Going Agile to Become SAFe

“We’re going Agile!”, declared the director.

“What does that mean?”, I asked.

“Well, for starters, we won’t be producing market requirements documents anymore,” he replied.

“How will we know what to build, then?”, I countered.

He responded, “We’ll figure it out as we go.”

“What about development plans?”, I continued. “How will we know what resources we need, what processes we’ll follow, how long it will take to complete the project?”

“We’ll do two-week sprints. Everything will map to sprints. It’ll take as many sprints as we need to build a minimum viable product,” was the answer.

I asked, “What is a minimum viable product?”

The director said, “It’s whatever the product management team decides is enough to ship.”

By this point, I’d learned enough. “Going Agile” meant the wild west, a lawless gun town where chaos ruled.

“Sounds exciting. I can’t wait to get started,” I offered with as much enthusiasm as a death row inmate hearing the news of his execution date.

Years later, after abject failure, a different director hired a consultant to look at our development programs and recommend an Agile methodology suitable for our business based on our products and our engineering team. Three days into the contract, the director announced, “We’re going with scrum!”

“What does that mean?”, I asked.

“Well, no more development managers organizing projects, for starters. Instead, we’ll have small teams. The teams will self-organize. The teams will set their objectives. The teams will report their progress,” he offered.

“What will development managers do, then?”, I queried.

After a long pause, he replied, “I’m not sure.”

I asked my next question, “What does self-organize mean?”

“It means teams will pull from a backlog of work tasks. Anyone on the team is free to do any work she or he is interested in. Any team can work on any task. We won’t have any specialization in the teams. Every team member is equal and can do any task. And we won’t have any subject matter experts. Everyone will know everything.”

I reflected on that reply. “Sounds like communism,” was all I could conclude.

Three years later, after more failure, a new director proclaimed, “We are moving to scaled Agile framework for lean enterprises: SAFe!” We are still in the SAFe experiment but the results are no better. If anything, “going Agile!” was the best of the lot.