Interviews with SAFe experts and scaling agile specialists

I am a SAFe rookie. Everyone in our company knows, and I am not shy to tell. I have set out to write this book about scaling agile to change this. So at the time of you reading this, I may no longer be the rookie that I was when I wrote these lines. But it does not matter much. At any time in the foreseeable future, there will be people knowing more about the topic than I do. And there is a specific strength in this situation. I can write this book from an angle that suits most of the intended audience of this book. So I hope that you'll like that.

If you don't know stuff inside out and have little experience, it's a good idea to ask experts and specialists. That's why I have invited central people from the SAFe and scaling agile community to talk to me about their findings, common pitfalls, and tips that they have for SAFe beginners like me to get in the know.

Those interviews are diverse and not structured. But I have prepared for all of them individually to try to get the most out of them. All interviewees received the questions upfront and had the chance to review the write-ups afterward.

Request for a SAFe interview

I would like you to contact me about a SAFe interview if you have something interesting to share. Here are some questions that I ask in interviews:

• Who are you? What do you do? For which company do you work? 
• What is your affiliation with scaling agile in companies? Have specific experience with the SAFe framework?
• Tell us about your experiences from a customer project and what people who are interested in SAFe can learn from it.
• What are the common mistakes and pitfalls that you see while trying to scale agile in a company? What do you recommend to overcome them?
• Do you have a small trick that most companies can utilize to improve their business agility?
• Do you see customers work with Atlassian Software like Jira a lot in the context of your SAFe deployments? Why is that? What is good, and what is wrong about this?
• What services do you offer to help companies with business agility?

If you have answers to these questions, please do not hesitate to contact me via the form on this page. Also if these questions do not match your situation, please contact me nevertheless. I have talked to SAFe methodology sceptics just as well and would love to present our readers a broad and balanced view.

Publicly documented Interviews 

Most of the interviews we did will eventually become public. But the process involves editing, proofing, and approving by the interviewee. So a conversation with a SAFe expert can only become public after all this. 

• An interview with Burkhard Schmidt - Advantages of SAFe in your Organization
• Deutsche Telekom Goes Agile: Martin Seibert speaks to Michael Frey about SAFe
• Interview with Dr. Thorsten Janning from KEGON: Their journey to SAFe and Scaling Agile in their Company
• Interview with Richard Wilson of Jarow Digital
• Scaled Agile at BMW - An interview with Marcus Raitner on LeSS and SAFe

If you know someone whom we should interview or if you are interested in becoming an interviewee yourself, please use the form on the right to contact us.