The title of my post may read like acronym soup but all of these concepts play a critical role in SAFe, and understanding how they’re connected is important to success. After exploring some connections, I will suggest some actions you can take while designing, evaluating, or accelerating your implementation. KPIs and OKRs The SAFe Value Stream …
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. …
Today, I wanted to share two quick observations about OKRs. Too many teams working on each strategic OKR I encounter many organizations that use OKRs. Too many of them have this crazy matrix where the high-level OKRs — those that aim to achieve the organization’s strategy — map to too many teams/functions in the organization. This creates a need …
Aligning Scrum Team Topology to Strategy with OKRs and Product Goals Yeah, I know. Could I squeeze more buzzwords into the title? I guess I could include Digital Transformation, Cloud, AI, and Machine Learning for effect. But seriously, I wanted to share some insights around how to align your Scrum Teams to your strategy leveraging OKRs …
The OKR Theater I encounter many organizations that are trying to improve the alignment between strategy and execution with the OKRs framework (Objectives and Key Results). There’s good intent there, but more often than not I see anti-patterns like: OKRs that look more like tasks than strategic objectives — especially by the time they reach working teams OKRs …
Summary I partnered with Gillette’s R&D and Commercial leadership to leverage Scrum for designing the Gillette Exfoliating Razor. This initiative included several multi-disciplinary teams involving technical, research, and commercial teams collaborating on one scaled Scrum borrowing patterns from the Nexus framework. Using Scrum to quickly learn and validate on the key leap of faith assumptions …
How do we handle Scope Changes in a SAFe Program Increment? How do you handle a scope change in a program increment? Specifically when it comes to switching one feature for another? And what’s the impact on PI Objectives and Predictability Score? A lot of people somehow get the notion that SAFe advocates for “limiting/controlling …
I’m hearing from more and more companies that are using the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS®) and are also looking at or practicing Agile e.g., using Scrum. In discussions with these companies, two key questions surface time after time: My teams want to use Agile/Scrum — is that aligned with the fact that we’re using EOS® in the …
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: …