Episode 25: Being SAFe with Marshall Guillory

Welcome back, listeners of the Agile Atelier podcast! Our guest today, Marshall Guillory, and I discuss the nuances of the scaled Agile framework, or SAFe. Marshall currently works as a senior consultant and enterprise agility coach with Agile Rising. He has over twenty-five years of business experience in software development, information technology, product management, and government fields and sectors. Marshall most recently completed successful implementations of SAFe for the FAA Emerson, and is a lead coach for an ongoing implementation at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Throughout his career, he has been responsible for the growth and fostering of environments where high-performing teams flourish as innovators.

              We open this episode by talking about Marshall’s experience that lead up to him using SAFe for the first time. We then move on to how planning and dependency mapping works in an large framework such as SAFe, the 10 essentials of SAFe, how to cultivate a product-first mindset rather than a delivery-mindset and whether there’s any space in SAFe for dual track agile. Marshall then touches on the topics of backlogs and forecasts, the importance of leadership buy-in, continuous exploration, and what’s new in SAFe 5.0. Finally, we wrap up our conversation by talking about where SAFe is useful, where it’s not, and what some traits of successful SAFe implementations are.

              During our conversation, Marshall referred to Dean Leffingwell and Agile Release Train (ART) a few times. You can connect with Marshall on LinkedIn and his website.

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You can’t scale something that doesn’t exist. So if you don’t have legitimate Agile teams practicing Scrum or using a legitimate Kanban system, then you don’t have anything to scale.

MARSHALL GUILLORY ON THE AGILE ATELIER PODCAST