Common Inspect and Adapt Mistakes

By Gerben Kollaard

Introduction

The Inspect and Adapt (I&A) is one of the most important events from the Scaled Agile Framework?. It connects to the SAFe? Core Values and helps organizations learn.

But it’s not easy.

As a result, we’ve seen common mistakes across the field when organizations carry out their I&As. (Ready to skip to the best practices? Check out this post.)

The biggest is the lack of follow-up on improvement items.?

The others the Release Train Engineers (RTEs) identified at the 2023 RTE Summit include:

·?????? Low participant numbers

·?????? Low engagement

·?????? Metrics aren’t used in the right way

·?????? Overly technical system demo

·?????? Skipping parts of the I&A

Let’s dive deep into the common mistakes.

No follow-up on improvement items

According to RTEs from all over the world, the biggest failure of the I&A is not following up on improvement items. This disrupts the loop of relentless improvement and learning. The improvement items are not given (a high) priority, teams don’t reserve the time for doing the improvement items, there is no ownership of the improvement item and sometimes the improvement item is just not realistic to complete. Resulting in the problem reoccurring every retrospective and problem-solving workshop.

The RTE should ensure the Agile Release Train (ART) plans the relevant work needed to deliver the identified improvements in the following PI Planning event, but the whole ART should feel responsible for the work.?

Low participation

SAFe states “all ART stakeholders participate along with the Agile teams in the I&A event”. But how often do you see all stakeholders wherever possible participate? Do you have a 95 percent attendance rate? Or a 90 percent? Or maybe a 70 percent? At what rate does the not attending become a problem? It might depend on the context of your ART, but we can all agree on the fact that we often see a lower turnout, with the effect that the Inspect & Adapt misses some of its value.

Making the Inspect & Adapt mandatory would also be a mistake, the ART and ART stakeholders should be intrinsically motivated and understand the value of doing the event with as many people as possible.

Low engagement

If you have a high participation, you’re not there yet. If you have an high participation, you can still miss out on the value of the Inspect & Adapt. Another problem is the ‘low engagement’ during the Inspect & Adapt. A low engagement during the System Demo will make you miss valuable feedback. But also, for example, that teams will not learn from each other. A low engagement during the quantitative and qualitative measurement will cause missing out on potential issues and low engagement during the retrospective and problem solving workshop will destroy your continuous improvement cycle.?

There are many ways of creating more engagement, giving ART members and stakeholders a role in one of the three parts of the I&A will help, as well as using inclusive and engaging practices such as ‘liberating structures’.

Metrics

Another common mistake is during the quantitative and qualitative measurement part of the Inspect and Adapt. Basically the teams should review the data and trends, so the ART can improve based on facts and a shared a vision of the problem. But do we even have metrics in place? And if so, do the teams always recognize the collected data? Do we take the time to analyse it? Do we agree on the trends? Does the business owner(s) really score the actual business value with the team before or during the System Demo? Or in the worst case: do you just use the metrics to compare teams and tell the worst performing team that they should improve?

A lot can go wrong with this part of the Inspect and Adapt. Which will make the third part of the Inspect and Adapt a lot harder and therefore ultimately has an influence on your continuous improvement process. Use the quantitative and qualitative measurement to objectively improve.

Technical System Demo

One that everybody will recognize is a ‘technical’ system demo. Teams often prepare it from their perspective, resulting in screens filled with code, technical details and a lot of explanation of all the ‘cool stuff’ they did to create the asked business value. And yes, we should respect the teams and give them credit for the hard work, but we should prevent that Business stakeholders don’t recognize the delivered value.

Invest in preparing the system demo with the members of the ART and involve the business stakeholders before, during and maybe even after the demo.

Not doing all the parts of the I&A

The last mistake we often see is not doing all the parts of the Inspect and Adapt. “Let’s just do the System Demo and skip the rest” or “we have never done the part of the quantitative and qualitative measurement, do we really need it?”. The Inspect and adapt has three parts for a reason. If you don’t do all the three parts, you will miss out on feedback, learning and continuous improvement.

Conclusion

The Inspect and Adapt might be one of the most important events in SAFe, but it’s also one of the hardest. There are many more mistakes you can make, but there are also a lot of things you can do to counter the common mistakes. Curious about our best practices? Make sure you will read our next blog. Do you think the Inspect and Adapt can use some relentless improvements? Make sure you get in touch.