SAFe 4.6 Thoughts and Reflections
SAFe 4.6 is here and I think there is more excitement than ever around the Framework. It seems every week that passes another Government department or blue-chip company is starting work on their first implementation. Which is largely to be considered good news. I have been asked my opinions from a number of you in terms of my thoughts on the new iteration – and I’m happy to report in general feelings are positive, but there are a couple of pieces I would (and did!) bring back in. To manage expectations the level of change between 4.5 and 4.6 is smaller than between 4.0 and 4.5.
So first what’s new – the five “core competencies” which are:
Lean Agile Leadership;
Team and Technical Agility;
DevOps and Release on Demand;
Business Solutions and Lean Systems; and
Lean Portfolio Management
Which will all be fairly familiar to anyone who is currently working within a SAFe organisation or has recently completed a course. I’ve not got a lot to add on these other than there is far more to read online than there is in the course materials, but this isn’t really anything new. SAFe for Government has been added, no doubt due to so many Government departments both in the UK and US adopting it. Not too much seems to change with this – in fact it is pointed out that “experienced practitioners in government services have reported that they achieve the best results when the SAFe model and terminology are used without modification”.
The Roadmap has been updated to include the new role based courses and also a typical starting point of waterfall / ad-hoc agile before the tipping point, more will follow on this in a separate blog.
The next thing you’ll notice is that a significant amount of content has been condensed. Whilst it makes sense to streamline some of the leadership styles in a course which always had potential to overrun, it’s important IMHO to still signpost leader as coach to reiterate the importance of leadership in empowering and developing individuals and teams. We can assume lean-agile leaders would exemplify this however when considering SAFe implementation following the new ‘ad-hoc agile’ starting point, this is an important differential.
So whilst I’m yet to be convinced they ever really went into enough detail to make the inclusion previously worthwhile – other than to perhaps signpost further reading, it’s enough of a gap to consider how best to cover when planning for delivering the course and the practical reminders such as open questions.
My biggest frustration was my favourite exercise has been removed - It’s my opinion that the Backlog Mapping exercise was a really useful diagnostic to gauge understanding of the level of understanding on the levels of SAFe, and the sometimes confusing terminologies involved in labelling within them. Other than that, the only thing I “manually” added back in was the slide around how to identify anti-patterns in terms of waterfalling iterations. It is still extremely common for teams (especially, but not limited to less mature organisations) to either be inter/intra-waterfalling within interations and I can’t really understand why this isn’t pointed out? Didn’t want to spoil the surprise? The 10 things to know you’ve implemented SAFe has also been removed- I always thought it was a useful (if high level) checklist.
The plus side to all of this is – there is a lot more “headroom” for real quality discussions between SAFe Program Consultants and delegates. I’ve always been wary of a “death by powerpoint” approach – mainly due to the fact its not something I have ever enjoyed during training sessions (Scrum seemed to be a particularly dry example of this). So it definitely helps if someone has an in-play issue they’d like to discuss in a little more detail.
I was going to close the blog off with a paragraph on what I would potentially look to include in the future. But it has grown into what looks like yet another blog so look out for it over the Christmas period.
Training dates for 2019 can be found at the link below. I hope to see many of you next year.