By Nathan Donaldson
I’ve just returned from a week of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) training with Dean Leffingwell and Al Shalloway in Seattle, USA.
Apart from the excellent hands-on training style that is so often a part of agile training sessions and the sheer density of the well thought out course material, I also really enjoyed the opportunity to engage with some of the leading people in the Scaled Agile community.
Dean Leffingwell (SAFe’s Chief Methodologist) has industry experience second to none, having been a part of the iterative development movement, in particular the Rational Unified Process, one of the major precursors to the Agile movement.
Al Shalloway’s company, Net Objectives, has been Agile as long as I can remember and is an industry leader, Al himself is a thought leader, particularly when it comes to Lean and Kanban.
As with all my visits to the States, I try to tone down its sometimes larger than life nature and look at its sheer scale from a pragmatic perspective. When all is said and done our endeavour is the same even if the scale is different.
And running Agile projects at scale is what SAFe seeks to address, value streams of work that span many different teams. The SAFe framework and its curators don’t claim to have all the answers, and nor should it or they. After all, each organisation is different and has different ways of achieving its goals. SAFe is merely a framework which like all good Agile frameworks, encourages you to inspect and adapt your process.
One of the key attributes of SAFe that makes it so attractive is that it seeks to address how the existing Portfolio and Program management levels interact with the Agile (usually Scrum/XP) teams who are actually building the products. It merely seeks to make these management levels operate in a more Agile way.
Over the coming weeks I’ll write a series of blog posts around different aspects of the Scaled Agile Framework, sharing my learnings and understandings as best I can.
