Hello everyone,

You may have read Dean’s recent blog post about the expansion of our thought leadership capabilities to keep advancing the Scaled Agile Framework and associated courseware. As SAFe Methodologists, we – Richard and Inbar – feel privileged to not only be working with such a great team of experts but also for our opportunities to engage with many other influential thought leaders. For example, at the October SAFe Summit in San Antonio we were able to sit down for extensive interviews with DevOps visionary Gene Kim and Lean product development flow thought leader Don Reinertsen following their well-received keynote presentations.

Inbar: I had the privilege of sitting down with Don to discuss leadership in product development flow, especially what Don refers to as the swing of the pendulum from the central control of the waterfall method to classic Agile methods which first appeared at the small team level. A critical, ongoing issue is how to balance energizing people by giving them autonomy while still maintaining alignment. Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be a binary decision. I met with Don both before and after this interview to continue to discuss these topics, and I am still thinking about them many weeks later. Watch the video to hear more of the discussion. 

Richard: Gene and I talked about the commonality between DevOps practices and SAFe principles given that in many ways they are both derived from Lean. We went on to discuss the issue of lead time and its impact on both sides of the value stream (design and development as well as testing and operations), hypothesis-driven development, and MVPs to create genuine organizational value. Do you fear doing deployments? Is this too often an emotional, rather than a rational, decision at your organization? Watch the video to listen to our discussion of these and many other DevOps issues.

Always be SAFe!

-Richard Knaster and Inbar Oren, Methodologists and SAFe Fellows