How much of an impact can a great SAFe consultant have? How?
A great SAFe consultant will invest time and effort to understand the context of the organization they are working with, and to identify what the primary goals and objectives for the organization are moving forward.
In essence, understanding where the organization is currently at and what they are shooting for.
They will also seek to uncover what obstacles, impediments, and organizational dysfunctions are preventing the teams from achieving their goals. Seek to understand why these problems exist and how flexible the organization are in working through those challenges.
A key element of the initial engagement is to validate what you are observing and learning.
You may have misunderstood the challenges, or you may be on the wrong track, so it is critical that a SAFe consultant work with individuals, teams, and leadership to validate what they have observed and why those barriers exist.
Cocreating a solution.
A great SAFe consultant doesn’t necessarily arrive with all the answers in their backpack.
Instead, they will work with individuals and teams within the organization to identify all of the options available, and explore how each of these options could help the organization move the needle on the metrics that most matter to them.
Some elements will be straightforward and the SAFe consultant will have more than enough skills, expertise, and knowledge to recommend the best way forward, but they will aim to cocreate the way forward with teams rather than simply dictating what needs doing and how to do that.
Design great interventions.
Organizations don’t just turn on a dime, they require time, effort, and a series of valuable interventions to course correct.
A good agile consultant will look to design effective, practical, and actionable interventions that allow the team to overcome specific impediments or create new processes and systems that circumvent those challenges.
As with the old saying, you eat an elephant a bite at a time, so is it with agile consulting.
Empirical Process Control.
The interventions are underpinned by Empirical Process Control also known as empiricism.
The agile consultant will develop a hypothesis, in conjunction with the team, and design an experiment to prove or disprove that hypothesis.
They will design the metrics or measures that validate whether the experiment is succeeding or whether they need to go back to the drawing board. They will gain agreement on the metrics to be used and design a dashboard that makes the metrics visible to the organization and teams.
So, it is a matter of making the objectives and experiments transparent, frequently inspecting the work that is taking place, and using the data and evidence to inform how the team should adapt.
A great agile consultant instils this process in the team environment.
They want the team to continue using this process with all future experiments and initiatives to ensure that the team have rapid feedback loops, and that the team are always clear on what success looks like upfront, and what should inform the work they attempt next.
Build additional sensors in the feedback loop.
Sure, we have an idea of what we are aiming for in the experiment but because we work in a complex environment, there could be unintended consequences in other areas as a result of the experiment we are running.
A great agile consultant will help the team design sensors to ensure that there are no negative consequences in other parts of the value stream because of the work happening at the team level.
This is the heart of systems thinking and systems modelling.
We don’t just optimize for the local level, we need to consider the whole system and optimize for the entire system rather than pockets within that value stream.
Is the work we doing moving the needle on the customer and organizational objectives or are we simply making an intervention that serves one of the agile teams?
Summary of an Agile SAFe consultant.
So, a good SAFe consultant will:
- Meet the client where they are and understand the unique context of the organization.
- Design experiments and interventions to move the needle on what matters most.
- Create guardrails to ensure that the team have data and evidence to inform decisions.
- Scan the environment to make sure there are no unintended or negative consequences.
- Be positive and optimistic, yet never complacent. A ruthless commitment to improvement.
If you are rowing upstream, the moment you stop rowing the team move backward, and so it is essential that the agile consultant is focused on continuous improvement. Focused on helping the organization move forward and build on each iteration.
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.
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