Why The Intersection Matters (A Case Study)

I encounter more and more people struggling to find a clear path in the agile space. They are dealing with a complex, scaled environment with many legacies, with some scaling patterns needed.

SAFe resonates to them as an approach that fits their organization’s appetite (or lack thereof) for change/risk but they also want to make sure that the agile heart is still beating in there. They find someone at the intersection of SAFe and the Professional Scrum and Kanban world to be a safer bet (sorry, had to).

Experts at the intersection keep you honest. They challenge you to think about where you’re going.

They have options. They also make for better training, more profound coaching conversations, more buy-in, better understanding, and therefore, smoother and more effective change - leading to faster outcomes of your transformation.

When they realize that their impediment is alignment, integration, and flow across multiple products and some of the organizational operating model assumptions and want to introduce agility at the portfolio level, they appreciate someone who was also involved in some of the most enormous scale Kanban case studies AND knows their way around Evidence-based Management and OKRs to be helpful.

Anybody can talk about SMART goals. Fewer experts can leverage the intersection to think of applying INVEST for your Goals/OKRs, applying Evidence-based Management to them, not to say to think of applying Flow/Kanban to your OKRs.

When they decide to take agility out of the technology organization to marketing, sales, and eventually to the whole company, they appreciate someone’s broader perspective that leads to seeing and emphasizing patterns and principles rather than practices and methodologies because they’ve tried to apply mechanics before and ended up with Agile Theater.

With the expert at the intersection, they deliver a cross-functional initiative with no actual software in it ahead of time, with outsized market value unlocked due to the resulting agility (even though they might not be using all the agile practices).

Not everyone appreciates the value of the intersection. Optionality seems to complicate things. Maintaining expertise in different areas isn’t trivial.