Do you want to break free from the weight of heavyweight frameworks and rediscovering what agility actually feels like?
The SAFe Reality
When I joined this company as a consultant in mid 2019, they were deep into their SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) implementation. They had ARTs (Agile Release Trains), PI Planning sessions and plenty of documentation and templates.
The walls were covered with SAFe posters (some of them I kept as a memento). People spoke in Program Increment timelines and Value Stream. Every quarter, the teams would have a big two-day PI Planning event where every team under the Agile Release trains would gather to plan the next 10 weeks down to the story level.
I have to be honest: it looked impressive, coordinated, enterprise-grade. It could have been one of the best implementation of SAFe I’ve personally encountered. But something wasn’t right.
The Cracks in the Framework
The problems started to show up in the everyday reality of getting work done:
Planning Paralysis: Teams spent a huge amount of time planning. Our PI Planning sessions became an elaborate theater where we pretended we could predict exactly what we would need (at user story level) for three months in advance.
Coordination Overhead: The framework created so many touchpoints between teams and some of them were being scheduled just because it was part of the framework.
Innovation Stagnation: Everything had to fit into the PI timeline so the teams became more like feature delivery machines.
The Breaking Point
The final straw came after a PI Planning session where we spent one whole day planning features and team capacities that, deep down, everyone knew would change within weeks of starting the PI. The priorities were shifting ever so fast, but we were locked into quarterly commitments and imaginary representations of business value assigned to PI objectives.
After the session, one of the POs pulled me aside and said: "Are we building an app or building a process to build an app? We seem to be moving slower now than when we started implementing SAFe a few years ago. What can we do?"
The Great Simplification
Instead of replacing one heavy framework with another complex system, we decided to simplify: go back to the fundamentals of Agile and Scrum. No new methodology, no elaborate process design, just boring old Scrum with a few thoughtful add-ons based on the experience we had with SAFe.
Stripping Back to Core Scrum
We returned to the original Scrum events and roles that had proven their worth over decades in so many other companies. These events stood the test of time because they actually worked when done right.
One of the Add-Ons: Quarterly Priority Reviews
To ensure we were not losing sight of the bigger picture, we introduced one key addition: Quarterly Priority Reviews.
The idea wasn’t your typical quarterly business reviews with endless PowerPoints. Instead, they were focused strategic checkpoints where leadership and teams came together to ask three simple questions:
Are we still heading where we said we would?
What have we learned that could change our direction?
What are our priorities for the next quarter?
These sessions became the beating heart of the teams, giving them the strategic context they needed while preserving their autonomy on planning and execution.
Why It Worked
Familiarity breeds confidence. Everyone already knew Scrum in a way or another. We didn't need months of (re)training or cultural change management, just a return to practices that had worked before.
Less overhead, more value. By eliminating the SAFe machinery, teams could focus on what they did best: building great apps and services.
Strategic without being rigid. The quarterly reviews gave us the strategic alignment we needed without the pretense of long-term detailed planning.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is go back to what already worked before.
What We Learned
Frameworks are tools, not masters. SAFe might work for some organizations, but it was too heavy for our culture and business reality.
Simplicity scales better than complexity. Our lightweight approach handled growth and change much more gracefully than a heavyweight framework.
Context is king. The best process is the one that fits your specific teams, culture, and business needs, not the one that looks good in a conference presentation.
Have you experienced the weight of heavy frameworks such as SAFe? Did it work for you?
