Let's Adapt the Inspect&Adapt

The Inspect & Adapt is, for me, one of the most important events from the Scaled Agile Framework. It connects with the SAFe Core Values and will help your organization to learn. It all sounds amazing - but do you recognize the following?

The System Demo is just a sum up of some results of scrum teams' work - the metrics are meaningless and not used to improve how the ART and the teams are working, the retrospective and problem solving workshop are always showing the same problems and improvement backlog items are not realized.

At the RTE-Summit last November in Haarlem we used the format of an Open Space, to learn and share best practices about the Inspect & Adapt. A group of 50 RTE’s from all over the world joined the session to discuss their experience with the biggest failures and the best practices of the Inspect & Adapt.

The participants all agreed on the VALUE of the Inspect & Adapt, but also recognized that there are many ways of enriching the current way of running the Inspect & Adapt.

Discussing the experienced failures of the Inspect & Adapt, we saw a big concentration of failures in the retrospective and in the problem solving workshop. When the groups shared the biggest failures, applauses and cheers filled the room, because the first group shared that ‘improvement items are not followed up’. THIS turned out to be a very common failure. After the failures we focused on (new) best practices of the I&A, and we found quite a few. I would like to highlight a few of these:

1. Keep your attendees engaged by giving them autonomy and responsibility - not only DURING the Inspect & adapt, but also AFTER
2. Let the business owners run the System Demo
3. Turn the improvement items of the problem solving workshop into a PI-objective for next PI
4. Ensure follow up at the following Inspect & Adapt to show respect for the work that teams and ART have put into I&A items

Are you curious about other failures? Do you want to know more about the best practices? We, as a group of I&A enthusiasts, are going to write blog posts about the I&A on the Scaled Agile website, so stay tuned!

Together we are going to enrich the theory and make a best practice for the Inspect & Adapt, so let us know in the comments below: What would YOU like to change about the Inspect & Adapt?

#RTESummit #IAevolution #ImprovetheInspectandAdapt Scaled Agile, Inc.