SAFe Principle 9: Decentralise the decision-making.
Complicated environments and centralized decision-making
In a traditional management and project management environment, the overall assumption made by the organization is that managers and leaders are smarter, and more capable of making great decisions, than the people who are employed to do the work.
In these kinds of environments, it tends to be simple or complicated work, and so the assumption can be valid given the experience and expertise of the manager(s) involved.
For example, if a construction worker has built 1,000 bridges before, there is a strong chance that they know how to build a bridge better than someone who started out as a construction worker a few months ago.
Given that a bridge has a blueprint, and we know most of the variables involved, it is relatively safe to assume that the manager can manage the inexperienced worker and ensure that they follow best practice to achieve the outcome that matters.
In this case, a rock-solid bridge that performs its role to predetermined specifications.
So, having senior and experienced managers make decisions seems like a better idea than pushing that decision-making down to the construction worker that has just started their apprenticeship.
Complex Environments and decentralized decision-making
In a complex environment, such as software engineering or product development, we don’t know the answers upfront and we can’t know the variables involved.
The product has never been built before nor has the problem been solved before.
In an agile environment, we push decision-making closest to the experts with the most knowledge, insight, and expertise. The people who do the work are the people best positioned to make decisions about the product, how best to build it, and what needs to happen next.
Sure, we aren’t going to ask them to make financial decisions about the organization’s future because this isn’t their area of expertise, but we are going to push product development or software engineering decisions their way because they understand the complexity, the risk elements, and everything associated with their sphere of expertise.
Having a great manager or leader, who doesn’t have any technical capabilities or experience, making decisions about the product or the engineering process simply doesn’t make sense.
If we do that, we are setting them up to fail, and we are setting the team up to fail.
So, decentralising decision-making and empowering teams of experts to make decisions ensures that we have the highest probability of success.
The greater autonomy the team have, the less we see things like delays, bottlenecks, and impediments to progress because the team can make decisions rather than go to a committee for approval.
This is why SAFe principle 9, decentralize decision-making, is critical for success in the SAFe agile framework.
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.
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