Do you recognize problems in project environments?
- It is difficult to get the right people together and get them going at the start of a project.
- Your project employees are constantly being pulled from outside your project;
- It takes a lot of time to arrange a budget. The estimates that form the basis for this are never correct;
- Due to a fixed project scope, new insights (however relevant) are difficult to include;
- With large projects you get more management attention. That attention helps, but the complexity of large projects reduces the chance of success.
This is just a small selection of what you encounter in projects. Feel free to provide better examples.
Projects as a solution for everything
The overarching theme in the list above is projects . A project is an activity, limited in time and resources, aimed at creating something. It is distinguished by its one-off nature. With a limited amount of money, a number of people are brought together for a limited time to achieve something that the standing organization (line) is not equipped for. The “joke” is that the root cause of all the problems I have listed above is inherent in this project-based nature. I am not going to explain this (boring), but I leave it to your own imagination.
SAFe® is Scrum with more than 80 people
Agile and Scrum working in a team is being applied more and more widely. Teams organize themselves and are increasingly able to adapt flexibly to the wishes of the organization and the environment. But what if you are in an organization in which development initiatives of 8 people or more on one product are no exception. What if there is a clear need for coordination between multiple teams. What if prioritizing within your portfolio is difficult. Then SAFe® (Scaled Agile Framework®) offers tools that help with this.
Successful application of SAFe®
Looking at SAFe®, we see organizations that have introduced 80% of SAFe® and have hardly become more effective, but also organizations that apply perhaps 20% of SAFe® and have made leaps and bounds. Successfully applying a method comes down to breaking through obstructing patterns in the organization. What is that one behavioral change that ensures that a whole series of problems is solved at once. If you can enter one practice from the method with a snap of your finger, which one will it be? It is useful to know what exactly the problem is that you would like to solve.
Lessons from SAFe®
If you were to teach me that cut, to drastically reduce the amount of hassle in organizations, I would know exactly what to do… Stop product development projects; they are not so temporary and unique that you absolutely need a project for them. This is also the advice of SAFe®: “Stop funding based on projects!” Stop bringing people to the work, but bring the work to existing, long-lived (Scrum) teams. In SAFe®, budget goes to Agile Release Trains (ARTs). An ART is a long-lived team of Agile teams that delivers solutions incrementally, aligned with a common business or technical mission. With this, you make change capacity available instead of budget. The challenge for the business is therefore to create as much value as possible with this. SAFe® calls this concept Lean Budgets . Follow the link for more information.
Remi-Armand: I see it as my mission to help people's talents flourish more fully within an organizational context. To this end, I fully commit to everything that helps the concepts of Team Learning and the Learning Organization take root. In doing so, I utilize Agile, Scrum, Lean, change management, and coaching techniques. Our practical approach to this can be found in the book “Praktisch op weg naar Teamresultaat”. See this website for more information or join a free evening session of our “ Platform Team Learning ”.
I am always available for a good conversation. Feel free to contact us to discuss SAFe® or Agile transitions.
