Breaking the SAFe: Why Did SAFe Redefine the Scrum Master?

[@DocThorQ]

Ryan, hands down. Thank so, so much you altered the broadcast to that format. Both - that and the debate about story points - are brilliant for more advanced agile/lean folks. As an IT industry, we need exactly that kind of content, less bro-agile science on youtube where we harm our young colleagues by teaching them bad practices. You debunk the myths, and your series brake bro-agile science. Thank you

[@DanielLiljeberg]

That SAFe kept the Scrum Master name to "leverage what came with it", but tweaked it a bit to fit their environment, in many ways acted to dilute and conflate what Scrum Master means. I have worked with great Scrum Masters who have been put in situations by companies who have looked at SAFe, but then hire PO's and Scrum Masters without mentioning SAFe and they doing a great job in their roles. Working with stakeholders, understanding and owning the product, working to explain it to the team and have them share that ownership, work with the team to evolve them and their agility... and the organisation revolting against then because they thought they would be getting something else from the roles. A PO that was basically a messenger/go-between for the team and a Scrum Master that should focus more on managing the team, reporting things to management, going to random meetings etc.

[@rolemodel99]

asking the tough questions!

[@AgileforHumans]

We are trying! Please feel free to leave your tough questions in the comments.

[@rolemodel99]

@@AgileforHumans i am wondering if the questions might be posed as a what factors led... than why... as why is quite emotionally charged. That being said, i apprecciate the use of "why" for brevity in this regard

[@rolemodel99]

@@AgileforHumans also, how do you guys feel about using appreciative inquiry to approach these questions?

[@rolemodel99]

I would also want to see a recap to kind of breakdown the comparison of PSMs and PSMs in a SAFe environment, and what they might expect as far as their service to team, PO and Org are concerned.

[@sanjeevbhardwaj8559]

Great discussion gentlemen !

[@Rekettyelovag]

When I interview to bigger companies, they always say they don't want me (Scrum Master), around the exec, portfolio, management level and I should stay with the team, and help them be more productive and efficient. When I say ~70% of the problems' origin need to be discussed with you, the management and "people with power" in order to fulfill this wish, then they do a confused pikachu face.

[@UjjwalPrakashSinha]

love this candid discussion Ryan and thanks to Yuval for being so honest. As much as I do not agree to the approach SAFe took just to make things fit to the current ways of working (status-quo), I love that Yuval was honest in accepting the reality of SAFe. Hats off guys. Thanks for this great content

[@user-vk3xc8qs8n]

Definitely a good episode. It helped clarify some things for me. If I had known about EBM and the differences between SAFe ScrumMaster and Professional ScrumMaster earlier, I might have been more discerning in the approach I wanted to take. It’s more of a preference than one is better than the other. Professional ScrumMaster falls more into line with how I was trained and developed in classes I took outside of work for several years. However, I get the evolutionary approach. I believe Capital One calls SAFe ScrumMasters Agile Delivery Lead which makes more sense to me as SAFe ScrumMasters are sometimes just using Kanban. I personally thought it was weird that I was called a SAFe ScrumMaster when all I was doing was some coordination, using flow metrics sometimes, and other times attempting to distill Kanban-like practices even if working on what I consider to be a super small project that is more complicated than complex. I do miss working on a large, complex project where I was able to see a the system end to end and get real customer feedback.

[@BorisGligorijevic]

This entire SAFe looks to me as some salesy managers got together, put up a bunch of stuff together, which all kinda look like agile (but are not) with the only goal being keeping the s… same as before and so that nothing must change for them. Yet they can say „we do advanced agile“. A bunch of BS if you ask me.

[@cigdemsakajackson2814]

Thank you for such a brilliant discussion!

[@ArunkumarSekar-ne8kz]

Very good video

[@tomaszniemiec]

As a SAFe long time hater, I approve this episode. Regarding hierarchy, scrum master's role withing the organization, working beyond the team and so on - so if I understood Yuval correctly, in SAFe there are multiple Scrum Master roles with different horizons/reach. For one the team are developers and PO, and for another Scrum Master the team he/she works with are, i.e. managers. This makes sense for a legacy company that is not in a position to undergo a big scale transformation. And also this does not have to be a hierarchy of Scrum Master or the Agile Coach to Scrum Master situation. All can work in a community alike way, with different domains.

[@yyeret2]

yes - The Scrum Master is essentially a Team-level Coach. The RTE is essentially an ART/Team of Teams-level coach leveraging all the techniques of the Scrum Master and more - and is very similar to how Scrum Masters are supposed to organically gravitate over time towards coaching the organization in the Professional Scrum world. And SPCs are coaching the organization in different levels.

[@tomaszniemiec]

​@@yyeret2 thanks. A proof, you explained it very well, and I'm glad Ryan brought the topic in the video. Looking forward to the next ones.

[@osnyzinho]

Very nice. SAFe is something that I want to learn in the future. Ryan, you mentioned that you will provide the links used in this video somewhere, but I couldn't find. Could you please share with me?

[@googleaccount5225]

A difficult thing is separating patterns from popular antipatterns. Apparently 47% of agile transformation fail, and certainly there have been lessons learned along the way.

[@jeroennollet6441]

What interests me the most is that Yuval mentions that SAFe took the 'in the trenches’ approach when looking at the Scrum Master. Yet, the Scrum Master remains responsible to coach the team and find their way toward agility. However, I’ve done 5 sequential SAFe projects and found out that in 4 of those 5 projects, the SM had no authority whatsoever to change how the team works. This authority was given to Agile coaches, the LACE, SAFe Consultants, or whoever was in charge of the SAFe implementation and was not to be changed by anyone else. Is this typical in SAFe or are these cases of ‘zombie SAFe best practices’ that happen in the trenches? I can truly see the benefit of taking SAfe into a large organization to learn how to be more agile. However, the danger with SAFe, or any other scaling framework, is that when you roll this out poorly, you get rubbish at scale. This also applies to Scrum, but the difference to me is that a Scrum team is small so the impact is potentially minimal. Another team, with another Scrum Master, can operate in a completely different way. Whereas in SAFe, if an organization leaves no freedom to the team to decide on their way of working, you cripple the entire company. I guess this is the main reason why SAFe is being bashed and why I don’t like the framework myself. It’s the difference between the theory vs. what actually happens in the trenches. Again, the same goes for Scrum, but the impact is less because Scrum focuses on teams, not entire companies.

[@Rayware2now]

I think it would have been very interesting to talk about who the people are in the teams and where they come from. The fact is that many, many teams are from other cultures or global service delivery organisations. The result of this is that organisations feel that the team lead focal point is needed, as they are not seeking to develop teams that are supplied in from other organisationss. Maybe this reality was the elephant that did not even get into the room.

[@yyeret2]

I see what you're saying Ray and can relate to it. let's continue this line of thinking. I hope organizations will eventually understand the power that self-managed teams can have, the value that they can create for them, and prefer contractors with empowered self-managed teams. Regardless, even if the organization needs a team to provide a focal point, that focal point doesn't need to be the SM. A good SM will create the reality in which they are less and less of a focal point even if they started this way - and move towards servant leadership/coaching/mentoring instead.

[@NNNN-yj7qz]

There's always a crunch of resources. I'm both a developer and a SAFe scrum master. In the environment where the team does not want to do all the 'bureaucracy' associated with SAFe, there's a lot of burden on a scrum master. Also, SAFe removes initiative from the team. We get pre-defined priorities and tasks to spread throughout the PI. We no longer have a say on what we want to do. So the team is simply waiting for me to go through the list and talk through the issues to tackle. I have to ask when they are available, when they are taking leaves... This is a pure secretary's/accountant's work of putting plans together and counting story points...

[@yyeret2]

NNNN - I would describe what you're doing as SAFe Theater. SAFe Principles and core values are nowhere in sight, just doing the same traditional project management and calling it different names. As we discussed - this is a common problem with SAFe, Scrum and any approach that is hard to implement well as it becomes more and more popular. I'm sorry to hear this is how your organization practices SAFe. Maybe you can work with other people to work on how to change this reality?

[@rolemodel99]

What is the measure / indicator of agility of the SAFe Scrum Master as defined by SAFe and what is found on the ground?

[@KevinMichaelCarroll]

I'm curious what approach you would recommend for a growth plan for those who are new to both. Would it be best to learn the Scrum framework and pause to pursue that certification before moving on to SAFe and any certification there. It seems that learning about both and trying to take the PSM I exam, for example, may lead to failure unless additional time is invested to fully digest the differences between the two.

[@youngloenoe]

I have worked with 4 different Scrum Master under SAFe. They are all secretaries. They have no power to change anything. Most of them don't even know Agile. They took a quick course and got certified. I agree with what others have mentioned: SAFe should just stop using Scrum terms. Own itself. Because in the end of the day it just confuses people and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of those trying to practice Agile.

[@rolemodel99]

What is the career progression or success criteria of a PSM in a SAFe environment?

[@yyeret2]

Succesful Scrum Masters aim to become Release Train Engineers / SAFe Program Consultants. What does successful Scrum Mastery look like? Improved team agility, engagement, and bottom line more value created by the team in a sustainable manner everyone is happier about (the team, the customer, the organization)

[@matthewhodgson1168]

The suggestion of incremental change for SAFe is an interesting one. However, I keep seeing in my own work implementing SAFe the lift and shift of legacy leadership, project management, and other roles, creates an "agile" approach that diminishes the effectiveness of Product Owners and effective Scrum Masters. It leaves the organization ultimately and largely unchanged.

[@yyeret2]

The challenge is real Matt... and its not new to SAFe... At least SAFe provides a lot of emphasis on Lean/Agile Leadership mindset, principles, and focuses a lot of attention on training and coaching leaders and providing the organizational competencies to help guide organizations in the right direction. It's still all useless if the organization settles for the lift and shift SAFe installation... The way I'm fighting this fight is reinforcing the lean/agile principles and helping leaders look at their agile journey as a complex problem where these principles should be used... (involve and empower people, assume variability/uncertainty and preserve options, decentralize control of the journey, unlock intrinsic motivation, think economically and pragmatically rather than use dogma, healthy balance of emergent org design and intentional org architecture).

[@RobertParker-zb1ic]

SAFe masquerades as Agile. I wish they’d just be honest and say that they’re implementing a new way of doing waterfall. That would be far more accurate. Beyond all of the heavy processes, quite simply no effective product led organization can use SAFe and expect to deliver anything other than at best very mediocre products. The very concept of PI Planning is anti Agile. How can you possibly experiment when you just planned out your next 10 weeks worth of work?

[@NNNN-yj7qz]

The 6th sprint is usually intended for innovation and planning, however, due to heavy/long planning, there's really no time/desire to innovate.

[@Alpemanden]

How on earth do you find a person who can actually fill out the SM then? It's like looking for a unicorn. They should do all that a professional SM should do, which is hard enough already. So loads of EQ, facilitation skills and on top of that. Be able to represent the developers hence have an above average understanding of coding etc. That's a tall order in my opinion.

[@yyeret2]

I agree and I think this is a fascinating topic for a future episode, not even just limited to SAFe... I'm not sure Ryan Todd and I fully agree here which will make this even more interesting ;-)

[@Alpemanden]

@@yyeret2 I would like to challenge the two of you to prioritize the different stances and skills if possible. If you got 3 strong candidates but they shine in some stances and lack in others. Which are more important than others? I would prefer EQ (people skills) over Teaching skills (teaching skills can be taught, thats harder with people skills). And so on.

[@andrechristianto7131]

@Alpenmanden very good question but maybe the answer will be depends on the context of challenge. But again maybe most cases I agree with you EQ people skill maybe most valuable

[@Alpemanden]

@@andrechristianto7131 I believe that some skills would be "more important than others" so to some degree it would be possible. Some skills are teachable others not so much.

[@daviddurkee1960]

"Agile Team Lead" is the nonsense pushed by CapitalOne. It's a Scrum Master with a big stick to beat more output out of the team. Being a good Scrum Master is not simply about outputting more stuff, but helping the team find ways to craft the RIGHT THING, and not waste time producing less useful things. I still prefer the "Servant Leader" of previous versions of the Scrum Guide. I'm still here to serve the team and still not a manager.

[@mstrG]

If You can't shortly answer question. You don't have an answer. Way guest answer question is disrespectful IMO, it's not professional.

[@mstrG]

SAFe it's just re-write of other Agile frameworks with much better marketing and monetization. Great product, worst Agile approach to follow. Just my opinion.