"The Rollout: A Novel about Leadership and Building a Lean-Agile Enterprise with SAFe"

If you ever wanted to understand why people talk about scaling in a different way that to traditional agile thinking, this is the book for you. This is a business novel format book that brings home the basics of SAFe to people.

Starting with the premise that a lot of implementations of agile work well for teams, but are perceived as limited (or even a failure) when considered in a larger organization, the book takes you on a journey (via novel and characters) from an organization that had multiple agile teams to an approach where there is an enterprise and portfolio view of how we implement work through a team of teams.

What I liked in particular about this book is the way it brings some SAFe concepts down to earth. No longer are we talking about an “Agile Release Train” but rather we are understanding that the reason an ART works is because there is they “plan together, execute synchronously, and review the results together”. This understanding helps people understand how they would apply the concept in non-traditional environments.

I also liked the explanation of themes, epics, and capabilities. It sometimes seems like these concepts have been blown up to be intentionally confusing. But the explanation in this book (themes as filters for epics, epics being a longer term investment necessitating a business case, if your value stream is too big to line up with an ART, split it by capabilities) helps keep the conversation grounded.

Recommended for any business leader who has done “agile” and is wondering “what happened” and “whats now”.

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