Breaking the SAFe: Why Did SAFe Redefine the Scrum Master?

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Breaking the SAFe with Yuval Yeret and Ryan Ripley

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[DocThorQ]

Ryan, hands down. Thank so, so much you altered the broadcast to that format. Both - that and the debate about story points - are brilliant for more advanced agile/lean folks. As an IT industry, we need exactly that kind of content, less bro-agile science on youtube where we harm our young colleagues by teaching them bad practices. You debunk the myths, and your series brake bro-agile science. Thank you

[DanielLiljeberg]

That SAFe kept the Scrum Master name to "leverage what came with it", but tweaked it a bit to fit their environment, in many ways acted to dilute and conflate what Scrum Master means. I have worked with great Scrum Masters who have been put in situations by companies who have looked at SAFe, but then hire PO's and Scrum Masters without mentioning SAFe and they doing a great job in their roles. Working with stakeholders, understanding and owning the product, working to explain it to the team and have them share that ownership, work with the team to evolve them and their agility... and the organisation revolting against then because they thought they would be getting something else from the roles. A PO that was basically a messenger/go-between for the team and a Scrum Master that should focus more on managing the team, reporting things to management, going to random meetings etc.

[Rekettyelovag]

When I interview to bigger companies, they always say they don't want me (Scrum Master), around the exec, portfolio, management level and I should stay with the team, and help them be more productive and efficient. When I say ~70% of the problems' origin need to be discussed with you, the management and "people with power" in order to fulfill this wish, then they do a confused pikachu face.

[vkxcqsn]

Definitely a good episode. It helped clarify some things for me. If I had known about EBM and the differences between SAFe ScrumMaster and Professional ScrumMaster earlier, I might have been more discerning in the approach I wanted to take. It’s more of a preference than one is better than the other. Professional ScrumMaster falls more into line with how I was trained and developed in classes I took outside of work for several years.

However, I get the evolutionary approach.

I believe Capital One calls SAFe ScrumMasters Agile Delivery Lead which makes more sense to me as SAFe ScrumMasters are sometimes just using Kanban. I personally thought it was weird that I was called a SAFe ScrumMaster when all I was doing was some coordination, using flow metrics sometimes, and other times attempting to distill Kanban-like practices even if working on what I consider to be a super small project that is more complicated than complex.

I do miss working on a large, complex project where I was able to see a the system end to end and get real customer feedback.

[BorisGligorijevic]

This entire SAFe looks to me as some salesy managers got together, put up a bunch of stuff together, which all kinda look like agile (but are not) with the only goal being keeping the s… same as before and so that nothing must change for them. Yet they can say „we do advanced agile“. A bunch of BS if you ask me.

[UjjwalPrakashSinha]

love this candid discussion Ryan and thanks to Yuval for being so honest.

As much as I do not agree to the approach SAFe took just to make things fit to the current ways of working (status-quo), I love that Yuval was honest in accepting the reality of SAFe.

Hats off guys. Thanks for this great content

[tomaszniemiec]

As a SAFe long time hater, I approve this episode. Regarding hierarchy, scrum master's role withing the organization, working beyond the team and so on - so if I understood Yuval correctly, in SAFe there are multiple Scrum Master roles with different horizons/reach. For one the team are developers and PO, and for another Scrum Master the team he/she works with are, i.e. managers. This makes sense for a legacy company that is not in a position to undergo a big scale transformation. And also this does not have to be a hierarchy of Scrum Master or the Agile Coach to Scrum Master situation. All can work in a community alike way, with different domains.

[googleaccount]

A difficult thing is separating patterns from popular antipatterns. Apparently 47% of agile transformation fail, and certainly there have been lessons learned along the way.

[cigdemsakajackson]

Thank you for such a brilliant discussion!

[jeroennollet]

What interests me the most is that Yuval mentions that SAFe took the 'in the trenches’ approach when looking at the Scrum Master. Yet, the Scrum Master remains responsible to coach the team and find their way toward agility.

However, I’ve done 5 sequential SAFe projects and found out that in 4 of those 5 projects, the SM had no authority whatsoever to change how the team works. This authority was given to Agile coaches, the LACE, SAFe Consultants, or whoever was in charge of the SAFe implementation and was not to be changed by anyone else.

Is this typical in SAFe or are these cases of ‘zombie SAFe best practices’ that happen in the trenches? I can truly see the benefit of taking SAfe into a large organization to learn how to be more agile. However, the danger with SAFe, or any other scaling framework, is that when you roll this out poorly, you get rubbish at scale.

This also applies to Scrum, but the difference to me is that a Scrum team is small so the impact is potentially minimal. Another team, with another Scrum Master, can operate in a completely different way. Whereas in SAFe, if an organization leaves no freedom to the team to decide on their way of working, you cripple the entire company.

I guess this is the main reason why SAFe is being bashed and why I don’t like the framework myself. It’s the difference between the theory vs. what actually happens in the trenches. Again, the same goes for Scrum, but the impact is less because Scrum focuses on teams, not entire companies.

[NNNN-yjqz]

There's always a crunch of resources. I'm both a developer and a SAFe scrum master. In the environment where the team does not want to do all the 'bureaucracy' associated with SAFe, there's a lot of burden on a scrum master. Also, SAFe removes initiative from the team. We get pre-defined priorities and tasks to spread throughout the PI. We no longer have a say on what we want to do. So the team is simply waiting for me to go through the list and talk through the issues to tackle. I have to ask when they are available, when they are taking leaves... This is a pure secretary's/accountant's work of putting plans together and counting story points...

[Raywarenow]

I think it would have been very interesting to talk about who the people are in the teams and where they come from. The fact is that many, many teams are from other cultures or global service delivery organisations. The result of this is that organisations feel that the team lead focal point is needed, as they are not seeking to develop teams that are supplied in from other organisationss. Maybe this reality was the elephant that did not even get into the room.

[osnyzinho]

Very nice. SAFe is something that I want to learn in the future. Ryan, you mentioned that you will provide the links used in this video somewhere, but I couldn't find. Could you please share with me?

[youngloenoe]

I have worked with 4 different Scrum Master under SAFe. They are all secretaries. They have no power to change anything. Most of them don't even know Agile. They took a quick course and got certified.

I agree with what others have mentioned: SAFe should just stop using Scrum terms. Own itself. Because in the end of the day it just confuses people and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of those trying to practice Agile.

[rolemodel]

What is the measure / indicator of agility of the SAFe Scrum Master as defined by SAFe and what is found on the ground?

[KevinMichaelCarroll]

I'm curious what approach you would recommend for a growth plan for those who are new to both. Would it be best to learn the Scrum framework and pause to pursue that certification before moving on to SAFe and any certification there. It seems that learning about both and trying to take the PSM I exam, for example, may lead to failure unless additional time is invested to fully digest the differences between the two.

[matthewhodgson]

The suggestion of incremental change for SAFe is an interesting one. However, I keep seeing in my own work implementing SAFe the lift and shift of legacy leadership, project management, and other roles, creates an "agile" approach that diminishes the effectiveness of Product Owners and effective Scrum Masters. It leaves the organization ultimately and largely unchanged.

[Alpemanden]

How on earth do you find a person who can actually fill out the SM then? It's like looking for a unicorn. They should do all that a professional SM should do, which is hard enough already. So loads of EQ, facilitation skills and on top of that. Be able to represent the developers hence have an above average understanding of coding etc. That's a tall order in my opinion.

[RobertParker-zbic]

SAFe masquerades as Agile. I wish they’d just be honest and say that they’re implementing a new way of doing waterfall. That would be far more accurate. Beyond all of the heavy processes, quite simply no effective product led organization can use SAFe and expect to deliver anything other than at best very mediocre products. The very concept of PI Planning is anti Agile. How can you possibly experiment when you just planned out your next 10 weeks worth of work?

[rolemodel]

What is the career progression or success criteria of a PSM in a SAFe environment?