(Re)Introducing Project Management in a SAFe world

This wiki focusses on (Re)Introducing Project Program and Portfolio Management to firms that have introduced SAFe but do not have a functioning PMO. This article is intended for both SAFe practitioners and Project, Program and Portfolio Managers and the Executives that lead them.

By Ben Blackburn

Background

Traditionally Software development has utilized Project, Program and Portfolio Management to support delivery. With the creation of new and highly effective small scale software development approaches like Scrum (1986 Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka / 1990's Jeff Sutherland, Ken Scwaber, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenn), Extreme programming (1996 Kent Beck), the Agile manifesto (2001), DevOps (late 1990's crystalizing in Pätrick Debois 2008/9), and Design Thinking (Cross over into Software development from the late 1990's onwards) development organizations have been evolving fast.

As the small scale but highly effective practices gave significant advantage to the team using them they rapidly gained popularity and adoption. As enterprises saw the value in these practices the demand for deploying these approaches grew.

Methods such as and Large Scale Scum (LeSS) in 2005, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) in 2011, Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) were developed to meet this need for introducing scalable Agile Practices. From the mid 2010's these practices were regularly featured in popular business literature such as Forbes and Harvard Business Review.

Those companies that adopted these practices gained significant success with results such as "98% experiencing success with Agile practices" and "75% saying that more than half of their Agile projects were successful" Competition created an imperative for most software organizations to change and adopt these practices.

The impact n Project management as a profession in Software development was profound. Early SAFe versions advocacy of a new organization with new roles took removed traditional project, program and portfolio manager responsibilities and moved them into the new SAFe's roles such as Product Owners, Scrum Masters, RTE, Epic and Business Owners. The impact on project management as a profession has been profound with the most popular Enterprise scale Agile model in the world Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), effectively advocating removing Project Managers from development organizations. This led many organizations to "throw out the baby with the bathwater" in relation to those project, program and portfolio management best practices that were not explicit in the scaled Agile models.

During the period 2011-2017 Project management as a separate formal practice within many software development Organizations literally had no place in those organizations that deployed SAFe as written. This is important because as of 2017 the SAFe methodology was used by 45% of those firms using an Agile methodology at scale.

Many of these firms have had to contend with a number of issues that this caused up until the acceptance of Project Management through its "(Re)introduction" in the form of an Agile Project Management Office (APMO) in the 2017 release of SAFe version 4,5. This new version implicitly accepted the role PMO's (and by extension Project Managers) play in strategy formation, Project and Program execution as well as owning and disseminating best practices (in this case represented in the SAFe model by the "Lean Centre of Excellence").

In this article we look at the issues that have arisen in many firms during their SAFe implementations and how implementing an APMO solves these issues. The article is intended for practitioners who are working in or with organizations that have deployed early versions of SAFe as part of the support for establishing an APMO along the lines now advocated by SAFe. It is also relevant or those organizations that are implementing SAFe but have not had an effective PMO in place before

Note: Due to the relatively new and evolving nature of SAFe there is limited empirical data around specific “Implementation issues in Large Scale Agile transformations” . As a consequence this article is more reliant more on Anecdotes, Personal Experience and other literature in this space.

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

According to the extensive "Scaling Agile Report 2017" by C-Prime . SAFe is the most popular Scaling Agile methodology by far. It is more than twice as popular as its nearest competitor Scrum of Scrums (or Scrum @ Scale) and more than 3 times as the 3rd most popular choice "Custom" (representing an in house patchwork of approaches)

What is SAFe?

According to ScaledAgileFramework.com:

Quoting Dean Leffingwell (the creator and chief methodologist of SAFe)

“SAFe® for Lean Enterprises is a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles, practices, and competencies for achieving business agility using Lean, Agile, and DevOps.” “It “…is built around the Seven Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise that are critical to achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage in an increasingly digital age”

ScaledAgileFramework.com illustrates the overall framework below. It makes this framework and support material available to all along with an extensive library of resources that can be used for free to support implementing and running SAFe in practice

The seven core competencies:

From the Sacledagileframework.com

"Lean-Agile Leadership – Advancing and applying Lean-Agile leadership skills that drive and sustain organizational change by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential

Team and Technical Agility – Driving team Agile behaviors as well as sound technical practices including Built-in Quality, Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Agile testing, Test-Driven Development (TDD), and more

Agile Product Delivery – Building high-performing teams-of-teams that use design thinking and customer-centricity to provide a continuous flow of valuable products using DevOps, the

Continuous Delivery Pipeline, and Release on Demand Enterprise Solution Delivery – Building and sustaining the world’s largest software applications, networks, and cyber-physical solutions

Lean Portfolio Management – Executing portfolio vision and strategy formulation, chartering portfolios, creating the Vision, Lean budgets and Guardrails, as well as portfolio prioritization, and road mapping

Organizational Agility – Aligning strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance

Continuous Learning Culture – Continually increasing knowledge, competence, and performance by becoming a learning organization committed to relentless improvement and innovation"

Levels & Objectives

SAFe's model aims to create an optimized "continuous delivery pipeline" via one or many Agile Release Trains (ARTs). There are 4 levels of SAFe suggested - "Essential", "Large Solution", "Portfolio" and a "Full" SAFe. All of ARTs should deliver improvements in delivery efficiency but at the Portfolio and Full levels the suggested organization changes to focus organization around the delivery of value with a more strategic portfolio emphasis relevant to larger companies that may have significant numbers of people working in a wide range of different business areas or providing a wide range of services

Introduction of Project, Program and Portfolio management

From SAFe 4,5 onwards we start to see the introduction of formal portfolio management processes as historically defined . First with Lean Budgets and then more features in each version until SAFe V5.0 which effectively introduces full portfolio management and portfolio optimization capabilities in the traditional project management sense with Portfolio Kanbans and Backlogs, Lean Budgets and project & program budget "Guardrails". By also introducing an APMO working with the Lean Center of Excellence it seems the model has created P3O's definition of program or portfolio offices

Roles and responsibilities

Developer and tester roles remain very similarly defined to the past but have new practices such as daily stand-ups, regular demo's & retrospectives but the roles responsibilities remain broadly the same but SAFe defines new roles in its organizations such as Scrum Master, Product Owner, Product Manager, Release Train Engineer and Solution Train Engineer, System Engineer & Solution Architects. This means may of the higher level expert and managerial positions change change substantially - having different relationships, responsibilities and reporting lines than.

What are the benefits of SAFE?

As advertised on ScaleAgileFramewrok.com:

20 – 50% increase in productivity

25 – 75% improvements in quality

30 – 75% faster time-to-market

10 – 50% increase in employee engagement and job satisfaction

Results like these sound very impressive. While Quality improvements and Employee engagement and satisfaction can be pretty straightforward to report and compare, productivity and time to market are much harder to compare directly before and after an agile transformation. Increases in productivity are often very difficult to quantify when the basis changes (I.e from hours to stories) how do you compare these apples and oranges? Likewise with Time to market - if estimation comparisons are flawed so is time to market.

That said - and working back from quality metrics with some basic assumption (like the bugs that didn't need fixing after release are now available for new development) INSERT IBM COST OF BUGS TO FIX it seems logical that organizations gain significant efficiency improvements through SAFe

My personal experience at a Mid Sized software firm was introducing basic Agile practices such as cross functional team Scrum to a traditionally Waterfall organization raised productivity from 70-80% of estimated scope per to circa 104% within 12 months. In the case I mention we had the rare situation of 3 Agile teams having the old waterfall estimation process running throughout the period as the main development organizations processes still required the provision of hourly estimates. Therefore the figures are not subject to comparison errors as is usual during an agile transformation. This experience would seem to support the kind of figures SAFe advertise.

Issues raised with SAFe

file:///C:/Users/ben_b/Downloads/Barroca2019_Chapter_AgileTransformationASummaryAnd.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335510943_Agile_Transformation_A_Summary_and_Research_Agenda_from_the_First_International_Workshop

Epics Epic owners as PM's without a home pmo and with weakend authoity and budget control. Epics at scale larger irganizations may have multiple Epicowners outside of the business but have no PMO to help organize them

Difficulty managing Value

Only some of the advantages of flexibility with none of the advantages of standardization. Stories across team mean estimation is a mess. COP but without mandates to adopt best practices & paradoxically A standard one size fits all - but PI planning may be a waste for Maintenance teams, team Kanban is most appropriate

Roots in Business to consumer Growing a business in a greenfield business to consumer space is where agile practices are optimal. Regular release of small packages of features to the market to build revenue makes perfect sense. But large Business to Business deals where incentives are to meet scope and make a margin requiree a different kind of managemeht. Even Value streams are still aligned with the B2C model rather than B2B.

Agile incremental practice s Agile Business to business deals for software are often large wide ranging deals involving deveelopment 

Issues with responsible people for dealing with the wider organization and third parties.

Synchronizing work. Dependencies and prioiritization. ART's over Cross function al epics - who may have

Standards

Long term planning and dealing with the big things. In order to optimize value SAFe advocates focus on completing small things that have value now, large and complex deliveries with payouts that may not come for a long time are very difficult to deal with with. WSJF is not always the right tool in these cases. When large difficult developments come along the ART is not designed to deal with them . Spikes for the next PI are all very well but for businesses with Commitments to 3rd parties this can be very hard to handle

Everyone outside the SAFe bubble. 3rd party suppliers, Projects with the rest of the organization,

Keeping agile at abstract levels of responsibility Team level has very clear roles and responsibilities but by the time you scale up to the Epic Owners and Business Owners of 100 person ARTs the responsibilities start to get more abstract and the structures and organizations that may be needed to function optimally are missing

What is an Epic owner - often in practice a senior Product Manager delivering some work or a dedicated person to handle cross ART work that requires significant co-ordination making up for weaknesses or absence of formal standardised processes across the organization with a weakened escalation path and due to missing PMO

Sold as bottom up but actually top down In reality teams "pick the work the organization needs them to.

SAFe still contains some process theatre. Retrospsectives and Planing events. Team scrum is flexible and practices can esasily be adapted (so retrospectives likley to be able to be resolved quickly in the scrum team itself. In larger organizations a teams after a few "Retrospective" sessions the team have a back log of issues that have been escalated but management are unable to resolve. This cam create disillusion in practices

Project Management as a practice is challenged

For a number of different reasons Project Management as a practice is challenged during an Agile transformation

Culture Change within the development organization

In ADKAR (Prosci’s ADKAR model for best practice for Change Management) . The A stands for Awareness of the need for change, absorbing this best practice the SAFe implementation model suggests creating “A burning platform”" . as part of motivating people towards the change. This “Burning platform” creates a momentum away from old waterfall practices and the roles and responsibilities of the past and seeks to motivate people towards the new Organizational model. Where the SAFe implementation creates this motivation and the model excludes project management it is only natural that those practicing SAFe will reject Project Management

Culture of the wider Agile Community

The Agile community coming out of Scrum and finding itself newly empowered with extra roles and responsibilities and its practices being recognized and scaled up into management layers is permeated with a sentiment that old school project management is not relevant any more. For example: "When it comes to agile project management roles, most agile processes - Scrum in particular - do not include a project manager. Agile “project manager” roles and responsibilities are shared among others on the project, namely the team, Scrum Master and product owner" . Although these are natural responses in this context the agile communities history and background in devleopment shows here by ignoring or discounting all of the other befits of project management. By dismissing project management as a practice the culture also discredits their more senior colleagues in Program and Portfolio management even though that is the area in the SAFe model furthest away from SAF’e scrum roots and the most immature parts of the model. Dean Leffingwell the creator of SAFe while introducing the APMO even tries to differentiate it from traditional PMO’s implying that old PMO’s were in some way not of equal value

Change in responsibilities in the organization

The responsibilities from most development organizations business as usual roles such as Team and department managers, tech leads and team leads can easily become Srum Masters, RTE’s or Architects. The majority of roles in a company fall into these categories but project management does not.

Consultants become the change agents for SAFe implementations

Traditionally most companies would look to their own PMO to source Program Management resources for initiatives of this size and would still retain ownership and accountability even where consultants or third parties were bought in to manage the execution. But while implementing SAFe most companies seek external SAFe consultancy support to act as early “Lean Agile Change Agents (before the organization establishes its lean center of Excellence). Even where Project managers start these programs with all of the traditional tools like long term multi workstream projects and plans the ownership of the execution tends to move to the Consultants. As soon as the transformation starts long term planning is replaced by Kanban boards and backlogs. The chnage projects original Governance and organization are disrupted. As are the roles of everyone involved in the change from scrum masters to Business owners. In this landscape it is common for control of the Project management to slip. Early successes with culture change as represented by new and higher levels of employee engagement and satisfaction INSERT CITATION demonstrate the value of the new working practices validating decisions to

General criticisms of SAFe

I practice most organizations find work arounds to solve these issues as they mature, but as common problems experienced during implementation and early adoption they could be either incorporated more explicitly into the model or resolved by addressing them formally as part of the implementation.

Delegated Authority & Budgets Historical versions of SAFe moved many traditional project and program manager responsibilities to lower levels in the organization. For example Product Owners might be given scope and therefore de-facto budget responsibility for delivery. Profitability for deals can easily be eroded where product owners manage scope and client satisfaction without regard to the bigger picture. This problem is particularly pronounced at the Epic level when multiple teams and ART’s are involved. Each team and ART aims to do the best job they can and the potential for additional work to gold plate and futureproof solutions can lead to new unnecessary scope/costs

Dependency management In the absence of standards for prioritization and value agreed across Teams and ART’s deliveries - in particular larger "Epics" - can have issues synchronizing work. Even in teams with standards for agreeing value and having shared estimation basis, it is common that one team 1s blocking issue is not prioritized by team 2 due to higher value work in their backlog or the imperative to stick to their own sprints commitments. This can lead to delays and lost productivity that a traditional project manager would have resolved Dependency management processes across teams and ART’s need to be very advanced and flexible to optimize delivery. This is hard to do in practice. Otherwise delegated authority to make these decisions needs to be delegated sufficiently to optimize for whole deliverable performance.

- Hard to prioritize large and difficult things

SAFe implementations introduce lots of new working practices such as Business Kanbans

(Re) Introducing a SAFe APMO

Motivation for (Re)Introducing an (A)PMO

Formal Portfolio Management is a best practice in successful Agile companies

Market Research from CA Technologies suggests that "Agility Masters" (defined as the top 18% of respondents in terms of maturity of Agile and DevOps practices) are:

1) 3,2 times more likely to strongly agree that portfolio management has a key role to play in organizations

2) 4.1 times more likely to agree the company has the right Vision and strategy .

PMO's address many of the problems raised with SAFe

In the study "Recurring Concerns and Best Practices of Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters" Analyzes the issues raised by Scrum Masters and Agile coaches. As the Agile coach operates at all levels of the organization the issues raised can be seen as general issues rather than specific to any one role. The issues are analyzed and specific best practices within Agile suggested to resolve them. The conclusion of the study is that the majority of issues in SAFe implementations can be addressed with the mediating actions below. (1) PUBLISH GOOD PRACTICES (2) SUPERVISION (3) GLOBAL IMPEDIMENT PROCESS (4) GLOBAL IMPEDIMENT BOARD (5) DON’T USE SCALING AGILE FRAMEWORKS AS A RECIPE

When modified to apply to fits very well with many activities performed by a formal PMO along the lines of the those recommended by Axelos or the PMI (through its P3O methodology). Points 3 & 4 relating to Global Boards very explicitly states that Companies should have higher level bodies to help manage issues across teams conflicts incorporate best practices regardless of its inclusion in the SAFe model formally or not.

This leads to the conclusion that larger companies benefit the most from Implementing SAFe with a strong PMO supporting strategy formation and execution regardless of any specific direction or lack of direction about this from SAFe.

Dean Leffingwell says so...

As Dean Leffingwell (the creator and chief methodologist at SAFe) himself said in his 2010 book "Agile Software Requirements" "Project Managers should be re-tasked as Agile Project Managers." This new role was specifically intended to address managing the types of issues that were not passed explicitly into the scrum teams themselves such as contract and relationship management and communication interfaces with suppliers, customers and other parts of the enterprise. The introduction of the APMO into SAFe suggest an active role for a PMO to both support execution - and to act as a Center of Excellence(CoE). As much as the CoE is defined in SAFe as a Lean CoE it is likley that the role would expand- help manage issues thag can happen at Epic level and to support Business owners in organizsations with multiple release trains.

in 2017 also addresses issues such as Budget control through "Budget Guardrails"   

Although this was published a year before the release of SAFe the thought appears to have finally emerged in the SAFe framework by 2017.

How to (Re)Introduce a (A)PMO

Best practice would suggest implementing a P3M3 maturity assessment to identify the state of the organization prior to identifying the organizations aspiration for the function.

and then implementing the most appropriate form of PMO and next steps to implementing or re-invogorating whatever functions fulfilling these roles .

Considering the specific issues of Budget/Value control

Issues with Implementing a PMO

- Cultural resistance - Organizational maturity and ability to absorb change

Beyond SAF'e V5.0's APMO

Current SAFe model 4.5 addresses many issues by providing a flexible new function - the APMO but it does not address all of the issues raised in XXXX.

For instance: By not clarifying the scope of the manate of the new LACE/APMO it does not clarify as the scope necessarily have a mandate to address issues with Communities of practice not rolling out best practices efficiently

Annotated Bibliography

Broadcom https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/how-agile-and-devops-enable-digital-readiness-and-transformation

Research on the state of Adoption of Agile principles, DevOps and interestingly on the impacts of Agile practices on the wider organization. Agility and business performance opinions and statistics.

Researchgate https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336899351_Identifying_and_Documenting_Recurring_Concerns_and_Best_Practices_of_Agile_Coaches_and_Scrum_Masters_in_Large-Scale_Agile_Development

Researchgate has several useful (but small scale) studies on issues with Large Scale Agile implementations. One of the most relevant was this one. It Investigates the types of issues experienced by Practitioners of large scale agile frameworks and provides the best practice options to resolve them. Including most importantly the finding not to treat the frameworks as gospel.

VersionOne State of Agile Annual reports. https://stateofagile.com/#. Background to Agile adoption and key trends in Agile by one of the larger dedicated Agile Systems vendors. Circa 1500 respondents across industries and at varying organizational sizes. Covers everything from motivations to adopting Agile through to to perceptions of success and specific techniques used. Solid general background to Agile in practice

Quotes

Article on Medium.com - On of the 15 reasons to choose SAFe over waterfall was give as "2. Enhancing the Role of Project and Program Managers".

Suggestions for further reading

Scaledagileframework https://www.scaledagileframework.com/

The Agile Manifesto: https://agilemanifesto.org/

Agile Alliance: https://www.agilealliance.org/resources

Disciplined Agile https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/start-here

HotPMO: https://www.hotpmo.com/

© SAFe and Scaled Agile Framework are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc