How does SAFe handle dependencies between agile teams?

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How does SAFe handle dependencies between agile teams?

Dependencies, especially in complex, multi-team environments are a fact of life.

People assume that once they make the transition to agile, dependencies suddenly evaporate, but that simply isn’t true.

The reality is that dependencies are always going to be a part of the equation.

Even if your product only requires a single product development team, you are still going to need to deal with dependences. Within the team itself, you will also experience dependences.

Sure, you deal with it creatively and effectively, but it needs your attention, nonetheless.

Cross-team dependencies.

In any project management or product development environment that has multiple teams, you will encounter cross-team dependencies.

This is especially common in complex environments like autonomous car development. At minimum, you have a hardware team, a software team, and a firmware team. More often than not, you have multiple teams in each sphere of development.

SAFe in the context of cross-team dependencies.

SAFe or Scaled Agile framework deals with cross-team dependencies in multiple ways. We’ll explore a couple of the most common and effective ways of dealing with those dependencies.

  • Identify and deal with dependences in PI (program increment) planning.
  • Frequent events to ensure alignment and continuous delivery.

Identify and deal with dependences in PI planning.

Our goal is to identify, as best we can, what dependencies exist and what we could reasonably anticipate.

We go and talk to the teams involved to understand their environment, challenges, and what potential impediments might impact our team. We agree on what needs doing, how the dependency will be fulfilled, and what we need to do to ensure the dependency is fulfilled before it reaches us.

What facilitates this kind of engagement and agreement is the original design of the agile release train(s). Everybody is aligned to the same customer purpose and organizational objectives for that specific value stream.

In traditional project management and product development environments, you tend to have silos and people focused on fulfilling their exclusive responsibilities. They aren’t aligned with other teams, other departments, and a single customer purpose.

SAFe ensures that the alignment of all teams and departments to a single value stream and customer purpose is by design, and that all teams understand how they are integrated and interconnected to that customer purpose.

Often, dependencies occur in product development because of mismatched prioritization amongst teams. Team A see X as the priority whilst team B view Y as the priority. SAFe negates that and enables the teams of agile teams to work in perfect alignment with agreed goals and objectives.

Frequent events to ensure alignment and continuous delivery.

SAFe has created frequent events that ensure:

  • Teams of agile teams (agile release trains) are aware of how things are progressing.
  • Teams of agile teams are able to collaborate through potential dependencies.
  • Effective communication and collaboration to fulfil dependencies early and effectively.

Sure, things go wrong and sometimes what we agreed upon doesn’t happen despite our early interventions and collaboration. Fine, that’s life. In SAFe, we are able to make that dependency and its consequences known throughout the value stream.

We make the problem transparent and visible so that people can adapt and plan accordingly.

There are no surprises at any stage of the development or delivery process because everyone is aware that X has gone wrong, and everyone is aware of what is being done to mitigate the threat or risk that has arisen from the dependency not being fulfilled.

If there is an impact, that is something that we can manage within the teams of agile teams. That is something we can make transparent to customers and product stakeholders, and ensure that we continue to grow customer satisfaction and customer retention despite setbacks in delivery.

The goal of agile is to be responsive and adaptive. SAFe is an agile framework and so we develop our responsive capabilities and ensure that we collaborate and coordinate frequently to ensure that we are continuously delivering value to our customers and the organization.

We may not have the answer today, but as a team of agile teams, we will overcome the challenge and become better through the process. We work together to identify where we can swarm over a problem, or alleviate pressure, or increase capacity for the team that are fulfilling the dependency.

We want to be working on the most valuable solution or most compelling problem, and the frequent events and communication enable us to do that effectively.

So, in a nutshell, these are the two most common ways SAFe deals with dependencies between teams of agile teams.

About Value Glide

Value Glide are a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) consultancy, coaching practice, and training specialist who work with organizations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.

As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team are invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and use the data and evidence we gather from each implementation to inform our training, coaching, and consulting services.

In a nutshell, empirical process control or empiricism.

If you are thinking of adopting agile within your organization and have identified SAFe as a great agile framework to adopt, implement and improve your business agility, visit our SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program page or view our SAFe Consulting Services page.

If you have identified a need for an agile coach and SAFe coach to help your organization adopt and implement SAFe, visit our SAFe Coaching Services page.

If you want to know more about SAFe and how to lead SAFe, visit our SAFE Training page for a host of options, from Leading SAFe to a SAFe Release Train Engineer course.

#SAFe #scaledagileframework #scalingagile #agile #agileframework #agilecoach

 

 

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