I was inspired by a post on LinkedIn by Mike MacIsaac titled “The problem with scaled Agile and SAFe” so I took my comment and create this blog post from it. In a nutshell, the author was relating that the SAFe BigPicture diagram is complex; therefore, SAFe is overly complex and the true meaning/concept of Agile is lost. I think many fall into this ‘SAFe is too complex and burdensome, just look at this diagram’ trap without really trying to understand what it represents.
I was reading the report from the Learning Consortium that is associated with the Scrum Alliance and Stephen Denning, and what I liked about the report is that it was not religious about Scrum, or Kanban, or SAFe, or any of the common jargon regarding Agile/Lean organizations. Rather, it emphasized entrepreneurialism.
If I’ve read it once, I’ve seen it 10 times across a variety of blogs and newsletters. Sure, making 12% consistently on your stock picks or investments in general will definitely help; but, if the ratio between your savings rate and expense rate is favoring your expenses, you are fighting a losing battle.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but it was clear something wasn’t right. For months, a small ‘specialist’ team spent many hours a day, for weeks/months, architecting, designing, thinking, debating, and controlling the scope of work. To the point that only a trickle of information ever escaped to the larger community, and that info that did escape was simply to provide something for them to work on. The goal was to create ‘The Backlog’ for all to consume.