Blog

Many teams struggle to let go of their waterfall, silo mentality when they first transition to agile ways-of-working. In particular they shy away from collaboratively working on the definition, evolution and implementation of their backlog items insisting on up-front definition of Features and Stories, and clean handovers between the Product Owners and the Development Teams. This is an issue that we see with all the various agile methods but which always seems to get compounded whenever teams try to scale. So what are the worst things you can do to compromise the agility of your program when using Features? In Part 4 of this series, Ian Spence provides some practical tips to avoid waterfalling your features.

Many teams struggle to let go of their waterfall, silo mentality when they first transition to agile ways-of-working. In particular they shy away from collaboratively working on the definition, evolution and implementation of their backlog items insisting on up-front definition of Features and Stories, and clean handovers between the Product Owners and the Development Teams. This is an issue that we see with all the various agile methods but which always seems to get compounded whenever teams try to scale. So what are the worst things you can do to compromise the agility of your program when using Features? In Part 2 of this series, Ian Spence defines the seven deadly sins of feature preparation, and the most wasteful practices we have seen teams adopt in an attempt to be better prepared for the PI Planning event.

In this short blog Ian Spence looks at how many Features a SAFe® Agile Release Train needs to prepare to be ready for their PI (Program Increment) / big room planning event.

I was recently asked to help facilitate and to act as coach at a multi-day kick-off event for a new Agile Release Train (ART). The agenda initially looked a lot like that of the SAFe Program Increment (PI) Planning event, but there were immediate differences, the main one being a restricted attendee list due to ongoing team recruitment. The people in the room consisted largely of the SAFe Program level: Release Train Engineer (RTE), Product Management, Product Owner, Architecture, and a few Subject Matter Experts...