“They are unlikely to show-up” is what I said to my co-trainer when he suggested inviting senior managers to attend our first Leading SAFe two-day in-person class. He made a logical argument that senior managers should lead from the front and it’s imperative that they attend this class. I pushed back that no senior manager will likely have the time to take out two full-days from their schedule to sit through an agile training. 

To address the low participation count, we thought it would be a good idea to carve out byte-sized trainings that could be delivered in a short amount of time (no more than two hours), conducted online over Microsoft Teams. By no means was this a unique idea as most agile practitioners/trainers/coaches have found out that obtaining two full-days commitment from most leaders was going to be a non-starter. 

In-house agile trainings have become more commonplace as they not only fill a need of shorter time-commitment but have also allowed for cost-cutting measures, greater alignment with organizational needs, easier adoption and less reliance on industry standard agile frameworks. 

Early last year (2023), Capital One made the headlines by announcing that “ it was scrapping 1100 tech positions to eliminate its ‘Agile’ job family and integrate it into existing engineering and product manager roles”. This further reinforced the need for organizations to internalize agile learning, make it more actionable by applying it where it mattered most.  

Should you invest in building an in-house portfolio of agile training programs? Let’s look at the pros and cons of both in-house and industry standardized training programs from SAFe to better understand where they can add value and where they might fall short. 

How do In-house Agile Trainings Add Value?

Leverage In-house experts

After a few months of practicing agile, teams generally develop a good understanding of agile events and activities. Over-time, their experiences can be a great source of creating agile trainings, best suited for onboarding newer teams and occasional refresher sessions. 

These learnings can be shared at lunch-n-learn sessions, lightning talks and agile events, helping identify commonalities, carving out material that can bring a new team up to speed with tools, techniques and a primer to agile way of working. If you already have scrum-masters and agile coaches, they would (most likely) have a running list of resources that can be used to create a custom offering (avoiding any copyright infringements). 

Easier buy-in

Business units might view internal agile trainings more favorably, especially if they feel involved in the process and if their input has been factored into the development and structure of the agile trainings. Their participation can make the agile trainings more relevant. For example, a company manufacturing physical products may view kanban trainings more favorably than scrum, as they relate more readily to a system of flow.  

Lowers cost and more motivated employees

With internal resources, costs can be controlled more readily and made more predictable. Each small accomplishment can create a winning effect that consolidates to more wins, greater motivation for employees as the portfolio of agile trainings evolves to cover agile methods, tools and techniques. 

What are some potential issues with In-house Training? 

Difficult to influence change 

Internal resources are constrained to work within the organization culture, thus any aspect of training that hints at culture change might be viewed unfavorably and likely excluded from the course material. Consequently the training may not emphasize areas that are considered a hard-sell. For example, in my experience, internal trainings tend to emphasize team and technical agility and focus less on agile product delivery.

Updates take much longer 

Updates to course material can take longer when trainings are designed in-house. Any number of factors could influence this slow-down: lack of dedicated resources, politics and infighting, lack of transparency in the feedback process etc.  And, such delays can potentially make the material out of touch with ground reality.

Multiple versions can dilute value proposition

Business units may end up customizing the training to keep some of the legacy practices going on within the unit – especially if larger changes are unfathomable or just too difficult to comprehend. This could create multiple versions of agile trainings, each of which may only be applicable to the said business unit(s). 

May not present a holistic offering

The training portfolio may continue to rely on external trainings for advanced concepts and lack the ability to present a holistic offering. Advanced trainings may require hiring experts to build course material, thereby introducing greater entropy if there are ongoing challenges to adoption. 

How do Industry standard agile frameworks (SAFe) add value?

Common Language

Agile Frameworks (such as SAFe) present a common language across the industry to define agile terms and techniques. This creates a shared understanding of agile application and adoption that relies on a knowledge base of agile practices. Self-paced eLearning modules and a collection of online videos explaining important concepts are already available on applications such as SAFe Studio, which makes this knowledge easily accessible.

Tap into Industry experts

Partners, vendors and application providers can make it easier to implement agile and also make a plethora of case studies available. In some instances, you could leverage a try-before-buy model. Partners can bring in prior experience of working in similar situations that allows them to meet you where you are in the agile journey and set a custom implementation path. 

Outsider perspective can provide unique insights 

Leverage external expertise to perform the heavy-lifting such as conducting trainings, identifying value streams, setting up Agile Release Trains and organizing around value. Partners can also define a transition roadmap for pain-free peel-off so that internal resources can be trained on-the-job to fill in important roles such as Release Train Engineer, Solution Manager etc. 

The outsider perspective can provide unique insights into your blind-spots and make your agile journey much easier than going it alone. 

Where do Industry standard agile frameworks (SAFe) fall short?

Cost prohibitive 

Cost concerns are at the top of mind for many organizations and also an important factor in creation of home-grown agile trainings. Upfront and ongoing costs can add up to a sizable amount, especially when the benefits from agile transformation might take a few years to materialize. 

The trick is to define a vision for agile transformation and then put an implementation plan towards it. If your vision doesn’t paint a concrete picture, then you are likely to end up with a suboptimal outcome. 

May not work for hardware or cyber-physical systems 

Agile has its beginnings in the software world whereas Lean originated in the manufacturing world. If you are considering adopting SAFe, the out-of-box configurations are likely better aligned to software businesses. The iterative process of value delivery is easier to comprehend for teams that are working with malleable software and perhaps easier to re-organize (respective teams)

The same cannot be said for manufacturing processes that have been perfected over time to follow a predictable path (to achieve greater efficiency). Thus at the outset, SAFe may not seem to be a natural fit for manufacturing world.

However every business today utilizes software and data to make day-to-day decisions and is looking for innovation opportunities to grow their market share. Working with SAFe partners and experts can help identify how best to leverage SAFe for your organization. 

A (prior) failed implementation

If a prior application of SAFe has left you confused, frustrated and angry with all the chaos it created.. When no timelines were provided, most decisions were left to the agile team and most of the time spent in trainings, then you have a case of failed implementation. 

This can sway you to the other side of the pendulum, where you take a very cautious approach on anything-agile and revert to tried and tested – project management methods. 

An objective and pragmatic view is needed to discern what went wrong the last time and put in measures to start small and take an inspect-and-adapt approach. 

Sliding back towards older way-of-working

Newer ways of working, if not anchored in newer behaviors and sustained by a culture of transparency and accountability, can lead you back to the older ways-of-working. 

You may find yourself working with Agile constructs (ARTs, PI Planning etc) but unable to identify improvements in outcomes. This gradual slide-back can be caused by a variety of factors such as lack of management participation, a general disillusionment about agile way of working, covering failure by moving the goal-post, focusing on vanity metrics instead of outcome metrics etc. 

In essence, you may have additional factors to consider when making a decision on in-house or industry-standard agile framework (such as SAFe). 

In-house agile trainings fill an important gap in the agile journey by lowering the bar on time-commitment needed to get started and providing greater access to in-house agile practitioners. While they may not present a holistic offering to scale agile, they can help create a solid foundation for the next phase. 

Remember, at the beginning of an initiative, the cone of uncertainty is wide, thus not suitable to act on limited knowledge at the time and lock yourself to a point solution. 

The trick is to get feedback at regular intervals and course-correct to get to an optimal outcome. Share your thoughts and feedback in the comments below