Al Shalloway

Al Shalloway has been one of the three initial SAFe Principal Contributors for six years, the first SAFe program consultant trainer (SPCT) outside Scaled Agile Inc, and with his company, he has been a SAFe Gold partner.

In 2018 he broke off his relationship with Scaled Agile Inc and SAFe, citing among the reasons that SAFe has grown considerably more complex than it needs to be, and that he was told had to prove he had done a few “by the book” SAFe adoptions to renew his SPCT certification.

In 2020 he further commented that he thinks it’s more appropriate to call SAFe an improved Waterfall than it is to call it a poor Agile. That creating ARTs (Release Trains) merely accommodates dependencies and is a poor value creation structure. And that a 3-month PI (Product Increments planning) is better than annual but is not Agile.

Al Shalloway has also made some positive comments about some elements of SAFe. He said that SAFe can provide a good start for organizations that can’t deliver quickly or are even stuck, and that it provides:

a holistic view
an introduction to first principles
a cost-effective method of training teams
a way of providing alignment across the organization.

He added that the challenge for most organizations is that SAFe provides just enough to get started, not enough to finish the job of continually being able to improve. Most SAFe adoptions start with Essential SAFe and never move to the higher levels because of SAFe’s complexity. Many others stagnate after 2-3 program increments because they revert to a push system.

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Last modified October 6, 2022: Fix SAFe links (45cdbde)