[bradknowles]

In my experience, SAFe is an improvement over what has gone before. It provides a clear path for intake of new work, instead of having stuff dumped on you that suddenly has to be completed yesterday. It provides a clear method of identifying inter-team and intra-team dependencies, and then you can apply methods to address or at least monitor those issues while work proceeds. In PI planning sessions, I learned so much more about what all is going on in the other teams and elsewhere around the company, and that helped me do a better job for my part of the puzzle.

What I’ve seen is that the business types don’t like it. Marketing doesn’t like it. The bean counters don’t like it. Upper management doesn’t like it. It doesn’t fit into their neat quarterly buckets. They don’t like that PI planning takes so much time from so many people, despite the fact that history has proven over thousands of years that just leaping into things without a planning process is the surest path to disaster. They don’t like the fact that the more often PI planning is done, the more effective it is — because the more time spent between PI planning sessions is more time for things to go off the rails in ways that could be addressed in a PI planning session.