#eavoices

Abstract: If you address the question of how to scale Agile projects by considering what framework to use, you are only looking at one aspect of the problem. Scaling is all about coordination – managing enterprise considerations and cross program dependencies, and the defacto frameworks (SAFe, LeSS and DAD) focus on the people and process dimensions. However, in combination with a factory approach you may be able to automate many of the compliance and dependency management issues.

The question of how to scale Agile development has been around a while. In January 2015 I commented [1] on a clear trend in which my customers were voicing concerns about loss of consistency; inability to govern; lack of coordination and increasing time to market. Since then I have observed many large organizations adopting SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) perhaps because it appears to be the only game in town, or perhaps there’s good marketing or there’s strength in numbers. But the criticisms of SAFe [2] haven’t gone away. The central and continuing concern is that SAFe compromises core Agile principles of self-organizing, cross functional teams that have full responsibility for the delivery of potentially shippable increments. And that SAFe looks suspiciously like WaterScrumFall because there’s a high overhead of portfolio, value stream and project management and in all probability intentional architecture. Now I have mixed opinions on SAFe; I see positives in value streams and product management which are important. And for organizations that have large programs, highly organized, structured approaches will be seen as lower risk, and indeed something that takes them some way down the Agile path, without straying too far from conventional management comfort zones. But the outcomes are unlikely to be inherently “agile”.

What SAFe does, is provide a rather conventional approach for a complex problem that most enterprises have – that is to deliver high integrity solutions that can work in an enterprise context that demands cross project dependency management, consistent data and reference architecture, collaboration with the existing portfolio complexities, compliance with enterprise standards and governance etc.

There are alternatives. Craig Larman and Bas Vodde in their books [3] and more recently with their LeSS initiative [4] have pursued a very different path that starts with Scrum and scales by understanding the needs for coordination while adhering to core Scrum principles. In their forthcoming book [5] they say, “LeSS is (1) lightweight, (2) simple to understand, and (3) difficult to master—due to essential complexity”. And this allows us to contrast the different approaches; while SAFe clearly works at some level, it has its roots in conventional large scale project management, whereas LeSS is lightweight, but requires much deeper understanding of the systems dynamics because of the inherent complexity of all the coordination requirements.
So the real question underlying Scaling Agile should be, “can we address some of the coordination requirements in a manner that reduces complexity and eliminates some of the need for additional layers of management or events?”

In my post Service Factory 2.0 [6] I describe the conceptual background of the Software Factory, ideas pioneered by my old friend Keith Short and Jack Greenfield while they were at Microsoft. Today these have evolved and become specialized around a framework of tools, repeatable processes and patterns for creation and assembly of services – manifest as first order components with formal interfaces. If you consider that all core business functionality is increasingly composed of services and their operations, this provides us with a reference architecture that by design implements separation of concerns.  Figure 1 below is a conceptual view of the scope of the service factory in terms of managed objects.