The team has been working extremely hard in a major push to meet our self-imposed deadline of V1.0 of the Scaled Agile Framework ™ in time  for Agile 2012 next week. (These timeboxes really work, though we must admit that we waterfalled this PSI, at least a bit….)

Of course we had to do a little scope management to assure that we “met the date and controlled quality”, but that is as expected, as we doubled down on quality and, of course, held to the date. After all, that’s what agile and the framework requires.

With respect to breadth, we overachieved a bit, and based on feedback from our new SPC consultants, we have added four new Big Picture elements in the last couple of weeks, including:

• Metrics (has Details, thanks Alex)
• Epic Owner (awaits Details)
• System Demo (has Details)
• Refactors (awaits Details)

With respect to depth, we’ve also just added details for

• Features (thanks Drew);
• Iteration Planning
• Team (sprint) Demo
• Iteration Retro
• Shared Resources (thanks Colin)
• User Experience (thanks Alex)
• PSI/Release

In the few weeks prior, we added Details for:

• Enterprise Architect
• Architectural Epics
• Architectural Features (thanks Alex)

(Note, theses list remind us of one of the reasons you don’t simply throw away Story cards when they are complete, as they make such a nice little pile in the corner…..)

With respect to quality (and a little technical debt) we:

• Refactored all the URSs to the form of: scaledagileframework.com/<big picture element name> (example: http://scaledagileframework.com/metrics/).  This will make it simpler to find stuff, and to create an easier access vernacular for the user.  But no worries, if you have linked to it before, the old, hierarchical URLs have been permanently redirected to the new ones.
• Did a small, but comprehensive face-lift to the Big Picture. You might not even notice it, but Regina, Alex and I can guarantee you that its bitmap is quite different, because that thing is hard coded to the URLs.
• Cleaned up the web site a bit

With respect to scope we managed, we have yet to complete details for Investment Themes, Portfolio Backlog, Portfolio Vision, PSI Objectives, Features and Components, and Epic Owner. Most of these require some new thoughts and some peer-reviewed IP, so they will happen at the rate of about one a week during fall. After that, not sure what our priorities will be, (but I’m confident we’ll have some).

Also, various of us are setting off to San Diego, Korea, London, Chicago, Denver and other parts of the world for certification and SAFe implementations, so our production velocity for content will decrease a bit due to this “backlog capacity allocation”.  (We all have our masters….)

So with that, we move on to Agile 2012 next week in Dallas. We hope to see you there. As always, we are interested in your feedback, and we are particularly interested to see if we can entice you into implementation training and certification at one of our upcoming workshops.  In this way, we can spread the word and the benefits of SAFe, and arm you, our graduates with the tools and community you can use to successfully implement SAFe. (Ok, and so we’ll also be able to pick up a few $ to pay our webmeisters.)

See you in Dallas. If you want to see me, you can find the details of my talk here.