If you are visiting this page, most likely, you or your organization are looking for ways to recover from adverse impacts of SAFe implementation.
Unquestionably, SAFe has been the most well-known and successfully promoted framework, for more than a decade. It’s deep market penetration, fueled by large consultancies and supported by long-term tooling partnerships, is very well known.
However, an overwhelming complexity of hierarchical layers, communications and processes that SAFe advocates, has led to numerous adverse impacts on [client]-companies and inability to successfully move towards incremental product development and client centric organizational design. There is a lot of industry research about this, collected from many companies, and it can be further studied here. Also, there is a large volume of references about SAFe and its impact, from a number of industry experts that can be found here.
Perhaps, you may recognize some of the following anti-patterns, and if you do, you may consider asking for help:
- General lack of flexibility/adaptiveness
- Overall, organizational complexity and excessiveness of management layers
- Heavy top-down decision making and command & control culture
- Traditional, non-product centric budgeting
- Heavy focus on portfolios and projects (not products)
- Hard dependency on project management tools and metrics
- Misguidance from large consultancies (SAFe golden partners)
- Weak product definition and lack of customer focus
- Complexity of WBS prioritization and estimation
- Big-batch delivery, based on long release cycles
- Lack of iterative, incremental delivery
- Absence of teams’ autonomy and independence
- High numbers of old roles with new titles
- Poor recognition of truly agile roles (SM, PO)
- Low percentage of real full-stack developers
- Lack of agile engineering practices (ATDD, TDD, BDD)
- Low code quality and heavy/expensive integration (CI/CD)
- Highly complex vocabulary of terms and definitions
Instead, our goal is to help individual companies and people in them to recover from adverse impacts (economic, reputational) of long-term SAFe implementations. We realize that this sort of recovery could be a lengthy and frictional process.
Therefore, we do not advise any huge, all-at-once “big bang”, radical changes that would disrupt BAU or working dynamics of thousands of people, even if the ultimate goal is to move an entire company away from SAFe.
Our recommended approach is deep and narrow and it involves a few critical steps, such as doing an organizational assessment, getting an informed consent of executive leadership, conducting structured training (if necessary), later followed by coaching and consulting support. We have a lot of experience in this field.
We also understand that because the time, effort and financial investments that companies have made in SAFe (a.k.a. “sunk cost”) were significant, there could be some discomfort and hesitation to acknowledge that things did not work out as well as they were expected. We get that. We are all humans and sometimes make mistakes.
WE RECOGNIZE THIS IMPORTANT PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT of this and are prepared to work with companies and individuals on how to make gradual improvements, while protecting people from shaming, blame-gaming and fear of repercussions.
If you are looking for help or are interested in learning more about the approach, please reach out and ask.