As a SAFe® SPCT I work with a number of large companies with
an end goal of transforming the way they work and think to gain the advantages
of Lean and Agile in their enterprise.
Their burning platform is usually the same, “we need to deliver faster
than our competition, with better quality, and reduce our costs”. Sometimes we are successful, but many times
we are not, and the underlying reason is always lack of leadership
engagement. I work with a number of top
notch coaches and have learned that they have had the same experiences. The problem isn’t the framework (I’ve seen it
work too well too many times for this to be the case), and the problem is
rarely logistical or physical constraints.
The underlying issue is always a missing focus on creating a better
system.
In your enterprise you have two (at least) common systems;
the systems you build for your customers and the system you use to build those
systems. This enterprise system consists
of your culture, environment, organizational structure, value streams,
constraints, etc that create the environment that allows you to deliver value
to your customers (the other systems).
The major problem I have seen is that leadership in most large companies
tend to view any lean agile framework, be it SAFe ®, LeSS, Scrum, etc as a
panacea, the magical prescription to solve all of their systemic problems. There tends to be a perception of “Hey, IT,
go do that [framework] thing so you can deliver faster and cheaper”. None of the current frameworks will directly
create a new system for you, that’s up to you.
One of the reasons I am such a believer in SAFe ® is that it
is a big spotlight. Applying the principles and
practices of SAFe® will not solve many of the systemic problems causing your
quality or delay issues, but it will shine a very bright light on the source of
these problems. Visibility is key to
improving your enterprise system, and the strategic alignment, cadence and synchronization,
and inspect and adapt practices will provide a great deal of transparency and
understanding to the true root cause of your systemic impediments. I am not well versed in many of the other
frameworks, but I believe this increased visibility to be a natural artifact of
these as well.
Here’s where we start to fall down, as I tend to see one of
two leadership patterns come out of this visibility. The first is to blame the framework. “We never had these problems before we implemented
xyz, cancel xyz and try something else”.
If you are driving your car and hit a tree, we can’t blame it on the car
or the tree. The car, like the
framework, has principles and practices of operation and needs maintenance and
attention. If you ignore these, bad
things will happen. The same holds true
for the framework we base transformations on.
The framework will provide lots of data for us to act on, if we ignore
it how can we blame the framework?
The second common issue I see with this visibility is
fear. Fear of change, fear of loss of
control, and fear based on self-preservation.
These are valid and legitimate human reactions, and we need to deal with
them, but they should be viewed as a positive sign from the
transformation. We are now exposing
underlying issues in the system that were already there, but with the increased
visibility we can now deal with them.
The cure to all of these exposed systemic issues is simple,
but not easy. Leadership needs to
re-focus on building a better system. As
I coach executive leadership I hear a common thread “we don’t have time for
training or coaching. We have too much
to do”. However, when we look at what
these leaders are really spending their time on I find a large focus on directing
work rather than building a better system.
Before we blame the framework for lack of transformation success, let’s look
at how much time we are spending on creating an enterprise system where the
framework can thrive. That is the true
objective of leadership.
Great insight and I second your findings.
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