Is SAFe Evil? • Henrik Kniberg & Lars Roost • GOTO 2015

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2015. #gotocon #gotocph
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Henrik Kniberg - Agile/Lean coach at Spotify & Lego. Author "Scrum & XP from the Trenches" and "Lean from the Trenches"
Lars Roost - Program Manager and Agile Change Agent at LEGO Group
ABSTRACT
Scaled Agile Framework is controversial - at first glance SAFe looks a bit like a big scary heavy-weight top-down RUP-zombie. But what about in real life? This talk is based on our experience doing this at Lego [...]
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[@AndreiDinTheHouse]

Still remember that huge SAFe chart that at the bottom it mentioned "meetings may occur not described on this chart". But I do like how hard SAFe tries to mask its lack of any agility. Tell any management level person that a backlog item overflows in the next iteration of a team that has dependencies. SAFe or not save, that will result in half of sprint time spent in looking for justification. Yes, that huge chart oozes agility. Definitely enterprise.

[@M0rd7ust]

No feedback loops to be seen here, so basically ineffective open-loop control paradigm is going on. There's also no Scrum in SAFe (in terms of the official Scrum Guidelines) because teams are dependent and remain so (and there's incentive in management layers to keep the teams dependent), thus development is tedious and wasteful.

[@alejandrojumilla834]

SAFE - Shitty Agile for Enterprise i heard that somewhere o yeah martin fowler

[@ewalevkov7645]

Something is seriously wrong with the "process" if you need to have 100+ people in a room doing "planing".

[@summersunt]

If you have never had multiple teams trying to deliver a product or sharing resources then that might be the view. If you have to deliver product(s’) then it’s a Huge benefit. If not these two days a lot of time is wasted Via email, miscommunication, lack of shared vision from developer to executive.

[@mianferla]

This should give you a view of how many dependencies and innovation exists at Lego. While big tech companies tries to decentralize teams and decisions, SAFe brings back this command and control approach from the 50s with "Agile" flavour for the melancholics

[@seinfan9]

@@summersunt I'm working on a project right now that at the moment only requires about 10 people max. The other 200 people involved in planning don't matter jack all to me.

[@summersunt]

@@seinfan9 if you don’t have interdependencies with other teams and your not reliant on technical enablements from other teams that works well. If you do then that means your ‘team’ is wider than the 10 members you currently have

[@sunnohh]

@@summersunt huge benefit in having 100 people do the work that can easily be done by 10, efficiency maximized

[@FudgeYeahLinusLAN]

Several big companies in my country are slowly throwing out their SAFe initiatives now that they're failing to deliver anything of value. I tried to warn them a few years back not to hop on the SAFe bandwagon, but they called me overly dramatic when I said that SAFe will never work.

[@Lorryslorryss]

I have worked a place that adopted SaFe with the help of Crisp (Henrik Kniberg's company). It's was a terrible place to work with teams that are treated like crap by product, technologically ineffective and unhappy. There are teams that feel unempowered to fix things, and there are some that feel frustrated because they had no say in what we make to deliver value. It was the worst place I've ever worked. I'm sure they were offered both good and bad advice by Henrik. I'm sure they ignored the good advice and adapted SaFe in their uniquely awful way. But that's kind of the name of the game of SaFe adoption. Avoid this shit at all costs. Also, avoid agile coaches who claim that people who disagree with them are on "mount stupid". That, much like a company saying "we do SaFe", is a big red flag.

[@Twiyorch]

If you want to build or introduce burocracy in the company choose SaFE.

[@simontutek5945]

Why SAFe? Why not attacking the complexity by changing corporation organization to break up complexity?

[@szeredaiakos]

In software managers come from developers who lack the ability to effectively manage complexity. And ... smooth talkers, naturally.

[@churchmouse144]

You mention that teams pull features in during PIPE. Wouldn't that be based upon WSJF priority?

[@seinfan9]

An "agile coach" and "agile change agent" trying to whitewash how this things is an absolute burden on the people doing actual work and ultimately a waste of time. We must believe them.

[@psyaviah]

I don't know what being agile means to SAFe :).

[@alejandrojumilla834]

SAFE is EVIL

[@phatster88]

You gotta ask ?!

[@Lhotea]

Awesome ! This is a great talk. Henrik at it's best !

[@pratapvarman6073]

Good one, keep up the great work.

[@summersunt]

SAFe is a tool. If you use a hammer when you should be using a Phillips screw then clearly it won’t be a great experience

[@sthivaka]

I didn't listen to it fully, skipped many places. Nice 101 for safe. skips the difficult parts of safe and plays safe :-). Doesn't address the difficult points like 'globally distributed teams', 'Arch runway - difficulty in implementing it', 'Non-existent test automation for existing code'. Safe is normally silent on these issues or ducks the question by some 'one slide answer'. This talk is no different.

[@lost-prototype]

Cannot emphasize how bad the advice is here. SAFe is awful and if you want to destroy your organization and its productivity, by all means. It might be cheaper in the end to just fire all your staff and let your product(s) rot though.

[@milanzivkovic5790]

It's not evil just stupid

[@FudgeYeahLinusLAN]

Why not both?