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Some of us have been saying for years what the website “The SAFe Delusion” so nicely portrays: SAFe Agile sells so well to economic buyers within corporate environments exactly because it takes the old crusty bureaucracy and further legitimizes it by sprinking capital-A Agile lingo, methods and roles on top.
It’s the same pretend-predictable approach that the phase-gate used in the 90s and early-2000s to utterly dominate managerial thinking around project management for product development.
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“agile” does not mean “Agile”.
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“agility” does not imply “Agile framework”.
All those frameworks cater to some managers’ deep-seated emotional need of feeling in control (an illusion of it, to be precise), just because they can put every single person into a little box on a process and just because everything has some little description on some process tome blessed with big words like “Lean” and “Enterprise”.
Woooooo wow, enterprise, wow. Much business. Very agile. Such leadership.
You will never achieve agility with such frameworks. You will, however, achieve a bunch of new job titles, tons of meetings, etc.
Oh yeah, also the people dancing around this straitjacket framework will get to adorn their CV with fancy-sounding certifications and titles. In other words: your development becomes infused with what the software world already knows as “RDD”: Resume-Driven Development.
Congratulations. You played yourself (and your whole organization).
The Incredible Story of Deft explores this phenomenon, not only for Agile, but for all similar “miracle cures”.
