Stop Playing it SAFe!
In a recent blog, I lamented that we’d become too safe with SAFe. We’d become dull, boring … insipid. I’ve been thinking about our best and worst PIs over the past three years. If you polled the ART members, I’d expect the survey to say that PI#13 was our worst PI while PI#14 was our best. Why is that? For PI#13, we committed to release three major software updates. A single software update is rare but three in one PI was truly an exception. The only problem was that the two of the three releases had a dependency upon the third. Any slip in the one jeopardized all three. We captured this risk in our program board and proceeded with our confidence vote. No one voted one or two and away we went.
No surprise, by the middle of the PI, the dependent release had slipped and we released nothing in PI#13. We exited the PI with our lowest business value score ever for the ART: barely 50%. By all accounts, this PI was a bust. PI#14 benefited from all the effort done in PI#13 and we actually had four releases in PI#14. Without question, we’d never had such a successful PI. But, on careful reflection, was PI#13 our worst and was PI#14 our best? I counter that PI#13 was actually our best PI; I don’t pass judgement on PI#14. We assumed significantly more risk in PI#13 than at any time since we started with SAFe. We missed our mark but, by setting the bar higher than we had before, we accomplished much more, albeit spilling over into PI#14.
That makes me wonder: Are we ready for a SAFe 2.0? Instead of setting objectives we believe we can meet, thereby ensuring a confidence vote of three or better, might not we be more successful in the long run if instead we set objectives that we didn’t feel entirely confident in … to push us past our comfort zone? Instead of looking for three and above in our confidence vote, we look for an across-the-board confidence score of … twos! And we drop the business value scoring. Then, the ART would be striving to get as much done as possible. Gone would be the arguments of why a team should get business value for something incomplete but “largely done.” With more to get done per their commitments, teams would strive to do more than we do now in our “safe” world. SAFe 2.0 might make us … excited.
