Dinner with Dean at Agile Australia 2015
At the 2015 Agile Australia pre-conference speaker’s dinner I was seated next to invited speaker Dean Leffingwell (pictured here on the left) founder of the
Scaled Agile Framework: ‘SAFe', a process framework invented to help organisations scale their Agility beyond a few teams to much larger software delivery teams. Applied to teams and departments numbering in the hundreds, SAFe is now gaining traction at several large Australian organisations, Telstra and Australia Post to name but two notable examples happy to showcase their SAFe successes.
I shared with Dean one of my frustrations at our implementation of SAFe at Auspost where I was a Head of Digital Engineering. Although I found many good things in the framework, and had blogged previously on the topic myself, I observed that SAFe can lead to software delivery teams becoming bloated with people, and that the ‘Big Picture’ SAFe artifact contributed to the problem.
This diagrammatic model shows how the three major levels of the framework are represented and supposedly interact, being Portfolio, Program and Team. A quick scan reveals 40 little people represented in different teams and roles that are identified in the framework - and no, I don’t believe the diagram needs to be interpreted that literally.
However, one of the perennial problems associated with large enterprises is scale; numerous people tend to mass and coalesce around the work, whether they are required or not. A phenomena fuelled by the nature of territory grabs common in an internally competitive enterprise - large teams are advantageous for positional power in an organisation.
In our efforts to apply SAFe to new programs of work, we observed people of many and varied roles, from Project Managers to Architects to Portfolio Managers, pointing to the Big Picture declaring “That’s me, I’m needed in that team” or “We need, a heap of those [teams, roles or programs] in order to deliver product X“ or more darkly “I think I need more budget to hire some of these roles in this here picture”.
I relayed this observation to Dean, and also my fear that SAFe release trains were trundling along inside other organisations carrying too many passengers - roles that would be considered ‘waste’ in the application of Lean thinking - he replied with an phrase that was both sensible and chilling: “I agree, but you know those people are inside the organisation anyway, would you rather they were involved and supporting you, or not involved and trying to stop you?”
It’s a likely truth that enterprise organisations waste time and money detracting from each other internally, instead of focussed on the business outcomes. Therefore, is SAFe just a pragmatic compromise that is better than any non-agile approach to delivery? It’s akin to a slogan I keep threatening to print on a t-shirt “It might not be agile, but it’s better than waterfall”.
The topic of scaling agility is something of increasing interest to the Agile Australia conference audience. As the base of organisations and practitioners applying agility widens, it’s attracting a lot of discussion in the community, as die-hard practitioners debate the merits of scaling frameworks, and consultants sell training and approaches to scaling agile. That’s why my talk at Agile Encore this September is “Scaling agile to the enterprise - frameworks and the debate!” and I hope you’ll be able to join me there.
(pictured on the right is Cameron Gough GM of Digital at Australia Post and I am in the middle pretending not to have arms)