Nexus and SAFe - Similarities, Differences, Ideas - Initial Draft...
Yuval Yeret
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Yuval Yeret
Scale Without Slowing Down | Traction and Agility Advisor | SAFe Fellow | Professional Scrum Trainer
I've been asked several times now about Nexus and SAFe - what are the similarities, differences, etc. Here's an outline of a blog post / whitepaper I'm planning to write about this. Like/Comment if you find this a useful/interesting subject and I'll try to find time soon to actually write it up :-)
Nexus and SAFe - Similar Concepts
- Sprint - Iteration
- One Product Backlog - Program Backlog
- Nexus Integration Team - System Team
- Scrum Master in the NIT - RTE
- Empiricism via working integrated increments every Sprint - System Demo & Nexus Sprint Review meeting a common Definition of “Done”
- Nexus - ART
- Nexus Sprint Goal - Program PI Objectives - just at different cadence/frequency
- You cannot scale crap - Scaling requires technical excellence
- Following the principles of Empiricism, Self-organization within constraints, organization around value, and flow.
Important Differences
- One Product Owner vs Product Ownership/Management Team - PM/POs
- Cadence/Frequency of bringing the whole Nexus/ART together for Planning and Retrospection - Every PI in SAFe, every Sprint in Nexus
- No team-level Sprint Review
- Nexus SPRINT Retrospective vs Problem Solving Workshop
- Nexus focuses on just the team of teams (Essential SAFe). SAFe covers other competencies needed for Business Agility
- Integrated Nexus Sprint Backlog vs various team iteration backlogs
Some ideas for Improving SAFe inspired by Nexus
- Don’t just review together every Sprint. Also retrospect and plan together. It doesn’t mean bringing the whole ART together necessarily. It just means creating some alignment across the ART before splitting off and doing Iteration Planning at each team and then coming back together. Sort of like the pattern Solution Trains use when they do PI Planning.
- Similar to a Program Board for the PI, use Integrated Nexus Sprint Backlog
Some ideas for adding to Nexus inspired by SAFe
- PI Planning for higher-level alignment/refinement once in a while across the Nexus
- Figure out what level of "big room" whole Nexus together makes sense every Sprint and what can fit a less frequent cadence (e.g. a PI) - Look at how you run the Nexus Sprint Planning, Retrospective specifically.
- Looking at the SAFe Principles and complementary Lean/Agile competencies like Lean Portfolio as a way to support the Nexus within the traditional ecosystem in the organization.
I help organizations to evolve+improve ?? l AI+Leadership I HBR Advisory Council I Accredited Kanban Consultant & Trainer I Project Management Professional? | Scrum Trainer | PSM 3 & PSPO 3 I Flight Levels Professional?
2 年Really helpful article - I just finished a two day Scaled Professional Scrum training yesterday with Nils Oud and very nice and experienced participants from a European bank and a big German premium car company. We had among others also a conversation about strong literature about both of the frameworks - thank you very much again Yuval Yeret! Ronny Kant Adrian Louis maybe also interesting for you? The full article is here: https://www.agilesparks.com/comparing-nexus-and-safe-similarities-differences-ideas/
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4 年Agility is about changing directions on a dime for a dime. In Nexus you can change directions every Sprint (max 1 calendar month). In SAFe, you can only change directions every PI planning (5 "iterations" or about 10 weeks which is about 2.5 times that of Nexus). In SAFe, since each team has its own backlog, it optimizes the teams "locally", instead of global optimization. Nexus has only one product backlog, and hence teams can decide at the "last responsible moment" on who does what, optimizing globally, as well as increasing agility
Building high performing teams and organizations
4 年Same same but different. To see what they have in common (and Scrum@scale and LeSS...), I wrote this article: https://valueinsights.ch/-scaling-agile-building-blocks/
Thank you for capturing it very well
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4 年Thanks for posting