SAFe® 6 Scrum Master (SSM) certification. Scaled Agile, Inc.
I’ve just acquired the SAFe® 6 Scrum Master (SSM) certification at Scaled Agile, Inc 🙂. It’s my fifth certification to date in the Agile sphere.
After 4+ years of hands-on working experience with SAFe® (both physically and 100% online with distributed Agile teams, incl. PI Planning), it was interesting to compare and validate my experience also with the current SAFe® 6 version.
We could argue that SAFe® is only one-fourth Agile (the ”working software over comprehensive documentation” part). SAFe® often gets bad press, and we should take constructive criticism seriously. However, lots of thinking and effort has been put into the framework. The foundation is solid, and based on relevant literature. It even has enough buzzwords for a lifetime 🤪. We shouldn’t blame the tool, when the hardest part is our behaviour and our inability to change our habits.
The risk is that SAFe® misses one of the elements that can make Scrum effective: being disruptive. Scrum aims to replace your current approach, disrupting the status quo (kaikaku). In many SAFe® ”installations”, more process is added by introducing the Dual Operating System, while the organisational structures and mindset are kept intact.
However, if SAFe® (or any other framework) makes the teams and the organisation deliver value a little bit faster, with a little bit better quality, and with a little bit better process, that can’t be totally worthless, can it? Especially if the Way of Working keeps becoming better—perhaps even more Agile in the long run?
What I want to see more in Scaled Agile is not only optimizing and scaling the flow instead of scaling the process, but also more kaizen, if kaikaku feels too radical :)
To summarise: the success with SAFe® is deeply entangled with critical thinking, systems thinking, and our ability to change our behaviours and habits with repeated practice, such as Agile Kata.
And don’t forget the customer!