[pracer]

>If you’re trying to enforce SAFe on something much smaller then I think you’re probably doing it wrong.

the comment you are answering was on point

>I know Scrum / SAFe proponents will say we were doing it wrong. It's ALWAYS that way

[Cederfjard]

Sometimes you actually are doing something wrong though. Preemptively stating that you know someone will tell it to you doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t true.

If you want to lose weight, a diet where you can eat as much McDonald’s as you want is probably doing it wrong. Applying SAFe to a small team is probably wrong.

[rpmiskin]

My bad, not ‘doing it wrong’, just trying to use the wrong methodology for your problem :)

sledgehammer to crack a nut.

[vesinisa]

This particular company was in fact seriously in need of a corporation-wide business development methodology, so sledgehammer was called for – and I can see the appeal they saw in SAFe. But completely replacing autonomous agile teams' existing self-organized processes with a new top-down forced SAFe variety of Scrum with the same swing of the hammer -- not really called for, but mandated anyway in name of SAFe having to be an "organization wide" effort.

Reality is of course that the dev teams are the only ones ever trained in the new process, and must suffer the chaos while rest of the org just don't care or hate it just as much – apart of course from the new middle managers who were hired to "help with the SAFe transformation".

My prediction: max two years from now senior management announce "the end of the SAFe experiment", and go back to some ad-hoc version of the preceding organization model "with lessons learned" etc. Rinse and repeat every four-five years.