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.
Take your largest agile program, try to depict the organizational governance all the way up through the enterprise level where budgets are allocated, describe in this drawing how you are going to represent the highest level Epics and their journey being decomposed into team level user stories, build in how you are going to align your organization around the core objectives of your agile project and keep them collaborating and aligned to ensure we are delivering customer value every few weeks/months. Depict how you are going to bust up your silo’d organization and organize them to be accountable for the value delivery to your customer.
As we scale up the simple idea of “Developers just want to sit with the customer, write code, and get feedback”, creates considerable complexities when you are dealing with 100+ developers. When you are dealing with ~4+ man years worth of potential effort for every two week sprint, you need to have a system for aligning, collaborating, creating, innovating, reviewing, and delivering value as effectively as you can. And built into your method a way to continuously improve your ‘system’ of building valued software/solutions. LeSS, DAD, SAFe, all describe scaling mechanisms and relay similar concepts in a single diagram.
End result – a picture that looks complex, because it is relaying a complex idea. But so is LeSS and DAD. They don’t represent an enterprise flow and skip some realities like funding, integration, etc. That being said, having a diagram to reflect this complexity can be valuable. Whether you have a diagram or not doesn’t eliminate the inherent complexity that exists in a large scale program. As mentioned by others, the art of simplifying, getting the teams right, relaying the 1,000’s of words implied, and continuous improvement are key.