Introduction to Inspect and Adapt in SAFe

The Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, provides a set of proven practices for implementing agile and lean approaches at enterprise scale. One of the key events in SAFe is the Inspect and Adapt (I&A), which plays a vital role in driving relentless improvement. Let’s take an in-depth look at the purpose and significance of the I&A event in SAFe.

The Purpose of Inspect and Adapt

The I&A event is held at the end of each Planning Interval (PI), which is a timeboxed event during which an Agile Release Train (ART) Demos the value built during the PI, validate the metrics and also pick a high priority problem faced by the ART and do a root cause analysis and find the solution for the problem.  The I&A serves several important purposes:

1. Demonstrate the current state of the solution – Teams showcase the features and capabilities developed during the PI, allowing stakeholders to see the progress and provide feedback. This is done through the PI System Demo portion of the event.

2. Evaluate performance quantitatively and qualitatively – Metrics and data are reviewed to assess the ART’s performance and identify trends. This includes each team’s planned vs. actual business value, which rolls up to the ART predictability measure. Qualitative feedback is also gathered.

3. Reflect and identify improvements – Teams conduct a retrospective to surface significant problems and improvement opportunities. A structured problem-solving workshop is then held to perform root cause analysis and define corrective actions.

In essence, the I&A is a chance to assess the ART’s current state, both in terms of the solution being built and the process being followed, and determine how to improve going forward. It’s a critical mechanism for enabling the continuous improvement that is core to SAFe.

Upholding SAFe Principles and Values

The I&A event supports and upholds several key principles and values of SAFe:

Alignment with Agile and Lean Principles

One of the 12 principles in the Agile Manifesto states: “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” The I&A event directly supports putting this principle into practice at an ART level. 

By having a cadence-based event dedicated to inspection and adaptation, with the active involvement of agile teams and stakeholders, SAFe ensures that this agile principle is being applied even at scale. The event synchronizes the teams, aligns them with common improvement goals, and secures stakeholder feedback – all of which are key aspects of SAFe.

Enabling Continuous Learning and Relentless Improvement

SAFe defines relentless improvement as one of the four core values of the framework. It is also a dimension of the core competency of Continuous Learning Culture. The I&A plays a key role in enabling continuous learning and improvement across the ART.

While teams have opportunities to inspect and adapt at a more granular level, such as in Iteration Retrospectives, the I&A ensures that structured time is set aside to identify more systemic, cross-cutting improvements at the ART level. Having this cadence helps make continuous improvement an integral part of the ART’s way of working.

Facilitating Systems Thinking

Principle 2 of  SAFe Emphasizes systems thinking – taking a holistic view to optimize the whole rather than local optimizations. The I&A supports systems thinking by bringing together all the teams in an ART, along with key stakeholders, to evaluate progress and improvements from an ART/value stream level. 

The event helps transcend team boundaries and local concerns to focus on the bigger-picture outcome of the ART. For example, the PI System Demo looks at the integrated solution across all the teams. Similarly, the problem-solving workshop portion emphasizes root cause analysis, digging deep to identify systemic issues, not just surface-level symptoms.

Key Elements of the I&A Event

Let’s now walk through the major elements and activities that typically comprise the I&A event.

PI System Demo

The I&A starts with the PI System Demo, where each team across the ART demonstrates all the features developed over the PI. This is a chance to showcase the ART’s accomplishments and get feedback from stakeholders. Some key characteristics of the PI System Demo:

– Broad audience that includes ART stakeholders, customers, and portfolio representatives in addition to the agile teams

– More formal and structured than iteration demos, with extra preparation and setup

– Timeboxed to an hour or less

– Presents the solution at a higher-level suitable for the audience

In addition to demonstrating the solution, the actual business value achieved by each team for their PI objectives is reviewed against the planned business value, and an overall achievement score is calculated.

Quantitative and Qualitative Measurement

The next part of the I&A is reviewing quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback to assess the ART’s performance. The Release Train Engineer (RTE) often collects and analyzes the data beforehand and facilitates presenting the findings.

Quantitative metrics include the ART predictability measure, which is calculated by aggregating each team’s actual vs. planned business value scores. Reliable ARTs should operate in the 80-100% predictability range. Other metrics the ART tracks may also be reviewed.

Qualitative feedback often comes from sources like customer satisfaction surveys, defect reports, employee engagement surveys, etc. These provide additional insights into how well the ART is doing.

Retrospective and Problem-Solving Workshop  

The last portion of the I&A is the retrospective and problem-solving workshop. The retrospective is a brief session, 30 minutes or less, where teams identify significant issues to address in the subsequent workshop. 

In the Problem Solving workshop, the entire ART discusses the different high priority problems faced by different teams and then agree upon one critical problem to be considered for solving.

Techniques like root cause analysis, fishbone diagrams, and the “5 Whys” are used to dig beneath surface-level symptoms and identify the root causes of problems. Once the top root causes are determined, teams brainstorm potential solutions. Since the entire ART is present during the workshop, it  enables the workshop to harness diverse points of view and bring together the people most motivated and relevant to drive improvements in particular areas.

The most viable solutions, usually around three, are then written up as user stories or features for the ART backlog. They are planned in the next PI Planning to ensure the identified improvements are properly resourced and implemented. The improvement items are marked as ‘Improvement Backlogs’ for the next PI / Iteration for the teams to pick and work on. 

Inspect and Adapt for Solution Trains

For large solutions that require multiple ARTs, there is an additional I&A event at the Solution Train level. This follows the same general format as the ART I&A, but with a subset of representatives from the ARTs and suppliers involved in that Solution Train. This is mainly because with more people on each of the trains, discussion may become cumbersome. Hence only selected representatives of the ARTs and stakeholders who are best suited to resolve the problems. I&A at ‘Large Solution’ configuration includes the ‘Solution Demo’

The Solution Train I&A allows inspection and adaptation to occur at that higher level, enabling optimizations across the entire value stream. This is another example of SAFe’s emphasis on systems thinking – having a tiered structure of I&A events to match the organizational hierarchy.

Conclusion

The Inspect and Adapt event is a foundational element of the Scaled Agile Framework. It upholds key agile and lean principles around reflection and continuous improvement. By orchestrating a demonstration of results, quantitative and qualitative performance reviews, and a structured problem-solving workshop at the ART-level, the I&A operationalizes the SAFe core value of relentless improvement.

While teams have other opportunities to inspect and adapt, such as iteration retrospectives, the I&A event ensures that the entire Agile Release Train is continuously evaluating and improving its performance. The event enables systems thinking by bringing together the perspectives of multiple teams and stakeholders.

In the spirit of SAFe, the I&A event is a significant step in establishing continuous learning and improvement as an integral part of the culture and way of working in an agile enterprise at scale. It’s a critical mechanism by which SAFe helps organizations become more agile and responsive to change in pursuit of delivering maximum customer value.