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Scrum: In a large enterprise environment can the scrum sprint/iterations synchronized?

I have a simple guideline for this

Leave it to the teams - unsynchronized sprints
  • Simple products with single teams working on it
  • If you have a different independent products which rarely or doesn’t communicate with each other.
Team will be more creative and it gives more flexibility. Because of all these unsynchronized releases there will be lot of churn so the management & PMO should use a lot of common sense in dealing with such cycles.

Use synchronized sprints
  • If you have a big product, with multiple teams working on it
  •  If you a product portfolio of products/applications which communicates with each other
  •  If you want to synchronize the release because of billing, reporting or any other similar reasons
  
Synchronization helps in large organization where we have to worry about lot of complexities. They will have a common reporting tool which can provide the correct view across all the teams. This helps in billing and other administrative jobs also.
In my company we have multiple teams working in a multi-billion USD product suite. We have a two week sprints which is synchronized across the different teams. There are many teams who have a 1 week sprint also.
e.g. – Assume the organization is in Sprint 03, team A is in two week sprint & Team B has one week sprints
So for the sprint team A will have only one sprint - Sprint 03
Team B will have two sprints - Sprint 03(a) & sprint 03( b).
After the two weeks, both teams will jump to Sprint 04.
How about common resources (people/machines)?

When the teams are in the synchronized mode, they may need some common resources (people or machines). How can we make them available for all the teams when they are synchronized? I have heard this question few times. Usually the planning for the sprint happens during the release planning but what is preventing them from discussing the need for common resources ahead of that? During the current sprint itself team can set aside few hours to identify the resources required for next sprint. The Scrum master should ensure that he communicates the need with other managers and scrum masters and make them available to the team at the right time. If due to any reason the shared resources are not available then it should be informed to PO. The necessary priority changes should be made in the product backlog of the team so that team can work on the next item.

I believe companies shouldn't over synchronize to exact date & time also. There may be people who are in multiple teams - Product owners and scrum masters. Ideally a great PO & SM can serve only one team but still we can see them serving more than one teams. Such “shared” people would miss on important meetings.  When I was the scrum master of two teams, I changed the sprint review dates to the next day. So on one day I could attend the review of first team and the very next day the second teams. On Tuesday I had the review of my first team like other teams in company and on Thursday I had my second teams review. It worked perfectly. These small changes in date and time allowed the little flexibility needed to accommodate the important stakeholders.
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