SAFe – Just got certified! Yay

I finally went through the process in order to get certified (Leading SAFe – Certified SAFe® 4 Agilist). I was thinking about it the last two years. It all started when I applied for my current position and that I was told we were going to be using that. Then I started to read the whitepaper and then look at the video (The Lego use case was something really amazing to watch and is probably still available on youtube). After reading on it, I then sent a mail or two to the writer of the white paper. Basically, I really wondered what were the limitation of such a framework. E.g.: How many employees minimum would be required, how much is too much, etc.. I then received some details about it and how it should be applied.

As a reminder, SAFe is an acronym for Scaled Agile Framework for enterprise and uses the principles from LEAN, the Agile Manifesto and then a bit more (Portfolio, business owner role, etc.). If you go on the site, you can click on pretty much anything in the picture in order to understand what it means. Remember, this is only a framework and in no way a magical technique in order to fix everything in a company. If your management is not for it, it will fails, like agile might fails. The buy-in from all the layers is important and everyone need to understand their roles. In such case it will work well, otherwise it will become chaotic.

This then bring me to the topic, to be trained, or to just try out? I am recommending to receive some training (different type of them exists depending on the role). Once everyone understand their role, it’s a good way to start and all use the same terminology.

I am finally happy that my upper management understand that putting everything as urgent is not the way to go and the same goes for trying to push too much on the team by changing their focus too often.

Depending on the teams, the flow (one of the pillar from LEAN) is already going well while in other team we are more working old fashion by using the Waterfall (thinking we’re doing agile). All the teams are now trying hard to improve and become more predictable. I think this will be achieved soon, since people are really motivated.

In case it interests you, you can learn more about it on the official website (scaledagileframework.com).

Thank you for reading ;).

Nordès, SA