Watch Out, Waterfall Ahead! The Truth About SAFe.

SAFe is a thrown together mess. Is it agile to first set up a whole bureaucratic process of months, maybe years.? The key to really applying agile to an organization must come from business science. Not a few ICT people sitting in the chair of a business scientist.? Agile for business is much needed, but we need to start from the traditional MBA/strategy waterfall. Not build an ICT framework slowly into something that is also appropriate for the context of management and business. Then you get a kind of Frankenstein's monster.? You can criticize, but then you have to come up with an alternative.? My own framework,?SUS | Star/t Up Scrum: The Agile MBA Framework?, is such an attempt. It has taken me 10 years of academic and practical preliminary study and is tested in different organizations, but soon we will go live to the public. If you as a business professional, from management to innovation team, really want to get started with agile, this is the only true agile path.?Unlike many other frameworks, which come with some vague principles in terms of business agility, this is an iterative overall framework, which you can really use to achieve agile business growth.

I see that diagram in my dreams :o(

Hmm, as any "all-encompassing" framework SAFe has it traps. It can become too heavy And there are ideas like separating Product Manager from Product Owner which are just wrong However, with a bot of thinking you can distill SAFe to: 1. We need to coordinate what various Agile teams are doing 2. That should be prioritised by business and validated regularly ensuring all teams understand the priorities and they are being adjusted as things change 3. There is a need for quality control and for doing things that help organisation as a whole not only individual delivery 4. And yes - you CAN NOT leave everything in hands of developers, because they will do what they are doing best - develop. How they see fit. Not paying attention if e.g. it would be better to actually buy the thing they want to develop. Or that they are creating unscallable technology debt There is a need to scale Agile. There is a wonderful world of startups and you have a world of companies that still need to function at the markets they are in. Yes you separate those lean things which can be separated out. However, those companies have customers, they have compliance, they have suppliers (with various level of agility) they have a whole ecosystem to manage

I read quite a few of the comments, and I am missing any discussion of case studies or research about various methods (they do exist!), and their relative cost effectiveness. Everybody is spouting their opinions (not their results). This lack of scientific or engineering rigor is what leads to people selling and buying methods based on something other than rational thinking. This is wasting everybody's time, and would not be acceptable behavior in serious disciplines. Would the next person to post on any agile method, anywhere, just give us some facts about experiences, costs, stakeholder value delivery (main point of agile). Or is there some strong preference for not using evidence based thinking? Let me share one example of serious industrial attempt to understand the cost effectiveness of some methods. J. Terzakis, ?"The impact of requirements on software quality across three product generations,"? 2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), Rio de Janeiro, 2013, pp. 284-289. https://www.thinkmind.org/download.php?articleid=iccgi_2013_3_10_10012