It’s not too hard to get a senior executive to buy in Lean, at least on a superficial level. Reducing waste, building quality in, nurturing a culture for respecting people, encouraging innovation, focusing on the lead times and relentless improvement – yes, sounds good! The essence of flow, the changing role of leadership … hmm … those tend to require a bit more digesting.
SAFe – Scaled Agile Framework® – was created to tackle the challenges of M – XXL sized projects. Such projects consist of several agile teams having in total from ~50-100 up to hundreds or even thousands of practitioners. How about S sized projects with just one or a few teams, is there anything in SAFe for them or is Scrum just enough? If the team is a relatively independent pure software team and the project is short, Scrum (or Kanban) would be the way to go. However, an S sized team can benefit from selected SAFe practices at least under the following circumstances:
During the autumn 2016, Qentinel opened a new office in Tampere where almost 10 people work in Qentinel’s R&D and digital quality assurance consultancy. “Our aim was to hire new kind of talents with international experience,” tells Juha-Markus Aalto, who runs Qentinel’s Tampere office. “We succeeded in this and found top-level experts.”
When the clockspeed of business increases, the software development teams have to function faster. Our Talent Management Specialist, Hannele Kuitunen, reflects on how their work has changed while humans are still not built to multitask. What benefits increased clockspeed has brought along?
“Organization silos are bad! Break the silos!”
I was probably 22 when I first heard about the existence of organization silos, isolated functional units that operate their own empire without knowing and without caring about the surrounding silos. I was told that silos are bad and should be broken. At that time, the magic that was meant to destroy the silos was called “business process re-engineering”.