I Wrote This Post During PI Planning. Nobody Noticed.

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I was in a ceremony recently. Not a wedding. Not a funeral. A PI Planning ceremony. Three hours. 60+ people on a call. Cameras off. Microphones muted. Someone sharing a screen full of boxes and arrows that could have been an email.

I spent the first hour pretending to pay attention. The second hour Googling "how long do PI planning sessions usually last." The third hour writing this post.

Nobody noticed. Because nobody was paying attention either. Somewhere around hour two, my cat walked across my keyboard and accidentally typed something more useful than the entire backlog.

That's when I Googled something else. Just out of curiosity. "SAFe framework criticism."

And I found safedelusion.com.

A whole website. Built by certified Agile practitioners. Not bloggers in pajamas like me. Actual consultants who trained in SAFe, implemented SAFe, coached SAFe, watched it fail, and then built an entire website collecting the evidence. Case studies. Expert analysis. Industry data. Years of it.

Their conclusion? SAFe implementations consistently miss key elements of effective Agile practice, reinforce legacy behaviours, and invest heavily in scaling suboptimal practices. That's not from this blog. That's from the people who were paid to make it work.

I kept reading. Forbes called SAFe a framework that "subordinates agile teams to bureaucracy." Equal Experts, a major consulting firm, published a paper titled "Three reasons why we don't recommend SAFe."

And then the one that made me nearly spill my coffee for the second time in this blog's history: even SAFe-certified professionals are now declining SAFe-related job offers. Citing their own negative experiences. The people trained to sell it won't buy it.

The industry calls it "framework fatigue." A third of organizations surveyed now say they don't follow any mandated enterprise Agile framework. They've moved on. Custom approaches. Lighter methods. Keep what works. Drop the expensive scaffolding.

We're on PI Planning 4. I asked five colleagues this week what ART they belong to. Two didn't know. One said "the wrong one." One laughed. The fifth asked me what ART stands for. I told him. He said "that doesn't help." He's right. It doesn't.

Here's what really gets me. The kingdom doesn't even make us take the certification renewal exams anymore. The organization auto-renews everyone's certifications. Pays the vendor automatically. Every year. For every staff member. Nobody has to demonstrate they've learned anything. Nobody has to prove they use any of it. The vendor gets paid, the certificates get renewed, and the transformation newsletter gets to report "100% certified." Everyone wins. Except the budget. And the mission. And anyone who thought certification meant competence.

Meanwhile, close to a million dollars was spent on HackerEarth. A technical assessment platform. Purchased to evaluate the skills of the entire kingdom. Current usage since purchase: zero. Not low. Zero. The platform sends automated "We miss you" emails to administrators who have never opened it. It's a million-dollar pen pal that nobody writes back to.

Four months ago you told me SAFe wasn't working. This week, the rest of the world caught up. The industry data, the expert analysis, the consulting firms, the practitioners who walked away. They all arrived at the same conclusion you did. Sitting in those ceremonies. Muting your microphones. Knowing it wasn't working but having nobody to tell. You weren't "resistant to change." You were right before the consultants were.

And still. Nobody in leadership will say out loud what they say in private: this isn't working. Colleagues in leadership roles are writing through the form, confirming what everyone suspects. The ceremonies are theatre. The only real delivery mechanism in the entire framework is the invoice.

But here's where it stops being funny.

SAFe didn't just waste money on training. It rewired how the kingdom hires. The new Job Architecture created roles built around SAFe terminology. Product Owner. Scrum Master. Release Train Engineer. And when those roles need filling, who looks best on paper? Not the person who spent 20 years keeping the kingdom's systems running. The external candidate with a fresh SAFe certification and a CV full of framework buzzwords.

A few houses still have manager positions pending. In at least one, the reposted process is producing a familiar pattern. A reader commented that an external candidate from a major cloud/consulting provider has already been identified for the Citadel. Another external for King's Landing. Internal candidates who prepared twice, interviewed twice, waited months twice, are watching the same outcome unfold. If a reposted process produces the same result as the one cancelled for irregularities, it wasn't a correction. It was a delay with better paperwork.

The framework didn't just change how we work. It changed who gets to lead. And the people it favors are the ones who've never worked here.

Round two is coming. Not just this kingdom. Across the entire realm. In the coming months. Prepare.

Every selection. Every department. Documented.

To the Hand: you said you address everything raised in this blog. Here's one more for the list. The kingdom spent millions on a framework that an entire website of practitioners says doesn't work. A third of the industry has walked away. Your own leaders privately agree. And the framework is now being used to justify hiring decisions that replace institutional knowledge with certification logos.

safedelusion.com

Read it. Then read us.

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~ The Chronicler

P.S. To my cat, who contributed more to backlog refinement in one accidental keystroke than PI Planning 4 has in three weeks: you're hired. Starting salary: one treat. Still better ROI than the certification licenses.

P.P.S. To the five colleagues I surveyed about their ART: your answers were the highlight of my quarter. Especially "the wrong one." You're all getting character names in the next scroll.

P.P.P.S. To every "Assistant Senior Solution Architect" with 20 years of experience: your title is an insult. Your work is not. The Job Architecture owes you an apology and a promotion.

P.P.P.P.S. To the internal candidates interviewing for the same position for the third time: your patience is documented. Your preparation is documented. The outcome will be too.

P.P.P.P.P.S. To whoever set up the auto-renewal of 1,300 certifications without checking if anyone actually uses them: that's not a training program. That's a subscription trap. The vendor sends a thank you card every fiscal year. Probably.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. safedelusion.com. Bring it up in the next ceremony. What are they going to do, mute you? Everyone's already muted.

P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. To the God-Mother's office: I wrote this entire post during one of your PI Planning sessions. Three hours well spent. For once.