5 ways Modern Agile Can Take SAFe Out of a Rut

Modern Agile offers a powerful way to explain the fundamental values that drive successful agile adoption to just about anyone. It's easy to understand, simple, and more importantly gets to the heart of agile. It was released in 2016 by Joshua Kerievsky, in effort to modernize agile manifesto of 2001.  

In 2011, Dean Leffingwell released a scaled agile framework known as SAFe into the world. Ever since its inception, there has been an agile civil war with constant criticism of SAFe's ability to become a purer form of agile. None the less, SAFe framework has a way of appealing to global, hierarchical and highly regulated organizations. It has a rigid, structured process, hard pressed in dogma, all things organizational comfort zones. 

Without the right strategy in place, SAFe can be a barrier towards the start-up magic results large organizations need to remain competitive and on top of their game in a disruptive market. For example, shaking project management behaviors continues to prove to be a tall, rigorous mountain to climb. Many weary and less skilled consultants have diluted agile in order to take a safer approach to agile coaching. Even though SAFe will solve some challenges faced with agile adoption at scale, it continues to be a double edged sword. 

Implemented just as prescribed, it prevents just in time empirical learning, drives outdated agile metrics and behaviors,  and does nothing to transform decades of hierarchy and bureaucracy within an organization.

Getting beyond the mechanics of SAFe and getting to the heart of agile continues to prove to be challenging.

What if there was another way, a happy medium leading to greater results and outcomes. 

Let's explore 5 ways Modern Agile can keep your SAFe adoption soaring

1. Chartering Agile Release Trains [ART] 

When chartering ask yourself one question - will this provide knowledge workers what they need to make the right decisions in the shortest amount of time.

A re-occurring situation happening in organizations implementing agile is that something detrimental is missing - vision.  It is a much needed phenomenon, and single most important thing, that can pave the way for teams to thrive in a competitive market. Without it, systems thinking is just a pretty word on a piece of paper, self organizing, empowered teams will be limited to superficial actions and decentralized decision making will be a dream in the cloud.  Most organizations miss nailing communicating vision for two simple reasons - it's very hard to do right and most of us are focused on activities that need to get done instead of having an outcome driven focus. 

Modern Agile offers an awesome way to create a greater sense of purpose through chartering. What if we took agile release trains further by chartering communities bonded by a common cause. By chartering you look beyond the scrum teams and include everyone who has a part to play, this includes your support folks, tech writers and so many others that are involved to make releasing to production successful. More importantly the goal of chartering is to nail down the greater vision in an easy to remember, simple English terms on a visible large piece of paper for everyone to see and believe so long the vision is an active part of development.

2. Turn PI Plans into Release Planning 

PI planning is a an awesome alignment and planning ceremony. SAFe suggests to get everyone in a room to dynamically build an upcoming proposed roadmap for the next 4-5 sprints.  As prescribed it doesn't take into account how often a team can release value into production. More frequent releases to production is the golden egg of agile releases and many struggle to achieve it. 

Focus PI planning on delivery of value by capturing the following metrics:

  1.How quickly have we been able to release value to production

  2. What % of the process is manual 

  3. Production usage metrics 

 Leveraging PI Planning to focus on frequency of releases of value will drive home that this is a leadership priority, drive outcome focused teams and create transparency. 

3. Anytime Innovation 

SAFe introduced an entire sprint dedicated to innovation called innovation and planning (IP). Why? Because organizations were not providing teams the time to go off and innovate and try new things. With good intentions SAFe, solved a common problem but inadvertently created another by limiting innovation to a hard coded time way into the future. Innovation can't ever be a hard-coded parameter. Innovation should be allowed to happen when you need it most. It needs be part of your agile blood line to stay competitive and adaptive to learning better ways of delivering software.

4. Experimentation boils down to psychological safety 

In my experience, the hardest part of embodying agile is building a culture of psychological safety. It has been known to be called the secret weapon of awesome teams and has to be embedded as a priority within any framework. Transforming decades of leading by command and control is no easy task. SAFe doesn't go far enough to address how this change will happen but Modern Agile does.

 Building a learning culture, built on respect is the future of work and will be the differentiating factor for awesome places to work, built upon innovation.

5. Collaborative Product Ownership

Did you know that good 80% of features are infrequently used by users? 

Who gets to own the decision making process of what gets built and when so that to gain maximum value for the user?  What if this effort wasn't a single person, but a collaboration across a team of people? According to SAFe it's a single voice, attributed to a single person - the product owner. Modern Agile has firm and radical approaches towards product owners with a strong stance on eliminating the role, going as far as stating the role being an agile anti-pattern. But what if the role, was no longer a single person but a collaborative effort? What if aha moment ideas are encouraged to come from anyone. Are you really done, if no one used the feature?