Running agile teams inside your organization is one thing.
Scaling agile up throughout your organization is flat out hard.
Extending the mindset, behaviors, and frameworks across to your customer or multiple partner organizations is 10x harder and requires thoughtful, deliberate planning and execution.
Who's part of the core team?
When and how often do we engage? What are the cadences?
How are we tracking the work? Risks? Actions? Issues? Decisions? Dependencies?
How do we keep the work visible?
What tools do we agree on?
What are the official communication channels?
How do we escalate and to whom?
Where are the feedback loops and what's the frequency?
When do we report out to management and how often? What do they care about?
Are we measuring the rights things that define success from the customer's point of view, not just the work items that were promised?
Inside your company you've got an established culture.
Each engagement with customers and/or partners outside of what's familiar to you requires a reestablishment of a new culture, albeit a potentially temporary one.
You need to build high levels of trust quickly, and to achieve that you need radical transparency as well as sublime, near bulletproof communication.
Easy to say and much more difficult to execute.
Unless you've been long time partners, there's no winging it when it comes to delivering complex products and services to outside parties. Even with established relationships, there's room for assumptions and misunderstandings to happen.
Meeting once per week just won't get it done.
Teams need to be dedicated and be integrated with each other, even if it's virtually, so they can collaborate and sync often.
It's always bumpy in the beginning, but can potentially get easier over time if everyone buys into what it takes to win together and deliver wins for their customers.
