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SAFe or Sorry?
Summary
In his article for Forbes titled Understanding Fake Agile, Steve Denning refers to SAFe as “codified bureaucracy”. Jared Spool says it’s a “fast path to mediocrity”. But the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is currently in use by many enterprise organizations like NASA, Capital One, FedEx, and the Department of Defense. With so many companies attempting to become as agile as Silicon Valley startups, SAFe is being adopted as a way to scale up Agile software development processes, and many UX teams are having to support it, whether they like it or not.
Key Insights
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SAFe scales agile by organizing multiple agile teams into Agile Release Trains aligned on synchronized iteration schedules.
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Lean UX is typically added to SAFe as an afterthought, creating a hybrid decentralized model where a UX Center of Excellence supports multiple teams.
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Due to limited UX resources, embedding a UX person in every agile team is usually impossible; training team members and using design systems help alleviate this.
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Program Increment (PI) Planning is a key SAFe event to visualize dependencies and align teams around shared work and schedules.
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Working UX one or more iterations ahead of development is important to validate hypotheses but risks creating mini-waterfalls with handoffs.
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Story pointing UX work alongside development stories can improve capacity planning and make UX effort visible to the teams.
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Product Owner and Product Manager roles in SAFe can be confusing and sometimes reversed compared to other agile methodologies, causing role conflicts.
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Smaller SAFe implementations (as low as 100-125 people) can still benefit from the framework, especially for managing inter-team dependencies.
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Effective collaboration between UX, requirements analysts, and business analysts is crucial due to different focuses: user experience vs. business process.
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A risk of SAFe is codified bureaucracy that may isolate agile teams from customers, potentially undermining true business agility.
Notable Quotes
"Each Agile Release Train is a long-lived team of agile teams that delivers solutions incrementally within a value stream."
"If something is not ready by the time the train leaves the station, then it catches the next train."
"There aren’t enough lean UX experts to collaborate with every team, so we create a lean UX Center of Excellence for each value stream."
"Our PI planning events are like 600 people strong, including representatives from across our 6,000 person company."
"Story pointing UX work would help us plan capacity and avoid being surprised by last minute discovery work."
"SAFe is very developer-centric and was originally designed for construction—the code production part of software."
"In SAFe, product owner and product manager roles are reversed from what some teams expect, which causes confusion."
"PI Planning really helps visualize dependencies between teams, which was invisible before."
"If the entire firm isn’t operating the same agile script, you won’t get the benefits of scaled agile."
"Steve Denning says SAFe is codified bureaucracy where the customer is almost totally absent."
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