Agile at Scale Article Series: How SAFe is Eating the Management Knowledge to Make Companies Operate like Apple or Tesla
Agile transition requires tough decisions. Many questions arise. Frameworks are made for right answers. Sometimes it works.
Business agility at scale is hard. In this series of articles, the authors analyze different approaches to agile transition. The sense and nonsense of maturity models is tackled first. Second, the currently most successful approaches for introducing, scaling and accelerating agile ways of working are discussed and finally compared. The goal is to share insights and open up the toolbox for change leaders, to challenge the “status quo bias” — from a sense of urgency, to customer obsession and the smooth flow of value.
Key Takeaways
- Even if the Scaled Agile Framework has become a new standard, custom enterprise agility frameworks are on the rise. Most of the fastest-growing firms are recognizably agile in much of what they do, even though they don’t use standard scaling frameworks.
- Human beings are hardwired to protect what is familiar, a concept psychologist often refer to as “status quo bias”. That’s why the major barrier to agile transition is not intellectual — it’s emotional.
- Mapping different maturity models is useful to get a look on the road to agility from various angles. The value lies in understanding the benefits, not judgmental labels of maturity and immaturity.
- Cracking the portfolio level is critical to achieve enterprise agility. Organizational agility is an end-to-end game, to connect strategy and investment funding with operations.
- Successful market-oriented ecosystems are organized through (a) platforms, (b) cells and © allies. Critical capabilities are: external sensing, customer obsession, innovation throughout and agility everywhere.
Introduction
The management board is sprinting with scrum. They adopted continuous planning cycles instead of annual planning. Agile leadership teams consist of 5–6 executives with a Product Owner and an Agile Master. Leadership across the company lives agile values. What sounds like a romantic idea is said to have happened at the world’s leading automotive supplier BOSCH¹.
In Sweden, it went from zero to 500 agile teams in 18 months. With about 60 Agile Release Trains at Volvo Cars² — they don’t need to hide from other world leading car OEMs in terms of launching agile programs, the so-called Agile Release Trains. The car industry seems to be starting more new trains than the railways. The Implementation Roadmap of the leading Scaled Agile Framework SAFe® has established itself as the new highway for most car companies. Not without a lot criticism as “essentially bureaucracy” or blaming such as “fake agile”³.
Cracking the Portfolio Level
Custom enterprise agility frameworks are on the rise. At first glance, this seems to be a countermovement of the establishment of the scaling framework SAFe®. If you take a closer look it becomes clear, that even the best framework requires a lot of individual configuration. What works well for a bunch of teams cannot easily be transferred to the portfolio level. SAFe itself is much of a mix of other frameworks, like Scrum, Kanban, Design Thinking, and others. No agile framework can completely foresee the agile transition throughout all organizational levels. So, there is no one-size-fits-all approach without specific adjustments. Inspect and adapt is required.
On the one hand, there are a number of agile principles, practices and frameworks — the general toolbox. On the other hand, is the need for an individual configuration to get the right mix that fits to the specific organization, to enable the capabilities to delight the customers.
Remarkable that most of the fastest-growing firms on the planet — Tesla, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Alibaba — are recognizably agile in much of what they do, even though they don’t use standard scaling frameworks.
Assuming that the desired outcomes of agile transitions are innovation capabilities, there has to be something more than just a framework. An analysis of some of the world leading companies, published in the Harvard Business Review in 2019, shows interesting other key capabilities to transform enterprises to leading innovation ecosystems.⁴
Sometimes the Biggest and Best Ideas are the Toughest to Sell
To make matters worse, we are not dealing with rational agents, but with people and multifaceted social systems. Human beings are hardwired to protect what is familiar, a concept psychologist often refer to as “status quo bias.” That’s why the major barrier to agile transition is not intellectual. It’s not the process of learning a bunch of new agile practices. The major barrier is emotional. We’re scared. Feeling stupid doesn’t feel good, and in the beginning of learning anything new you feel really stupid.⁵ Thankfully, if you are convinced that the transition to more business agility is exactly what your organization needs, there are things you can do to improve your chances to succeed.
The Sense and Nonsense of Maturity Models
You shouldn’t spend too much time on maturity models. Nevertheless, the simplified maturity models are useful to create order in the disorder of reality. They can help start important conversations to clarify your vision of the future state of your organization, and the journey to get there. The value lies in understanding the benefits and tradeoffs of the different levels not judgmental labels of maturity and immaturity. In addition, it is usually not particularly well received to qualify the maturity of people with terms normally used for children and childlike behavior. Since we are working with adults, organizational parenting is obviously not welcome, with good reason.
Contents of the Article Series
In this series of articles, we compare the concepts of different agile maturity models first, just to get a reference and a general context. Second, the leading approaches to business agility are analyzed, such as SAFe, Kanban, Scrum@Scale and custom frameworks. The third article focuses on selling and winning strategies, to help motivate the organization for change and overcome resistance. Next, is examined more closely, how to connect strategy and operations at the portfolio level. In the fifth article, we summarize the most valuable elements of the frameworks in “one” toolbox. How to connect suppliers for successful collaboration in scaled agile environments is examined in the sixth article. Finally, the essence of findings is discussed in the conclusion.
Even if the decision has been made in favor to a specific framework, a lot can be learned from other scaling approaches for the design of your own configuration. No agile framework can completely foresee the transition of any complex organization, so there is no one-size-fits-all approach without specific adjustments. The toolbox is bigger than expected.
Next Articles
- The Sense and Nonsense of Capability Maturity Models — Mapping SAFe, Kanban Maturity Model (KMM), and the Agile Fluency Model with CMMI and Automotive SPICE.
- The Rise of the Train: How the Agile Framework SAFe is Eating the Management Knowledge to Make Companies Operate like Apple or Tesla
The questions we want to tackle are:
- How to increase innovation capabilities at scale?
- How to get a clear vision of the desired future state of your organization?
- How to start or accelerate running transitions throughout all organizational levels?
- How to motivate for and overcome resistance to change?
- How to connect strategy with worldwide distributed units and teams?
- How can suppliers be integrated into value streams to accelerate the transition?
Further reading: Download the free Business Agility Playbook
References
¹ Case Study: Bosch Embracing Agility, Scrum@Scale, Annie Howard, BOSCH 2018
² Presentation of Maria Hansson, Volvo Car Group, SAFe Summit Europe 2019
³ Understanding Fake Agile, Steve Denning, Forbes 2019 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2019/05/23/understanding-fake-agile/#2a1dabe54bbe
⁴ Reinventing the Organization: How Companies Can Deliver Radically Greater Value in Fast-Changing Markets, Yeung, Ulrich, Harvard Business Review Press (2019)
⁵ Loran Nordgren, Four Tips to Persuade Others Your Idea Is a Winner, Kellog School of Managment 2017, https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/four-tips-for-persuading-others-that-your-idea-is-a-winner
