Without foundations, the wall will fall
If you fail to live up to these responsibilities, expect to be visited by the Chaos Bonobo; the man in a mask known only as… “The Trouble Maker”.
SAFe stands for Scaled Agile Framework for the Enterprise. But what does Agile stand for? What does it mean?
If you read the Agile Manifesto carefully, you will discover that Agile is a call to arms.
“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”
It is a call to create an experiential learning community.
It was a reaction to the prevailing approach to designing software process and methodology at that time. It is a reaction to individuals with pointy hats in University Labs, or IBM Labs, or Microsoft Hive minds that think they know better. It is a reaction against processes and tools invented by people who DO NOT USE THEM. It is a bold statement that instead elevates the tools and processes of people DOING IT! This is why so many of the tools popular with Agile Practitioners started as open source projects. They were tools that people needed to do their job, tools they had to create themselves because IBM, Microsoft and the Labs did not understand the needs of people writing real software.
As leaders in the SAFe community, it is our responsibility to ensure that tools and practices have followed the following process, or some similar variant:
The first role of leaders in the community is to be first followers, to try new ideas and support the continued SAFe extension of the Agile tool set. This means that a leader in the community needs to have the necessary experience such that they can implement the new approach in a “safe to fail” manner.
The second more subtle responsibility of leaders is to call bullshit on ANYONE who is promoting a tool or process that they have not used. They should challenge anyone presenting a solution without the context in which they have tried it. Anyone with a tool or process they think would be useful (normally borrowed from another industry such as Beyond Budgeting) should present it to the leadership community as a candidate tool. They should also point out that what most people think is “an approach” is often just an experience report and should be treated as such.
The third role of leadership is to be honest about the state of any solution. Do we have an experience report or is this an approach that has been tested by many practitioners in safe to fail experiments.
If the leadership community does not accept these responsibilities, they should remove Agile from the name of SAFe. To prevent the need to reprint lots of marketing material, the could replace it with Academic
.
The Call to Arms is followed by Through this work we have come to value
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The four statements that most people consider to be the Agile Manifesto are actually a status report. They are the principles that seventeen white, male, middle aged software professionals considered to be most important at one point in time. They primarily focus on the development of software at the team level. Mapping these values to the enterprise often causes problems.
Any tool or process that doesn’t align to the principles in the status report should be discussed extensively with practitioners in the Agile community before it is called Agile. If we fail to honour the principles of the Agile Manifesto, we have no right to challenge Accenture or IBM Rational or McKinsey when they promote their own command and control nonsense as Agile.
The Agile Manifesto is the foundation of the Agile Community and as a result one of the foundations of SAFe. If we fail to tend to those foundations, we know what will happen…
Powerful challenge to our young community from guest @PapaChrisMatts http://t.co/96KIJTcSY2 How do we stay true to Agility & Deming? #SAFeLR
Dr Deming said
How can we claim Deming’s heritage (and we do, and we should) if we do not continually seek to elevate practise and real world experience over , even while being based on sound principles.
That’s our raison d’etre: we meet the needs of our target context with practises that are tried and are known to work in that context. And it’s our response to the naysayers: Eppur se mouve.
Deming again:
This means though, that we need a clear means for experimentation and learning in our own environments to produce candidates. And a ‘bubbling under’ layer of practise that isn’t quite SAFe Canon, but that experienced practitioners should be able to draw on.
I like the way you’ve pitched this. not necessarily It signals intent: as a result of scaling, Agile may have to move some of its stuff around.
We’re already hitting a major area of this. A major bone of contention for many longstanding Agilistas is accepting the idea of systems thinking: that taking a systems view and gaining the value latent in a systems approach may mean giving up a lot of locally powerful stuff. In principle, Systems Thinking is fairly orthodox within the community – Goldratt is well quoted, and The Goal is well read (either directly or through The Phoenix Project, Rolling Rocks Downhill or other domain-versions). But the implications are still controversial.
I’ll be interested to see you define “responsibility.” In your context does it mean “should do something about?”
Repost from yesterday: A powerful challenge to our community http://t.co/96KIJTcSY2 How do we stay true to Agility & Deming?