When you scale agile strategically to address the needs of your entire enterprise, a multitude of roles appear. The reason why there are so many roles at scale is due to the breadth of activities that occur throughout a modern enterprise. Every single process blade introduces one or more specialist roles. For example, the Portfolio Management blade introduces the role of Portfolio Manager/Coordinator and the Operations blade introduces Operations Manager and Operations Engineer. As your scope widens to address agility across your entire organization, you find that you also need to address a correspondingly wide range of roles than what you typically find in narrowly focused agile methods or frameworks.
The primary danger of having defined roles is that they will be perceived as positions. When this happens the natural tendency is for people to start adding activities around the position so as to make it more important. In the case of a management position the tendency is to increase the number of people reporting into the position so as to increase the influence of the manger.
It is important to realize that we are describing roles, not positions, in this article. Any person may take on one or more roles and they will change the roles that they take on over time. Any given role will have zero or more people fulfilling it at any given time, and that will also evolve as needed.
This article addresses the following topics: