So before Christmas I wrote a post - “A Queasy Epiphany”. I’d been asked to write a bid (for a company that I don’t work for any more) saying how we would govern multiple teams. Rather than than try to make something up I queasily reached for SAFE and wrote using SAFE terms how we would approach governing a project that had more than one team.
After I’d spent a couple of weeks writing about 750 words a day (there were a lot of questions on this bid) the bid team got together and one of the people who had joined the bid team was someone who had actually been running a programme with 5 or 6 Agile teams. He offered to take a look at what I’d written for the the Agile governance aspects of this bid. In short, I was ashamed. He was someone who’d actually run an Agile programme - what was he going to think of the pretend SAFE stuff that I’d written. I haven’t really run an Agile programme since about 2011.
But to my surprise the seasoned Agile programme manager wasn’t critical of what I’d written. Rather, I think he was impressed by the SAFE description of how to go about managing a programme. Even though, anybody who knows anything about Agile knows that a SAFE approach is fundamentally flawed. His description of how he managed a programmed of Agile projects - with a daily Scrum of Scrums meeting and a weekly programme bard meeting to discuss where each of the teams might be going in the next Sprint/Iteration sounded a lot more plausible to me.