Author: ewernli

An interesting aspect of the SAFe framework is that it tries to combine two agile mindsets. The first mindset is the iterative mindset of methods like Scrum. It’s a cornerstone of agile development and SAFe “scales” it from the team-level to the program-level, for instance with the PI Planning.

Another mindset in SAFe is the lean mindset. The lean mindset is not about iteration, but about optimising the flow of value.

Lean came initially from manufacturing where the goal is to (1) reduce the time to produce physical good, and (2) reduce the “inventory” needed in the process, and (3) reduce the “waste” produced during manufacturing. In manufacturing, managing inventory requires warehousing and logistics, this costs money. Materials that end up as waste cost money too but do not produce value. To reduce delivery time, each step in the delivery process must be optimised and wait time be reduced to the minimum.

These ideas can be translated to the software world if we consider that features under development are “inventory” and the development process is a pipeline that can be optimised. Features under development are “inventory” since they don’t produce value but must be managed. Waste is a bit harder to map but it represents all the unnecessary work that end up not being used (think of unused design document, analysis, etc.). The development pipeline can take many forms but is always a variation of define, build, verify, and release. The quicker a feature can transition in the pipeline the faster you produce value.

Lean in itself doesn’t require iteration. Iterations are needed to manage uncertainty and course-correct the product development in the face of new information. Lean is about optimising a delivery process. But the delivery process could be about the delivery of a similar item every time, like cars in the manufacturing world.

But Lean is also a great complement to iterative approaches like Scrum. In this case, the goal of the lean mindset is in a way to optimise the iteration speed. Rather than having several features with long delivery time, focus on few features and short delivery time.

SAFe emphasises the lean mindset with concepts like the continuous delivery pipeline and value stream mapping. Besides presiding over the process, the RTE are also charged to improve the flow of value in the organisation.

The lean mindset isn’t as established as the iterative mindset. I find it interesting that SAFe integrates it and promotes it. We conducted a value stream mapping session at work, and it was very enlightening. Thinking in waiting time, inventory, waste does indeed work in the software world, too.

It’s a simple way to highlight process and organisational issues. It gives clarity to what should be optimised and not get lost in organisation design. Chances are, if you want to reduce waiting time, you will have to solve a bunch of other problems first. The lean mindset positions these problems not as end in themselves, but as bottlenecks to short delivery time. It helps you prioritize these problems. It’s a bit like Test-driven Development (TDD). Making things testable requires that you figure out a good design first. But assessing testability is easier than assessing “good design”. In the case of Lean, minimising “waiting time” requires that you figure out a good organisation first, but measuring “waiting time” is easier than measuring “good organisation”.

Few years ago, I would have described a good organization as one where everyone is on the same page. By it, I would have meant exactly on the same page. I realize now that I was wrong. You don’t need to be perfectly on the same page. Being mostly on the same page is enough, and a little bit a chaos is ok.

Engineers are very well positioned to understand why: to be on the same page you need to coordinate, and coordination is expensive. This holds for actors in a software system (threads, processes) but also actors in an organization (person, teams, units). Coordinating between actors takes time, and as such slows the system. You should first try to design your system so that the need for coordination is reduced, and then if necessary, balance coordination with consistency (being on the same page).

The analogy works surprisingly well (maybe it’s not an analogy but a property of system in general?). Take optimistic locking in software systems: it’s a tradeoff between consistency and performance. Rather than lock the resource on each change, you only check when you do the final write if you’ve been working on the most up to date information. If not, you do a retry. In this case, there’s a performance hit, but overall the system is faster this way. The equivalent in an organization would be to accept that some people somewhere have outdated information. They will work based on this outdated information until a synchronization point happens and they realized the information is outdated. Some work will have to be corrected or redone. It may be upsetting, but should happen rarely.

The art of organization design is to reduce coordination and when needed use the right synchronization points. The goal is to prevent catastrophic mistakes. Some inconsistencies here and there, if timely resolved and with small consequences, are fine. Do not synchronize on everything (it’s way too expensive) but synchronize often enough to keep the risks small. Prefer many small risks than looming, large big risks.

There are lots of patterns in software system to synchronize and coordinate actors in the system. There are also a lot of patterns to synchronize and coordinate actors in an organization: all-hand sessions, company memo, internal trainings, review boards, formal processes, team meetings, etc.

Interestingly, software systems and organizations have different profiles when it comes to the tradeoffs between consistency and speed. For software systems, relaxing consistency beyond simple techniques like optimistic locking is usually hard. Transactional systems are still a lot easier to build than systems with relaxed consistency. On the other hand, an organization will always work with relaxed consistency somehow: it’s impossible for an organization to update the “collective brain” in a transaction. It’s the nature of people to misunderstand information, forget things, or simply take vacations or be sick.

Speaking of coordination and alignment, Elon Musk put it like this:

“Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.” – Elon Musk.

What this analogy does not consider is the time needed to align. If lots of time is lost on coordination, the vectors are smaller. You then have to choose between an expensive perfect alignment, or some inexpensive imperfect alignment. Given that organizations constantly course-correct, vectors accumulate projects after projects (or task after task) and there are plenty of opportunities to adjust the alignment, even each time in an imperfect manner. This is why in a good organization, a little bit of chaos is ok.

SAFe introduces a new role in the industry: the release train engineer (RTE). A RTE is, according to the framework:

The Release Train Engineer (RTE) is a servant leader and coach for the Agile Release Train (ART). The RTE’s major responsibilities are to facilitate the ART events and processes and assist the teams in delivering value. RTEs communicate with stakeholders, escalate impediments, help manage risk, and drive relentless improvement.

The role is designed like a scrum master at the ART level. At a minimum, a RTE ensures that the process is followed. But a good RTE helps teams improve their performance – that’s the essence of the job. A RTE doesn’t have any authority over the content in the backlog. The focus on only on improvement at the organisational level. As such, the wording “assist the teams in delivering value” leaves quite some lattitude in how impactful an RTE can be.

What do you expect from a RTE? I am wondering how this role will establish itself in the industry. Here are my personal expectations.

Level I – The Organizer. The RTE ensures that the process is followed. He/She ensures that information flows between the teams using the elements of the framework. The RTE helps resolve problems related to the work environement as they appear. Example of such problem could be: tools to communicate, organisation of the program backlog, running the ART events. He/She makes sure people can work.

Level II – The Moderator. The RTE is able to create plattforms or use existing plattforms to encourge discussions in the ART / Solution. With some moderation talent, he/she can help instill change, support improvements, or create alignment. The RTE helps resolve problems about team performance as they appear. Example of such problem could be: interpersonal issues, improving the collaboration with a specific provider, managing morale in challenging time, ensuring transparency, suggesting a feature stop to address the existing bugs first.

Level III – The Influencer. The RTE identifies systemic performance issues in the organisation and work towards resolving them by instilling change at the organisation, technical, or product management levels. Example of such issues could be: addressing systemic quality issues due to the work culture, working with the system architects/teams/system team to make the continous delivery pipeline faster, encouraging decentral decision-making (while managing risks), improving feedback loops.

The higher the level, the more interdisciplinary the RTE will have to work. While little knowledge of product management or architecture is needed to be proficient at level I, problems at level II and III will require a good understanding of how engineering works and how product management, technology and processes influence each others. On the technology front, the RTE is also a key stakeholder to support mindset like DevOps, which means he must also have some good understanding of how technology supports delivery and operations.

The RTE role ressembles that of the more established delivery manager. Both focus on similar sets of issues.

The big difference between both roles lies I think in the mindset. A RTE is a coach and as such has little formal authority in itself. He leads by helping other take the right call. A delivery manager will typically have more formal authority. For instance, a RTE has no authority over the priorisation of backlog in itself. The PM and PO have formally this responsability. The RTE coaches the PM/PO in priorizing work.

The higher the level, the more the RTE works at the level of the engineering culture. It’s easy to define values and visions that nobody follows. Culture is defined by how people effectively behaves. It’s hard to be a good RTE. Just like it’s hard to be a good scrum master. Changing how people work isn’t easy.

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a complex framework. I mean, just look at this picture:

Long is gone the simplicity of Scrum. Its glossary contains 102 items (I counted them!), ranging from obvious concepts like a “story” to esoteric notions like “set-based design” with “customer centricity“ in between. The framework is meant to impose some structure, but at the same time, it has so many elements that with some creativity, you can probably retrofit any organisation in it without changing anything (for instance by abusing the concept of shared services). If agile was meant to be about simplicity, then SAFe is far from it.

SAFe comes in various “configurations”. The picture above is “portfolio” SAFe. And mind you, there is a “full” SAFe configuration which is even more complicated. But the core of SAFe – the “essential” configuration – has actually good parts:

• An agile release train (ART) is a collection of teams. They synchronize through the program backlog and the PI Planning (PI stands for “program increment“)
• ARTs should align with value streams. You organise you company in ARTs based on how you generate value to your customers so that each ART focuses on one part of the value stream. The definition of value streams is of course complicated in the glossary, with development and operational value streams distinct from each others, but the idea is actually good. You align IT and Business this way.
• At the ART level, the leadership is split across three roles: Product Management, System Architecture, Release Train Engineer. I think that this split is a nice point in SAFe. It creates some balance in responsability and makes it clear the to be efficient, you need to address product features, architecture, and work culture together since they all impact each others.
• SAFe also introduces a special terminology for things that aren’t features on their own: enablers. Chances are, you had this kind of work item already, just with a different name. But naming matters, and SAFe make a good use of the concept of “enabling” at various level. I like it.
• Community of Practice as the naming for working groups around specific issues.
• The System Team helps with toolchains, infrastructure, build pipelines, integration testing.

Most companies develop their own organisation when growing, which will have some similar elements. Maybe you have different roles (e.g. “engineering managers”), or different ways to synchronize, or some other way to manage architectural work. Some things are surely different, but some things are probably similar, but named differently, or implemented differently. If you want to move to SAFe, how much you will need to adapt will depend. But for most enterprise, the change isn’t radical.

In this sense, SAFe is as collection of patterns. What SAFe gives you is a standard frame of reference to discuss about these aspects. SAFe establishes a common vocabulary to talk about the organisation and how to improve it. Where this analogy with patterns fails, though, is that you usually can decide to implement some pattern individually. SAFe come as a framework of patterns, where all of them must be implemented.

The „large solution“ configuration adds an additional level of scale with product management, train engineer, and architecture at the solution level. Solution and ARTs have the same cadence and synchronize through the same PI plannings. They have the same program backlog. This makes sense. (Historical note: “Program Level“ was replaced with “Essential” in SAFe 5, but the rest of the “program” terminology survived)

With the “portfolio” configuration, you have an additional level of “lean portfolio management” (LPM) whose goal is to « align strategy, funding and execution ». This adds epic owners, enterprise architects, lean business cases, KPI and the like the framework. According to the framework, only with this configuration can you achieve business agility. Something I like with SAFe is that idea to fund value streams rather than projects.

I understand that this level may match well with existing organizations, with funding systems and steering boards. But the portfolio level still has a bit the feeling of ARTs and Solution Trains as “factories”, divorced from real business accountability. If the goal is to bring IT and business closer to each other, why not push these elements to the ARTs and Solutions? Make them accountable for the value their products generate. In a way, I wished that this level wouldn’t exist, or existed in another form – for instance not beeing an addtional level but rather a vertical that complement the existing levels. I understand that some initiatives will impact several steps in the value stream, and thus possibly several ARTs or Solutions. But I hope it’s the exception, not the norm. On the other hand, maybe that’s also precisely the point of the portofolio level beeing above the Solution / ARTs. If your business (and thus value streams) isn’t yet clearly establisehd, you need another level to be able to shape the value streams based on feedback from the market. I think that the portfolio level will be used very differently from enterprise to enterprise.

In its core values, SAFe recognizes its influences: Agile development, Lean product development, systems thinking, and DevOps. The framework actively tries to combine these influences into a consistent whole. The problem is that it feels sometimes a bit too much: The SAFe core values page lists 4 values. The lean-agile mindset page lists 4 pillars. The SAFe lean-agile principles page lists 10 principles. The lean-agile leadership lists 3 dimensions. Business agility lists 7 competencies that are required (on the left in the picture, but “competency” isn’t in the glossary). I like conceptual frameworks, really. But it’s hard for me to not get lost here.

I guess that companies moving to SAFe will still need to tailor it to their needs anyway. Where I’m working, they added „subject-matter expect“, for instance. That’s fully in the idea of agility- tailor processes when you need it. But with this idea in mind, SAFe could have been kept smaller rather rather than trying to be all encompassing.