Judging by the number of SAFe consultants (complete with that video of a guy drawing comic-book style diagrams about spotify, cute the first time but infuriating after the 10th) I'd have to say that if our SAFe was bastardised maybe SAFe itself is a bastard
I know many companies running SAFe on the east coast and it’s generally an improvement across the board from everybody I talk to. The only problems I’ve seen are from 2 camps: the people who don’t want to have to plan anything and the people who want everything that is planned to be 100% accurate and not a best guess. Either of these two groups will cause problems to a process like this with the latter usually being in some type of leadership role.
SAFe consultants or not, it’s still up to your company leadership to implement it. A lot of SAFe consultants I have talked to try to advocate for things that follow Scrum because many teams are already familiar with it. This is honestly one of the biggest issues that I have found with the teaching.
80% of SAFe is based on Donald Reniertson’s “2nd Generation Lean Product Development” book, which is fantastic. Once you’ve read that it’s easy to spot the differences.
I hate that diagram. It looks like gibberish to anyone who hasn’t gone through a training to understand it, and even this it still looks like gibberish.
SAFe is about addressing the communication problems that happen as an organization grows. You’re looking at the diagram for everything that would be applied to a very large organization.
SAFe itself has a goal of using 50-150 person “release trains” that are essentially independent units. That’s the core of what’s going on.
Everything outside of that is about managing communication between other “trains”. In the diagram that you’re looking at, the bottom 2 sections where the CD Pipeline sits is where most developers will experience SAFe and you’ll find that it simply advocates for DevOps best practices.
I completely understand how everything else looks like a mess. It’s a lot to digest.
