What's Needed at Small to Mid-Scale

This is a chapter from my upcoming online book Simplifying SAFe? With FLEX: An Enhanced Approach to Achieving Business Agility. FLEX is Net Objectives' Lean-Agile approach to helping organizations improve at all levels. While FLEX stands on its own, this book explains how to use it to enhance while simplifying SAFe. Feedback is requested either here on a user group I've set up for the purpose. I am also leading an online workshop starting in mid-January on FLEX that will include how to use it with SAFe. You can see more on linkedin by going to the Table of Contents.

?What’s required to achieve business agility at small to mid-scale is reasonably well known from a task point of view. Getting a company or development group to adopt it is another matter. As mentioned earlier, there is no set way. But there are a set of objectives that, if accomplished, will result in effectiveness. The trick is to manifest these objectives in a way that fits your organization.

The main objectives required are:

• business stakeholders set direction by specifying what they want to invest in and creating a strategy to manifest that
• create a list of initiatives, ordered by importance
• make all work visible across the value stream so that people can collaborate effectively
• have an intake process for the work and manage how much work in process is taking place
• create the proper eco-system so that teams can coordinate and collaborate efficiently
• improve continuously

These must be guided by a systems-thinking mindset, visibility of workflow and management.

This section will first show how Essential SAFe addresses these. We’ll discover that some of Essential SAFe is not needed here and some is not provided. The next section will show how Essential SAFe can be supplemented with FLEX to provide a complete solution for our challenges.

If you are interested in large-scale, it’s important to first grasp the concepts being laid out at the small to mid-scale. It turns out that the FLEX model of Lean portfolio and product management scales itself without requiring new levels. This will be discussed in the part on starting and continuing a Lean-Agile adoption.