I’ve got a question: Where do you keep your risks? If you’re doing a project of any significance you have risks, right? That just comes with the territory. Anything that is significantly challenging or meaningful has very likely got some risk associated with it. And let’s also clarify that we’re asking about agile teams. Because we all know that traditional waterfall teams would have some sort of risk register. Risk is just built-in to the waterfall model, so we don’t need to

“Some say that I should settle down, go slower and not push so hard, so quickly for such transformational change. To them, I say that you misunderstand the size of the problems we face, the strength of the status quo and the urgency of the people’s desire for change.” – Eliot Spitzer The Challenge According to the latest VersionOne State of Agile survey 2018, the most prevalent scaled agile framework in use today is SAFe. Note that I didn’t say it was the most popular framewo

One of my favorite cars that I ever owned was a 1967 Ford Falcon. I bought it for $600 when I was in college. It really wasn’t much of a car. It was a 2 door coupe built on the same frame as the classic Mustang, but without any of those muscle car good looks. It was the kind of car intended to be a hot rod for my grandmother. It had a straight six cylinder motor combined with an automatic transmission that was best described as apathetic. It had all the fundamentals you need

One of the wonderful things about being a parent is all of the children’s books you get to read. I never fail to be amazed at the simplicity, grace, and sheer storytelling genius that I find in many children’s books. I’m thinking of amazing books like Where the Wild Things Are. It’s stories like these that seem compelling no matter what your age. One of my personal favorites is a little story by Eric Carle called A House for Hermit Crab. In this story, our hero the hermit cra

Overview One of the interesting things about SAFe is how it has evolved over the years. The story there is very interesting. More so than any other framework that I’ve witnessed, SAFe has very definitely changed since its beginnings through what it has become today. For example, early on, it didn’t have the levels of work that it does today, and certainly the terminology has evolved. Furthermore, many of the roles have been added and changed. To a very real degree, things lik

Overview One of the biggest challenges that I often encounter on SAFe transformations is dispersed teams. A dispersed team is a team that is spread across multiple locations and often across multiple time zones as well. I’m speaking specifically of dispersal within the team membership – for instance, a product owner in LA, two developers in Bangalore, three testers in Russia – that sort of thing. That’s a dispersed team. While it’s possible for team like that to get work done

Overview For some organizations that prefer to have things really well explicitly defined or proscribed, especially if they are in a SAFe transformation, they might want to consider taking a long look at Jim McCarthy’s Core Protocols. To me at least, there is a very natural fit between the Core Protocols and SAFe. The Core Protocols define the kind of interpersonal interactions that you have on a team and SAFe defines the interactions that you have at a cross-team level and a

Overview What if you are a big fan of sociocracy or holocracy? Can you combine those practices with SAFe? Right now, when you look at SAFe you see teams at the team level (of course), programs at the program level (or release trains anyway). However, at the executive or portfolio level you don’t see any specific recommendations for how to organize into teams or groupings or aggregations. I think the portfolio level is where sociacracy or sociacractic methods might come in han

Overview Another modification to SAFe that we might make is role by election. Role by election is turning some of the role selection process on its head. for example, as in dynamic re-teaming, we’re going to allow the teams to make more decisions themselves, we’re going to allocate more power to the team and less to the management. In this particular case, this goes back to the way that value streams, release trains, and solutions are created. Again, the typical way this is d

Overview One of the issues that I’ve seen with doing big room planning (BRP) or Program Increment (PI) planning in SAFe is often people tend to over-prepare for these events (a quick note here: I use the terms PI planning and BRP interchangeably). And let’s face it, there are often good reasons for why they might do that. PI planning is a big event. It’s expensive. It involves a lot of people. There’s a genuine reason to worry that if you show up without any work, you’ll be w

There are two attributes of SAFe that I think have really been instrumental to the success of SAFe as a framework. The first attribute is The Big Picture. You’ve probably seen it before. It’s the great big diagram of the SAFe process that illustrates where and how teams, programs, and portfolios relate to one another. To me, The Big Picture is a mirror for any organization that is looking for a better framework or better process. The minute they look at The Big Picture in SAF

Here’s a weird one: Today’s SAFe mix-in is called #NoCoaching (yes, I totally made that up, but hear me out). So one of the things that you’ll see when you encounter any sort of decently large scale agile transformation is that typically there is more work that one coach can do. So often times you will have a senior coach that will play a coordinating role, there will be program level coaches that will be responsible for doing things like launching large programs or value str

Being in a project management office (PMO) is tough. In many ways it feels like the ultimate corporate middleman role. You report to the executives on the status of their key initiatives, but you aren’t actually doing any of the work. Frankly, it’s kind of a tough place to live. From the perspective of the executive, there’s the expectation that somehow you have influence over these initiatives. From the perspective of the teams doing the work, you only get in the way. It’s n

The next SAFe mix-in that I’d like to address is dynamic re-teaming. Dynamic re-teaming is a relatively radical agile innovation that changes the way team selection works. Let’s take our typical practice of rolling out a SAFe release train, we have our executives and key stakeholders get together and decide who is going to fill what roles. They make all the decisions: Who is the right person to lead this train, who is the right architect, who should be the Release Train Engin

The idea behind #noestimates is that one of the biggest problems that many folks in the agile community face is the estimation process. Estimation takes an inordinate amount of time, it’s often terribly inaccurate and it doesn’t buy us a whole lot in terms of additional value at the end of the day. So why not get rid of estimates entirely? Overview I want to admit that #noestimates is one of the more radical ideas in the agile community. This isn’t for everyone. But if you’re

Examples of redundant structures that overlap and support each other can be found everywhere in nature. Examples include: human vertebra, protein interactions in cell function, and network communications. In engineering, structural redundancy refers to the ability of a structure to retain its function without catastrophic consequences. To state it only slightly differently, it’s the redundancy of function that enables the structure to survive assault or crisis. Redundancy is

Recently, there has been a series of tweets with the hashtag #NotMyAgile. They are usually a statement or example of some dysfunction in how people are implementing agile. Many are the kind of thing that you read and nod your head thinking, “Yup, that’s not how I’d do it. They got it wrong.” But there’s part of me that feels like this isn’t very helpful. Look, I know there are a lot of ways to screw up the agile methods. There are truly endless possibilities there. However, p

Simon Wardley does a marvelous job of highlighting some of the essential requirements for understanding and defining strategy. There are five key elements that he describes in his book: Purpose – why are we trying to do something Landscape – the map of the business domain Climate – the weather Doctrine – the rules of the game Leadership – decisions we make The underlying premise is that you can’t have meaningful strategy without a map. All of these elements support that conte

I’ve been fortunate to have been a part of the agile community for many years now. And in that time I’ve seen a lot of things change. In the beginning things were pretty small. You started with the team and if you managed to get to high-performing you were doing pretty well. Later as agile became more and more successful and methodologies like Scrum, XP and Kanban became more prevalent we started to run into issues as teams of teams work together. It was at that point that yo

Recently I’ve been reading Simon Wardley’s book on strategy mapping. I’m finding it to be some of the best writing on strategy that I’ve ever come across, so I really recommend it if you have the inclination to learn more about strategy. Simon is a very vocal critic of the typical tools that we consultants use to ‘do strategy’ with. In particular, he is especially critical of the use of 2×2 diagrams and SWOT analysis. His central observation is that strategy as we do it today