- Welcome to 7.4 Focus on Essential SAFe practices.
In the last lesson, we talked about
the top of the LPM pyramid, Strategy and Investment Funding.
And we talked about how we connect
the portfolio to enterprise strategy.
We spent a fair amount of time on
implementing lean agile budgeting and
portfolio flow because we needed to show
how it is that we can connect our work,
our work in the trenches, the work that
the developers and testers do everyday
to the enterprise strategy how we can do that
while minimizing cost accounting and friction
and overhead associated with traditional
project cost and establishing the flow of value.
Now we're going to move to the second
element on the pyramid, Agile Program Guidance.
And here we're going to describe three different things.
We're going to describe how we can focus
on essential SAFe practices, support the agile PMO
and comedial practices and sustain and improve.
So LPM has a function here, it's not the traditional
program management function, necessarily,
we may have some aspects of that, but they have
an important function in providing the context
the business organization technical and financial
context were by the arts can successfully thrive
and deliver value.
The first of these is to focus on essential SAFe practices.
And the 10 essential SAFe practices
have come from experience.
As I mentioned earlier, very early on
I showed the big picture and I said,
Ah, we agree, there's a lot of stuff there.
Building complex systems requires more than
one thought, more than a couple different thoughts.
More than just two or three activities.
But essential SAFe is the simplest thing
that can possibly work, it's the
simplest SAFe you can deploy to support 100
or a couple of hundred people building a value
for solutions of a type.
And the 10 essential elements that we've
discovered by going back through various
retrospectives and then also doing assessments
and reassessing programs in flight, are these.
Now we've covered most of them so I don't
need to go into them in depth here, and I won't.
But I do want to describe them briefly.
Number 1 it is essential that we do understand
lean-agile principles, can't ignore that.
I said earlier, that that's probably the most
important lesson I believe it today.
I think everyday it reinforces the fact
that if we get that right we're good.
We need real agile teams and trains.
What's that mean, Dean, you've already
described teams and trains.
Yeah, but I mean real agile teams and trains.
Let me give you an example,
I ran into a scrum team of requirements analysts.
It's not funny, it's not an agile team, okay,
but it was somebody's interpretation of
what it means to be agile and be scrum.
I worked in an organization that's a highly
technical organization, very component based
because they're building systems built on components.
You can't wave your hand and smack 'em and say
don't be component based, well you tell me
what that thing is, that's got software in it
and there's software over there in this other thing,
so yeah, it's true that value flows through
those things but we have to make this component
work or nothing is going to happen.
And we looked at their teams and didn't think
that the flow was right, didn't seem like
they were getting the right through put.
So we asked further questions, and we said
but what's that team, tell me about that team.
Well, that's a team of developers, wow
I think I'm hearing the same thing again.
What's that other team?
Well that team tests their stuff.
Wow, those are not cross functional teams.
So right there, at the get go, it's like, Hmm
I don't think we've got this organized right
and there saying, well, we've got expertise
in test and expertise in development
well let's put the people with expertise in test
and expertise in development in the same team.
Well that might make a larger team.
Yeah, it might, maybe the team's too big
we'll split it some other way.
But we're not going to split it on functional lines.
Real agile teams and real agile trains are necessary.
I talked at length about cadence and synchronization.
I talked about PI planning, not optional.
I talked about DevOps and releasability
and now I've wrapped that back into the larger story
of basic lean startup mode and how it is
we need to take a small batch and get it
all the way through the system as quickly
as possible, you need to do that.
Now, it doesn't mean that you have
to have completely functional DevOps
and a full CV pipeline tomorrow.
It just means that you're going to start working on it.
And it means that whatever isn't working now
if you're really cycle is too slow,
if it takes six weeks, if you can imagine that,
to do a regression test on a big, fat application
set, I've seen that, if it takes six weeks, okay.
What's it take to get it to six days.
What's it take to get it to six hours.
Because you certainly don't have any DevOps
capability until you automate much of that testing.
I mentioned ahead of time that the system demo
wasn't optional, it isn't.
Because if you can't demo the system, it's not sprinting.
And I've gone in to organizations that were doing
pretty well with SAFe that didn't have
effective system demo, has some compromised
teams and trains and lots of ability to improve
just by going back to first principles.
And that's what essential SAFe is about,
the first principles.
Inspect and adapt, not optional.
We do it every 10 to 12 weeks.
We learn something every time.
We've been working most recently on decision making.
I think we're about there, I think we now have
a set of guidelines where a team of a type
or an organization of a type knows that they
can make these types of decisions but
certain other decisions need to be centralized.
Well, we have to create the borders
and the boundaries for that.
So the people really know how to behave.
The IP iteration, we talked amongst ourselves.
Maybe we have nine things, maybe it isn't essential.
I think it is, cause if you don't have time
for planning you won't take it.
If you don't have time for inspect
and adapt you won't take it.
If you don't have time for ongoing training
you won't take the ongoing training.
Architectural runway, talked about that.
Haven't yet talked about this,
so trust me we absolutely will.
Those are the 10 essential elements.
Now, when you do that, well, you've already learned them.
You've studied them somewhat.
You can read about each of these things on the web.
But you can also go to the site,
go to scaledagileframework.com/essential-safe
and you can download an assessment deck
and that consists of a couple things.
It consists of a set of power point slides
you can use to talk about the essentials.
And a way to kind of put checks by the things
that, the symptoms, the problems that you're having.
And then you build that out, and you build your own
print out chart of things to work on.
This team has some things to work on in this area.
So this is a powerful tool that will help
you understand how you're implementation is going.
And also how to get started.
So it isn't just a matter of, gosh, I'm running now
I need these essentials, we're going to need
to do these things well even for the first arc.
So that's what essential SAFe is.
It's a powerful tool in your toolkit.
It's available online, it's available for free.
Feel free to use it, download the toolkit.
Do the assessment and pick what you think you need
to work on next to improve your through put.