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SAFe® has always been a controversial topic within the agile community. Therefore, back in 2017, I ran a first survey on the Net Promoter Score® of the Scaled Agile Framework SAFe®. The result back then was -52.
Four and a half years later, I reran the poll: SAFe® has been through several iterations, and many more agile practitioners have experienced working with it. However, the question still is: Would you recommend SAFe ®?
On the surface, the foundations of job sequencing in considering the Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) prioritization schema seem logical. Do the smallest job with the greatest cost of delay first to deliver the greatest economic benefit. Though, in practice, it can be much more challenging. To survive and thrive in the post-digital economy, organizations need to change how they produce products, interact with customers, and define and prioritize work. To succeed in each of these areas requires a significant shift in organizational behavior, including how leaders interact with their peers.
But, how did we get here?
Why do some people find SAFe to be helpful in empowering teams while others find implementing the Framework painful? To be honest, both scenarios are equally valid.
As I was beginning to refocus my career on transforming the operating models and management structures of large enterprises, I found that the behavioral patterns of Agile and the operational cadence of Scrum shined a spotlight on an organization's greatest challenges. As a byproduct of working faster and focusing on flow, impediments became obvious. With the issues surfaced, management had a choice: fix the problems or don’t.
As the post-digital economy begins to boom and the worlds of business process and technology come together, it’s time to think about how we optimize the whole from a unified, customer-centric perspective. Some organizations have begun to master the idea of experience architecture, whereas others are just beginning.
During my years consulting, I’ve had the opportunity to work with complex system architecture. Such as the APIs and data structures across multiple federal agencies that manage annual earnings and death records for every person in the United States. I’ve also experienced complex business architectures responsible for moving passengers, aircraft, and cargo around the world in a safe and predictable manner.
SAFe and Business Architecture. As organizations begin their Lean and Agile journey with SAFe®, SPCs will introduce a tool designed to help organizations determine the best, most logical place to launch their first Agile Release Train (ART). The Value Stream and ART Identification Workshop is designed to help organizations identify the sweet spot where an opportunity to deliver value intersects with a clear problem to solve, leadership support, a clear product or solution, and collaborating teams.
It’s challenging to meet the criteria mentioned above, which is why many are tempted to launch ARTs within easier-to-identify constructs such as organizational silos. This rarely works. As we know, value often does not follow the organizational hierarchy. However, it’s important to understand that value stream identification is the first step in an ongoing practice of flow management to optimize the speed of delivery, quality, and customer delight.
There’s no faster way to kill a conversation among a non-technical crowd than to begin discussing DevOps. For many, DevOps is that “technical thing” that IT teams do to automate testing. Or, to paraphrase an actual conversation I once had with a client:
“Doesn’t DevOps use that guy Jenkins to monitor something called technical debt so that we can have a cleaner Git, which somehow allows our Kubernetes to Docker? All I know is that our operations people don’t like it when we release on demand, and our annual software releases just deliver last year’s trends too late.”
Becoming a SAFe Agilist Practitioner and bringing the Agility to the organization, is not new for today as with the implementation of Agile Methodology, comes the fact that it has provided huge contributive significance in the Software & IT industry for growth, improved results and development.
As the SAFe Agilist plays a vital role in getting significant improvement throughout the Agile Journey, the way of management and implementation of the responsibility acts as a backbone for getting improved results.
