Basic Patterns of the Inspect and Adapt

By Gerben Kollaard

The Inspect and Adapt is one of the most important events from the Scaled Agile Framework. It connects with the SAFe Core Values and will help your organization to learn. But it is not easy. Following on the Failures, Best Practices and Principles of the Inspect and adapt, a group of RTEs brings you the basic pattern of the Inspect and Adapt, which should help you doing it right and gives you the freedom to alternate.

• Basic Pattern of the event

• Basic pattern of the problem solving workshop

Basic Pattern of the event

The Inspect and Adapt has 3 parts and that’s for a good reason. All the three parts empathize the ‘inspect’ and ‘adapt’ parts of the event, whereby the System demo mostly focus on Inspecting the product delivered. As a measure of real progress. The Qualitative and Quantitative measurement focusses more on inspecting the facts (metrics) and providing bottlenecks which we need to adapt. As where the Retrospective and Problem Solving Workshop focusses mostly on adapting with relentless improvement.

Let’s quickly review the three parts of the Inspect and Adapt:

PI System demo

Looking back at the PI, the demo shows the features of the ART developed during the PI.

It should be an integrated view of the features delivered by all the teams providing an objective measure of progress. It is the opportunity to give feedback, inspecting the current state of the product/solution. Based on the feedback the solution can be adapted to stakeholders needs.

Qualitative and Quantitative measurement

The second part of the Inspect and Adapt gives rooms to the teams to review the agreed on metrics to find trends, issues and bottlenecks. Inspecting the collected data, teams find objectively and fact-based problems to adapt the process they went through

Retrospective and Problem Solving Workshop

With the focus on the last PI, teams and ART stakeholders search for relentless improvement in this last Part of the Inspect and Adapt. It’s one of the most important structural ways of improving your organization.

Doing all the three part correctly will help you not only building the right things (outcome), but also delivering it in the right way (flow).  Understanding the inspecting and adapting patterns in the basic pattern of the Inspect and Adapt will make it easier to adjust the Inspect and Adapt towards the needs of the ART and it environment.

Basic Pattern of the Problem Solving Workshop

There are many more basic patterns in the Inspect and Adapt event. One that’s really important for relentless improvement is the Basic Pattern of the Problem Solving Workshop. It searches for the right problem to solve, the rootcause of that problem and the right solution.

Understanding the steps of the basic Problem Solving Workshop will help you vary in ways of doing the Problem Solving Workshop which will make it more enjoyable for your ART and its stakeholders.

Using different diverging and converging methods during the problem solving workshop is a must if you’re doing 4-5 Inspect and Adapts in a year and doing it for several years. So yes, use different retrospective forms, use the fishbone diagram, use the 5x why, use pareto and use dot voting. But don’t be afraid to use other methods to understand the problem, to find the problem or to find the right solution!

You can use inclusive and engaging practices like ‘Liberating Structures’ or anything else you can think of: for example business drawing.

In this example of business drawing, we started with a quick lesson in business drawing, after that we asked the teams to make drawings answering the following questions: “who is your customer? what is his problem? what is the root cause of his problem? and what is the most important solution for that customer”. Not only did we had a fun morning, but also we had a customer centric view on what the biggest problem was of the customer and how we could do it better to help the customer with his problem.

Conclusion

Understanding the basic pattern of the Inspect & Adapt and use it to vary in running the Inspect and Adapt event will make your Inspect and Adapt better. Don’t be afraid to experiment as long as you respect the patterns.

Do you see other patterns in the event? Do you have other ways of running the problem solving workshop?