You scaled your team to 60+ engineers. You installed the “industry standard” frameworks to keep everyone aligned. For a while, it worked. But lately, it feels different. PI Planning has become a ritual people dread. Innovation cycles have turned into “dead zones.” Your teams are spending more time managing the process than shipping code. You’re …
Picture this: you’ve a breakthrough strategic initiative tied to one of your company-level goals that impacts 10 teams across two product groups, as well as your GTM organization. These are all busy, overloaded teams. Those same 10 teams are also juggling five other initiatives. And the business-as-usual whirlwind. You pull this work into the backlogs/roadmaps …
The idea of bringing dependent teams together to collaborate better and minimize cross-dependency overhead isn’t unique to SAFe. It’s just a fractal of the pattern of an agile cross-functional team, which Agile hasn’t invented either, just leveraged. Here’s how you might go about designing effective ARTs: There will still be dependencies. Sometimes, even a lot. …
Projects and initiatives are second-grade citizens in a Product Operating Model world. The organization worked hard to organize around products, creating empowered product teams, each with its product manager/owner focused on a product goal that hopefully aligns with the organization’s larger strategy. At scale, you might have Product Groups and even Product Portfolios, each empowered …
Strategic Themes in SAFe represent strategic choices at the Enterprise/Portfolio level that should guide decisions throughout the portfolio. A qualitative Objective accompanied by a quantitative, valuable, and measurable evidence-oriented Key Result connected to a portfolio KPI is a great way to make sure the strategic theme is pointing toward desired outcomes without going into too …
Here’s a frequently asked question in the SAFe community: What does SAFe say about someone who wants to go faster than two weeks of iteration? I mean, the whole PI concept is based on five iterations of planning. What if a team or organization wants to develop and synchronize faster than two weeks? Is speed going …
A lot of our clients are technology vendors that struggle to use the SAFe Operational Value Streams “out of the box”. Here, I explore how such a B2B vendor should organize around value when building products that are used to support its customer’s business operations. This article was originally posted in the Scaled Agile blog. …
I’ve been asked several times now about Nexus and SAFe — what are the similarities, differences, etc. If you’re not familiar with either Nexus or SAFe, I recommend taking a look at the Nexus Guide and the SAFe whitepaper first. Nexus and SAFe — Similar Concepts Let’s start with similarities — There are quite a few of them, as you can see: …
The search for the right Health Check model Back in 2015, I wrote about a Spotify Squad-level tool I started using in Executive/Management workshops as well as all-hands QuickStarts/QuickBoosts. Also, the option to run this assessment using a Kahoot survey is especially relevant these days when we’re all virtual. This might also be good timing …
Seriously, please don’t come. Don’t come if you’re looking at it as a formality since you already know everything about agile and just need the SPC (SAFe Program Consultant) Certificate. Don’t come if you’re looking for the cheapest way to get your SPC so that you can add it to your resume. Don’t come if you …