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

I never expected this book to be a one of those fiction thrillers that you don't want to stop reading until the end. I expected this to be a boring book of someone's story of trying to implement another boring project management framework in a corporate environment. From the very start I was totally captured by the story line because it is very much closer to my personal experiences in my professional life for last couple of decades. I had to purposefully slow down my reading speed so I can grasp the principles the story is written about and their applications. Several times I had to re-read certain parts so I can apply what I learnt in my day to day work life. Although the book is few years old, I am sure people who are new (like myself) to Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) still can get a lot out of it. The book has the SAFe concepts and application examples right there, if you have patience to go through it. Another book that compliments this book is "SAFe 5.0 Distilled" by Richard Knaster and David Leffingwiell. I highly recommend these two books for any SAFe Scrum Masters. I wish Alex Yakyma will take time to update "Rollout" to fit in to current version of SAFe.

Alex Yakyma wrote a great book “The Rollout: A Novel about Leadership and Building a Lean-Agile Enterprise with SAFe”. It’s a business novel in the style of The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt or The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford.This book gives you a good understanding what it means to implement SAFe in an organization. It’s a fictional story but on the other hand it is based on a broad range of real-life implementations and the pitfalls you can make or have to overcome.In this novel we will follow Ethan, the newly appointed Transformation Team Leader at VeraComm System, a large product development organization. He is facing an organization who can’t deliver anymore what they are promising. They are rapidly losing market share due to increasing complexity of their communications solutions, they are over promising and underperforming. The organization has implemented half-baked agile methods at the team level but failed to scale up to the program and portfolio level.Ethan desperately searches for a solution to help his organization find a way out. At a conference he attends a session by Adi, a SAFe consultant explaining what it means to really build large systems. Ethan was very impressed by the presentation and thought that this approach could be the solution to the problems he was facing.In the story we see Nathan implementing SAFe. He wants to start as soon as possible with the implementation of a release train and here we see why, in SAFe, we say that management must be in the lead in the rollout. Reading the novel, we understand what it means if we think we can do without this involvement. It’s the company’s culture and the mindset which are the key to success or disaster.With help of Adi, Ethan is capable to implement the first release train. We see what it costs to prepare and run a Program Increment Planning event and the value of real alignment between the teams. We follow him with his struggle to make this a success and we see what problems he is facing with the first program iteration and what the success is of real integration and management commitment.To survive, the organization wants to copy the success of the first Agile Release Train, but they understand at a certain moment that this is not that simple. After a lot of brainstorming the concept of value streams and their ARTs becomes clear. Problem solved?Not really. The new trains are not delivering. They are overloaded. What is lacking is the mechanisms of epics, their owners and a portfolio Kanban system including WIP limits for each process step. The story ends when Ethan presents his own SAFe success story during a conference.Conclusion. A great book for senior management to understand the concept of SAFe. A little jigsaw piece, a give-away, in your road to convince senior management to lead the change towards enterprise agility.

Who could benefit by reading this novel? YOU – the brave soul who is interested in scaling lean & agile for the enterprises, their technologies, and their systems.“The Rollout” by Alex Yakyma takes the reader through the exciting tale of the implementation journey at VeraComm, a fictional enterprise. For Vera Comm, without a transformation there will be a higher cost. Learn new ways, or die.Page after page the transformation comes to life as our hero; Ethan, leads his organization towards enterprise agility. This saga is based on a broad range of real-life implementation gotcha’s that are strategically placed, yet balanced over enough time for Ethan to share his experiences at the annual conference, where a year earlier he started down this SAFe journey.Ethan; along with the guidance of Adi, and support from his wife Rachel, takes a courageous stand to make a case for change with the Vera Comm leaders. His message; they needed a new way of thinking as an organization.Ethan is an individual willing to compromise his job by challenging the status quo, the organizational cultural norms, the enterprise way of thinking aka “Mr. Mindset”.Witness the break through for new processes & new cultural norms as the leaders and teams of Vera Comm navigate the survival challenges they encountered along the way.What a gift for us, the readers, as Alex shares a war chest of tried and true techniques and tools to support large-scale rollouts of SAFe Lean and Agile methods. Solving real problems with real solutions. A powerful learning tool in the novel itself, but the chapter diaries and Index are both full of insight into SAFe methods.I would also add a couple more books to Alex recommendation;The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a business book by consultant and speaker Patrick Lencioni, published 2002.Also, if you want a perspective of being a leader in a larger enterprise that needed to learn new ways or die, Jack Welch shares his experiences from his time at GE. Winning: The Ultimate Business How-To Book, by Jack and Suzy Welch, published 2005.

Tries to pick on the theme of business books written as a story. But this is clunky and signposts where it’s going considerably obviously. The middle section about the pi planning event is okay but the start and end was just poor. Think a poor a mans pheonix project.

Good insight

The Rollout is a fascinating book about a scaled agile transformation based on SAFe. If you follow the evolution of SAFe, it is like “The Rollout” has demonstrated the essential meaning of Leadership, Mindset und Culture. The “new competencies” that SAI (Scaled Agile, Inc.) is adding with every release are indeed mainly focused on those topics.In SAFe 5.0, the dimensions of lean-agile leadership are “Mindset & Principles”, “Leading by Example” and “Leading Change” – exactly like Alex Yakyma would probably have advised SAI to emphasize the necessary leadership skills to achieve a successful transformation.Let me quote some statements that underline the essential meaning of those topics:• “He comes to realize that the basic culture and his enterprise’s way of thinking are its biggest impediments to success. His quest leads him to understand that his own mindset is also part of the problem….”• “In adopting a new operating paradigm, the ways of working are only the tip of the iceberg. The real target of a change agent – the mass of ice below the surface – is the mindset of those who lead the organization”• “and then we took some time to talk more about mindset – the most fundamental cause of all problems. … you will eventually find that at its core, every mindset is a belief system.“• “Leaders that refuse to let go of the legacy mindset will be a huge impediment themselves”The book will help to make leaders understanding their essential contribution and that you do not only have to synchronize multiple agile teams, but also to synchronize the organizational development of business, organization and people.

Ich lerne aus guten Projektromanen mehr als aus Fachbüchern. Weil sie den Kontext mit beschreiben. Und dazu gehört vor allem der menschliche Faktor.Ich empfehle es allen, die sich gerade für einen Scaled Agile Ansatz entscheiden oder schon starten.Die gerade merken, dass der Faden, an dem sie ziehen, das gesamte Wollknäuel namens <eigenesUnternehmen> ausmacht.

Most books provides the fundamentals of the framework; this one does this and more in a way that you can read a novel. Practical experience is shared, presenting the most complex problems broken down in small pieces. I like the format which makes learning more interesting.