus Scrum, the things are Scrum teams.
A nexus is a group of three to nine Scrum teams working together on a single project. It is a framework that defines the roles, events, and artifacts involved and guides how they should work together. Built upon the Scrum methodology, the approach scales it across multiple cross-functional teams to deliver a single integrated product.
The Nexus framework was created by Ken Schwaber, one of the creators of Scrum itself. He released the Nexus Guide in 2015 through Scrum.org. The guide describes how to implement the framework for scaling Scrum.
How does Nexus work?
Scrum practices may work very well within a team. But when a project has multiple teams working on it, they need to collaborate and integrate their work into a single deliverable product. And this is where various challenges, cross-team dependencies, and integration issues arise.
The main goal of the Nexus framework is to minimize all the scaling challenges and help the group deliver a single integrated and valuable product. In addition, it reduces the complexities and cross-dependencies that the teams face while they collaborate.
The dependencies usually arise due to either the product or communication structures. A product will have independently developed separate parts and features that will create complexity during integration. If the teams don’t have a proper communication channel and feedback loop, it affects the workflow.
The Nexus framework guides how to make changes to the product and communication structure and reduce the dependencies. It also ensures transparency and accountability with the processes and roles.
Since the framework is built upon Scrum, one needs the pre-requisite knowledge and experience working in a Scrum environment to implement Nexus.
The Nexus Framework
As the Nexus framework is an expansion of Scrum, it retains most of the roles, accountabilities, events, and artifacts of Scrum.
Events
The Nexus events include Nexus Sprint, Cross-Team Refinement, Nexus Sprint Planning, Nexus Daily Scrum, Nexus Sprint Review, and Nexus Sprint Retrospective. They are similar to Scrum events and focus on solving problems during integration.
Artifacts
The artifacts include a single Product backlog, Nexus Sprint backlog, and Integrated Increment. These are designed to ensure transparency across all the Scrum teams during the integrated increment of the product.
Accountabilities
Nexus identifies a special Nexus Integration Team for implementation. It has a Product Owner, Scrum Master, and team members who are usually the members of the Scrum teams. The integration team’s members change over time to reflect the current needs.
The team is responsible for bringing multiple Scrum teams together to create a valuable and deliverable product. They ensure incremental integration at every sprint and address any technical and non-technical issues during the increments. They also coach and guide the Scrum teams on various practices and tools to increase their performances.
So far we discussed the Nexus Framework in a nutshell. More on this in later articles.
What is the difference between Scrum and Nexus?
Nexus is an expansion of Scrum. The events, roles, and specific artifacts of the framework are similar to that of Scrum. But their goals and agendas differ.
Nexus involves a group of Scrum teams and focuses on integrating their work. It has a separate integration team to handle such work. It doesn’t focus or tell how the individual teams should work on their part of the project. The Scrum team themselves handles that.
During Nexus events, the integration team members identify the cross-team dependencies and address the integration issues. They might replace individual scrum events like reviews and retrospectives in some cases. For example, during Nexus Sprint Reviews and Nexus Sprint Retrospectives, the Nexus team presents the integrated increment to the stakeholders.
The Nexus team has a single product owner responsible for effectively integrating the product. In addition, it has one Scrum Master who helps everyone to understand the Nexus framework. The Scrum Master of the Nexus team can be a Scrum Master of one of the Scrum teams.
Is Nexus the same as Scrum of Scrums?
Nexus is not the only Scrum scaling framework out there. There are other frameworks too. One of the popular ones is the Scrum of Scrums or SoS.
Like Nexus, even Scrum of Scrum has multiple Scrum teams working on a single project. However, it allows not just 3 to 9 teams but more than 12 teams. But the number of teams is not the only difference between the two frameworks.
Scrum of Scrums solves cross-team problems and impediments. The SoS meetings are held twice or thrice a week and have an ambassador from each team participating in them. It doesn’t have a separate team and roles like that of Nexus.
Nexus focuses only on integrating the product and identifies problems related to that. It has a separate team whose members include the Scrum teams’ members. Also, it has daily standup meetings where cross-team dependencies are identified.
The main difference between the Scrum of Scrum meeting and the Nexus Daily Scrum meeting is their agenda.
In SoS, the members talk about their teams’ progress and solve cross-functional problems. They negotiate boundaries and work between the teams.
In Nexus Daily Scrum, problems are identified but not solved. It is less about individual teams’ progress reporting and more about planning for the next sprint goal.
What is the difference between SAFe and Nexus?
Another popular Agile Scaling framework is Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Both SAFe and Nexus follow the principles of leadership, self-management, and continuous improvement. In addition, they have similarities like single backlog, iteration (sprint), planning, and an exceptional team designated to implement the framework.
Yet, they are not the same.
The main difference between the two is that Nexus works only on the teams level – the group of teams working on the product. Here, the individual teams are Scrum teams. But SAFe can have two or three levels. So apart from the teams developing the product, it can include other teams or the whole organization itself.
Although both have similar events, they differ in their durations and names. SAFe has SoS, PO-Sync, System Demo, Program Increment (PI), and PI planning. Nexus has Nexus Daily Scrum, Nexus Sprint Planning, Nexus Sprint Review,
Nexus Sprint Retrospective and Refinement. The duration of these events depends on the organization and the product.
The frameworks differ in their members and roles too. For example, the Nexus Integration Team has a separate Product Owner, Scrum Master, and members selected from the Scrum teams. SAFe has a Product Manager, Release Train Engineer, System Architect, and Business Owners.
Companies that successfully implemented Nexus
Many companies have successfully implemented the Nexus Framework. Here are some case studies:
Cathay Pacific Airways increased product delivery by 200%
The Hong Kong-based Airlines group had to develop an Internet Booking Engine (IEB) to help them manage their 200 aircraft with over 200 destinations across the globe. In February 2017, they adopted the Nexus Framework, and in two months, the Scrum teams increased the frequency of integrated increments by 200%.
HVAC manufacturers redesigned over 80 websites in 13-months
The Germany-based international equipment manufacturer had to redesign its 80+ websites and implement a new Content Management System. After making little to no progress in a year, they implemented Scrum and Nexus. It accelerated the redesigning process, and the websites were ready three months ahead of their 16-month timeframe.
Terminales Portuaris Perunos increased its business velocity by 300%
A Peruvian company that provides services to maritime, port, and warehousing activities needed software to manage its internal operations and processes. With Nexus, they could launch the first product increment in 30 days and the completed product in 3 months.
Conclusion
Product development might be complex. Methodologies like Scrum and Agile help organize and prioritize the work, collaborate between the members, and solve problems. When the number of teams increases, so does the project’s complexity.
Implementing Scrum at a higher level might be the answer, but that might pose a new set of challenges. A separate Scrum scaling framework like Nexus needs to be adopted. It helps to deliver a valuable integrated product.
