Playing it SAFe

In my real life experience:

1. Most IT outsourcing companies pay good money to get their people trained and certified in various Agile-related best practices and then discourage them to take initiative with not-yet-Agile clients in order to actually apply those beneficial skills the clients consciously or unconsciously pay good money for.
   
2. For an organisation uninitiated with Agile to start working using the SAFe framework is like getting a kindergarten class of 5-year-olds who are quite proficient in walking and running to join and compete in Le Tour de France with their kindergarten headmaster as their coach.
   
3. Most not-yet-Agile organisations are being duped by expensive and prestigious consultancy firms who are not Agile or Agile-savvy themselves to “adopt” certain expensive frameworks such as SAFe which are not suitable for their current needs.
   
4. Most IT outsourcing companies’ people are not proficient in working Agile as the companies that employ them are not Agile, although most of these people are being certified, marketed and sold to clients as Agile experts. They act and work mechanically and submissively, lack courage and initiative, the not-yet-Agile client cannot gain confidence and trust (forget the implicit need for Agile guidance and consultancy) and therefore feels the need to control everything.

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As long as both supplier and client act out of fear, confusion and lack of clarity, the nominal output could be high, but the net value is typically mediocre relative to the effort spent to create it.

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If you somehow still never read it, here’s the official Scrum guide. Just give it a read. It’s 10 pages short:

• https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html

Then, and only then, give these a read:

• SAFe 5 official page: https://v5.scaledagileframework.com/
• The exotic brand new SAFe 6.0 official page: https://scaledagileframework.com/