I attended a 4 day course for SAFe certified consultants a while back and wanted to share my thoughts. First of all, SAFe could very well be a RUP-like tool with the same negative results. The 4 day training gives the student the ability (if passing a test) to roll out SAFe at an organization as a consultant including training and process consulting – hogwash.
Some students could implement SAFe in a large organization. Despite
experience in agile at the enterprise level, I personally feel uncomfortable in
such a role without seeing SAFe in the works. Mistakes could lead to
organizational level disaster. On the other hand, having appropriate guidance
on enterprise adoption can be very helpful in the right hands.
SAFe does talk about emergence, self organization, and a lot
of the leadership dynamics, but in the context of company maximized profit and
a push-top down mentality. Decisions made at higher organizational levels can
be painful in the wrong hands when the decisions are not based on a thorough
understanding of emergence.
It also breaks a lot of the ground rules of scrum through
HIP sprints, multiple levels of product owner, multiple levels of scrum
masters, and potentially long planning horizons.
The big questions I have about the process revolve around
it’s overall focus on large, large projects.
Why do you need 50 teams on a project?
Why not make a lot of small projects?
Why plan out for a couple of years?
Can you decouple work so that dependencies among teams isn’t so much of
an issue? How do you tailor SAFe?
These are all questions that weren’t answered in the class
and, frankly, I don’t know the answers either.
Ultimately SAFe has merit as a starting point, but should be
applied with caution – it can easily be implemented as a push style of
management without having an understanding of agile itself. Remember values over mechanics. Agile in
general could get an ugly name through SAFe or any other process being
implemented through certified neophytes.
