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.Organizing Around ValueLots of organizations are organized around functional silos — such as business, system engineering, hardware, software, testing/QA, and operations. These structures exist because they support specialization and allow [...]

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 don’t know anything about agile and believe the SPC is your silver bullet to becoming an agile coach at the enterprise level.Don’t come if you’re looking for the [...]

Last week this was a theme in the Implementing SAFe class Ofer Cohen and I ran in Waltham, MA.We find it crucial when training new SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs) to emphasize that they should use SAFe as a framework not a methodology.First, what’s the difference between a framework and a methodology? I found this concise useful comparison written by Liz Keogh who I think highly of over at Quora -A methodology is a set of principles, tools, and practices which [...]

In the scaled Agile framework, one key role is the Release Train Engineer (RTE). But who should I look for to fill this role? What are the first few process improvements experienced RTE’s typically do? Yuval Yeret (AgileSparks) and Mattias Skarin (Crisp) took the time to discuss the traits of a good RTE.What are the traits of a good RTE?Yuval: The easy answer to this question is that you are looking for a Scrum master for a team of teams. Going [...]