Why the SAFe Framework just isn't working out for you..

I'm getting a little tired of it now. Not SAFe itself, but all the stories I hear from good people working in organisations that are apparently "doing SAFe", but the organisations are not really doing it in the slightest. In the UK (and perhaps elsewhere) we seem to be having a SAFe version of the rush to the Spotify model where organisations hoped that by re-naming teams to 'squads' and by creating guilds, tribes, and chapters, that the magic-dust of "agile" would scatter and leverage immediate gains, and the agile 'box' could be ticked. I'm seeing something similar with SAFe where companies are labelling up 'Trains' all over the place.

There is something called 'Scrum-but' which agile coaches see a lot. This is where companies say "We're doing Scrum but..." (then insert ..we don't have scrum masters, ..we don't work in iterations, ..we don't write stories etc) and this is actually ok if in that specific context it makes good sense, afterall, agility is about inspecting and adapting.

For the last few years, and again at conferences this summer, I have begun to hear 'SAFe-but' appearing. This has included "we're doing SAFe but we don't have an IP Iteration", "We're doing SAFe but we don't have a Product Management", "We're doing SAFe but have a Development Train and a Testing Train" and "we're doing safe but we don't do System Demo's". The list goes on.

Worse than this I also get to hear people at conferences telling others (and I mean speakers telling others), about how SAFe didn't work in their organisation and putting slides up maligning SAFe when the problem was not really with the framework, but with their own implementation of it.

I tweeted quite a while ago now, that it is easy to get SAFe wrong if you don't invest in getting it right, and this rings repeatedly true. The number of companies I go into where a few people have been on a Leading SAFe course or used SAFe in another company, and are somehow expected to implement it inside a large-scale enterprise (somtimes as side-of-desk work), is not small. I still see senior leadership delegating 'agility' to others who are not empowered enough to enact the kind of change that SAFe mandates, and who are then immediately destined to fail.

SAFe has ten guiding principles at it heart, and these need to be enacted and understood at all levels of an organisation attempting SAFe. They are not optional, and they all stem from prior work developed and honed over many decades from many disciplines. They are pretty much common sense. The organisations struggling with SAFe seem to be the ones that rushed into the 'Practices' without really understanding these Principles, and therefore miss out or downplay critical parts of the framework (e.g the IP iteration) without understanding the consequences.

Furthermore, again the organisations I see struggling with SAFe are those that have preserved their "Business" and/vs "IT" mindset and see SAFe as "something IT does". SAFe is an enterprise-wide commitment to working with lean-agile practices, and adopting a lean-agile mindset across the board. It tries to de-construct the old ways of thinking and many of the traditional organisational leadership patterns, so without the senior leaders actually going on a change journey themselves, again the organisation is not going to get SAFe right. SAFe starts at the absolute top of an enterprise as well as the bottom, and at much the same time.

All is not lost. You can get a quick sense of whether your organisation is getting things about right with SAFe by having a look at the ten critical sucess factors for Essential SAFe. This checklist gives you the core hotspots to focus on to make sure you are on the right track. They are:

As I said earlier, its easy to get SAFe wrong if you don't invest in getting it right. Get people who have done this before to come and help you. Build a core agile competence within your eneterprise that is empowered enough to drive change, get everyone trained up, and most importantly get senior leadership to really understand what it is that they must do to make SAFe a sucess in your organisation.

Please don't be a company that does "SAFe-but", because you really won't get what you need from it.