Is anyone else super-skeptical of SAFe? I've always heard it touted in some enterprise circles but I'm not sure I've heard much about it spreading and gaining popularity? Sounded like it was potentially just a consulting grift.
But the executive part of the company demands process, wants a role, so we invent creative re-bendings of agile, to make it "scale".
There's a couple valuable points in it, exercises & ways of looking in bigger terms that are good. While it's good for a company to be framing out the way work gets done across more deliberate dimensionalities than agile's window, the very act of "framing out" what agile is imposes the over-process that agile in many ways was supposed to relieve. You can't still be agile when you have a fixed standing point you & everyone else has to use.
I also think it's dogshit that as soon as you go from "Essential" to "Large" profiles, you suddenly have product teams with some attached architects that runs above the actual agile teams. This is, imo, a fatally flawed mistake that was already widely repeated, and there's a name for it already, it's not SAFe: it's waterfall.