To Team or not to Team?
If you look at the definition of Kanban or Lean, you wouldn’t find teams anywhere there.
If you look at the Agile Manifesto, you can find “The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams”
Scrum is quite clear about the topic
SAFe includes Scrum – so how come many Scrum practitioners and thought leaders consider it unsafe?
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe™) is one of the most popular approaches to applying agile at scale out there. SAFe’s perspective is that “Nothing beats an Agile Team” and it doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel or even innovate too much when it comes to the Team level. It takes advantage of established frameworks and techniques that work well – Scrum being the first and foremost of those.
“There’s no predictability/commitment in Agile”
Over the years I’ve heard my share of these kinds of statements from various levels of executives:
“When my guys run a product development release I really want to know what I will get at the end so I can make business plans accordingly”
Keynotes Agile Israel 2018 Impact mapping with innovation games By Gojko Adzic @ Gojko.net More Talks Agile Israel 2018 ATT Israel Journey to Built In
We’ve all heard it before – “Talented technology team builds amazing product!” That… doesn’t create the impact that they wanted, not enough customers end up buying or the users aren’t happy with it or
This is an especially common problem with companies that have a “brilliant” idea or technology that someone goes developing in their garage (if startup) / innovation product development group (if enterprise). This could be a new product or just a new feature of an existing product. Typically, the Product Owner or Product Manager in the organization specifies what to build. If they’re somewhat Agile, they even work closely with the organization to build it incrementally and hopefully deliver it continuously. But still, even then, too often the product or features don’t provide the expected impact/benefits. Overcoming this challenge is a common theme that is discussed by attendees at our SAFe POPM Course.
Actual is a relative term when it comes to business value delivered by a SAFe PI Objective. We had a discussion about this a couple of weeks ago in an Implementing SAFe class and I promised a blog post about this. Here it goes.
Planned Business Value – Making sure Business Owners and the Agile Team are on the same page
Let’s start from the basics though. PI (Program Increment) Objectives are used as a “back briefing” mechanism by Agile Teams on an Agile Release Train to share their plan for the PI and validate that they are indeed focusing on the highest priorities and are planning to deliver objectives that will be valuable for the business.
when it comes to how to practice SAFe as well as how to implement it, we prefer to consider it a very useful but flexible/incomplete structure that requires well-trained and experienced practitioners to successfully apply, and that’s a key design principle for our Implementing SAFe workshops where we train future SPCs
In the scaled Agile framework, one key role is the Release Train Engineer (RTE). But who should I look for to fill this role? What are the first few process improvements experienced RTEs typically do? Yuval Yeret (AgileSparks) and Mattias Skarin (Crisp) took the time to discuss the traits of a good RTE.
What are the traits of a good RTE?
Yuval: The easy answer to this question is that you are looking for a Scrum master for a team of teams. Going beyond that, when it comes to specific traits, you are looking for someone who cares about process and improvements, someone who has the ability to orchestrate things. But at the same time, someone who also knows when to step back and let the teams organize themselves. A good RTE is a great communicator and can see and understand what is happening.
Navigating the Agile Training Landscape
It’s become pretty confusing these days. If you’re interested in advancing your Agile knowledge there are so many options. I often field questions from people asking me for help choosing the right class for them. Here is my subjective take on things… with a focus on the US market – but probably applicable to many other markets.
Last week I called a technician to repair an electrical shutter that was broken. The technician did a good job in general, but there was one particular thing he did that made me think of him as a true professional. Was it the tools he was using? No. Was it the technique? He was working fast, but no, it wasn’t that. It was the moment he asked me for a broom to clean up after him. That was when I realized he was a pro.
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