Agile – How to architects work with self-organizing Scrum teams

From your description it is not clear whether the teams are actually working on separate projects - I assume they are.

In the ideal case, I think this should be mainly decided by the teams themselves, but they would come to more or less the same conclusion (i.e. using Agile). Especially if prominent members of the teams used to work together in the single Agile team before, they tend to naturally bring with them the practices they tried and proven to work.

However, each new team is bound to encounter its own, more or less different situation and challenges, so over time they will develop their own process a little bit differently from the others. And that is fine, within certain limits. In order to make management's life easier, it is advisable to agree upon and stick to some common way of reporting towards management. But since Agile is not reporting-heavy, I don't think this imposes huge restrictions on any team.

Now, if one team comes up with a process improvement, it is indeed useful for other teams to learn about it - as long as it actually solves some problem of theirs too. So IMO the best approach would be to keep up communication between teams regarding retrospectives and process improvement solutions, by way of some designated team members (one from each team would be enough - e.g. the Scrum Masters) to regularly meet after each sprint and discuss the problems they encountered, the solutions they tried, and the results.

So if Team A tells about a problem, it is possible that Team B has already got a working solution for it, which can be applied right away. Or if Team A has an idea to solve same problem, it is possible that Team C has already experimented with a similar idea and they have gained useful experience which they can share with Team A. Etc. The point is that any team is most interested in solutions to their concrete problems, so it is best to approach knowledge sharing from this perspective: adapting solutions to concrete problems, rather than trying to adapt processes to imaginary "solutions". Development teams would be pretty normal to resist the latter approach, but not the former.

Scrum is not a silver bullet. Not every project has to use Scrum in order to succeed. The situation you are describing however sounds like a great fit for Lean / Kanban. You may wish to check it out.

Kanban basically asks you to do only a few things, none of which are at odds with the kind of team you are describing:

• Visualize the flow of value, i.e. the Kanban board. The Scrum board is a specific application of a Kanban board; It is possible to adapt it to allow for specialization.
• Limit the Work In Progress (WIP), so that the amount of work assigned to the team is just enough to keep the work constantly flowing - i.e. no "blockage" on either the start of the stream (design) or the end (deployment).

You might want to check out some references about Kanban:

• One day in Kanban Land
• Priming Kanban (free EBook)