The primary “customer” for a Scaled Agile implementation isn’t an agilist.
It’s a stressed-out executive worried about staying relevant in the marketplace, who knows that better software is the key, trying to get more effectiveness out of their IT functions, who believes that agility and Lean Portfolio Management can help them accomplish all those things.
These executives and their businesses don’t have an “Agile” problem, they have a set of business problems they believe agility can help solve.
This is the role of Scaled Agile.
But it’s what Scaled Agile *doesn’t* attempt to address is why organizations fail to get the benefits, even after multi-year multi-million dollar SAFe “transformations”:
Organizational Design and underlying systems like project-based Funding.
The org I worked in that flipped to SAFe had such poor change management implementing it. It took at least 3 quarterly plannings to feel like teams were getting it and you still have 1/4 company that had no idea what SAFe even was.
May 17, 2023·edited May 17, 2023Liked by Maarten Dalmijn
I took Advanced Scrum Master SAFe training (4 half-days) just to be sure, and I was deeply disappointed with such shallow training and the inconsistency of the training material.
For example, we started addressing flow management and some metrics (not to mention they been renamed from Kanban, OMG...) but I was getting excited nonetheless. And then suddenly, just like that, we were speaking about Story Point normalization across teams, WTF! :'(. I could point out a dozen of other inconsistent, incomplete and really bad information. Yet, there's big investment from big companies, big investment from smart people to learn and teach SAFe, big announcements of success using SAFe. That's really puzzling!
I had the « chance » to experiment frameworks like nexus and safe. I ve always worked with scaled frameworks. Sometimes I ´m wondering if it s possible to be agile in big compagnies.The problem is maybe not about safe (for example) and maybe just the fact that big compagnies have lots of silos and roles between the customer and the teams. We try to experiment and adapt quickly but with a big machine it s hard. What do you think?
About your article I agree you. Joke: Safe is gonna be the Wikipedia of all tools in few years. The safe trainings are also straight foreword and superficial. Really hard to teach the real agile principles and scrum values this way. My point of view m. ++
The primary “customer” for a Scaled Agile implementation isn’t an agilist.
It’s a stressed-out executive worried about staying relevant in the marketplace, who knows that better software is the key, trying to get more effectiveness out of their IT functions, who believes that agility and Lean Portfolio Management can help them accomplish all those things.
These executives and their businesses don’t have an “Agile” problem, they have a set of business problems they believe agility can help solve.
This is the role of Scaled Agile.
But it’s what Scaled Agile *doesn’t* attempt to address is why organizations fail to get the benefits, even after multi-year multi-million dollar SAFe “transformations”:
Organizational Design and underlying systems like project-based Funding.
The org I worked in that flipped to SAFe had such poor change management implementing it. It took at least 3 quarterly plannings to feel like teams were getting it and you still have 1/4 company that had no idea what SAFe even was.
I took Advanced Scrum Master SAFe training (4 half-days) just to be sure, and I was deeply disappointed with such shallow training and the inconsistency of the training material.
For example, we started addressing flow management and some metrics (not to mention they been renamed from Kanban, OMG...) but I was getting excited nonetheless. And then suddenly, just like that, we were speaking about Story Point normalization across teams, WTF! :'(. I could point out a dozen of other inconsistent, incomplete and really bad information. Yet, there's big investment from big companies, big investment from smart people to learn and teach SAFe, big announcements of success using SAFe. That's really puzzling!
I had the « chance » to experiment frameworks like nexus and safe. I ve always worked with scaled frameworks. Sometimes I ´m wondering if it s possible to be agile in big compagnies.The problem is maybe not about safe (for example) and maybe just the fact that big compagnies have lots of silos and roles between the customer and the teams. We try to experiment and adapt quickly but with a big machine it s hard. What do you think?
About your article I agree you. Joke: Safe is gonna be the Wikipedia of all tools in few years. The safe trainings are also straight foreword and superficial. Really hard to teach the real agile principles and scrum values this way. My point of view m. ++