ComparisonScaling Software Development - ZeroBlockers vs SAFe: Which scaling framework is better for you?

Both frameworks identify dependencies and blockers as the cause of the slowdown in delivery as companies scale.

SAFe addresses this challenge by introducing new roles whose responsibility is to manage and limit the impact of the dependencies. There is a lot of effort in upfront PI planning to identify and avoid dependencies and then the Release Train Engineer is responsible for limiting the impact of dependencies in the path to production.

The ZeroBlockers approach stems from the belief that you cannot manage dependencies. The overhead involved continually increases and the teams end up being blocked anyway. The blocking dependencies must be removed to improve efficiency.

SAFe mentions hypothesis-driven development however the PI planning phase locks in solutions that are being committed to in the PI Objectives. PI Objectives have an associated business value but this is measured during the System Demo rather than via real world customer usage. Teams are only accountable for outputs.

ZeroBlockers believes that you cannot know how customers will react to new features until they have them in their hands. It is not fair to ask a business person to specify the outcome of a feature because we don't know. We all have ideas that sound great but few of them work. Therefore solution evaluation and iteration are integral parts of the process. The core metric is whether customers change their behaviour as a result of the feature.

Shared code is subject to the tragedy of the commons. Each team has a tight deadline so they need to cut corners at the end. While SAFe advocates for an Innovation and Planning Increment it is difficult to fix all of the issues given the incentive to produce debt in every sprint. That is why in ZeroBlockers each team owns their own code. They are responsible for ensuring the health of their code so they can work sustainably.

There are a million ways we can change how we work but not all of them are improvements. This can lead to battles of opinions unless there is a clear vision. ZeroBlockers has a vision of having zero blockers in the flow of work so teams now have a target to aim towards and something to use to compare alternative options for improvement. You'd be surprised how much time this saves.

Burnout isn't caused by challenging targets. It is caused by being held to targets that you can't control such as an unrealistic deadline that was imposed on you. By giving teams autonomy over the way they achieve the product goals you are putting them in control. We can still set challenging stretch targets but, once teams can control how they achieve the targets, this can energise rather than cause burnout.

SAFe follows a traditional Scrum approach at the team level with the addition of an Increment layer, which is a grouping of multiple sprints to develop a larger feature or solution. This provides teams with more context about what they are building and why.

The ZeroBlockers approach is that we don't know exactly what customers want so the team needs to uncover the best solutions to build. This means that the team needs to do research, ideate on potential solutions, evaluate them using experiments and then build the winning ideas iteratively so the team can continue to improve the solution over time.

In SAFe the coordination layer is critical to manage the dependencies that slow down delivery. This means that there are specific roles and events to manage the dependencies such as the Release Train Engineer and Solution Architect.

The ZeroBlockers view is that dependencies cannot be managed so the Stream Teams have full autonomy over their backlog, architecture and path to production. This frees up the Product Team to focus more on the strategy and validating that the initiatives being worked on by the Stream Teams are achieving the desired business goals.

Both frameworks scale the product/program level approach to the portfolio level. The same challenge as described at Product Level apply here as well. By empowering teams to identify their own solutions they can be more innovative, respond quicker and be held accountable for outcomes. The Portfolio team can focus more on strategic goals and validating the effectiveness of the Teams.

The changes involved in implementing SAFe are largely limited to the IT department. There is also a larger body of experts and support options to assist in the rollout of the framework compared to Zero Blockers which makes implementation easier.

ZeroBlockers involves changes across the business - because software is integral to our products today - not something just tacked on. This means you need more buy-in to get started. But you can start small - one product, one value stream. With over 10 years of UXDX content and case studies, there is also a large body of resources to assist in the rollout of the framework. It might be tougher to implement but it will deliver better outcomes.