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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 ®?
Large corporations are increasingly longing to be like startups: Flat hierarchies and the absence of formal procedures result in unseen productivity; doing without restraining bureaucracy allows for remarkable speed, innovation, and creativity.
Speed, innovation, and creativity: It's exactly these things most corporations are desperately lacking. In turn, it's only logical for big companies to want to take a leaf out of the startups' book. Where the clumsy imitation of a start-up mentality fails or maybe isn't even an option, the magic word agile soon echoes through the aisles. Because you know, the competition is already successfully agile, every consultant can deliver ready-made, highly scaled agile wonders on demand in no time at all, and even the house and farm service provider has had experience with it for a long time, but simply wasn't asked about it until now. So "agile" gets written on the banner, swarms of self-proclaimed evangelists get unleashed onto the staff and off they go on a journey into a brighter future.
Between November 2008 and December 2014, I transitioned from senior software engineer to dev team lead to Director of Engineering to VP of Engineering at CloudLock. During that time we grew from one office with 5 devs to four offices with 75 devs.
Let’s just say it was a crazy 6 years :-)
At the Influential Agile Leader workshop earlier this year, I led a session about scaling, and how it might not be the answer. My experience is that when people use frameworks for larger efforts, they experience these unexpected side effects:
Agile Scaling Frameworks: An Executive Summary
One of the participants asked, "But what if we have to scale?"