> Product/Engineering teams don't commit-escalate-communicate well
I'm not sure which way the causality points, maybe you're right and organizations that already have poor communication tend to adopt SAFe, but my experience is that it discourages communication between teams and encourages passive-aggressive irresponsibility. In a healthy organization, anyone responsible for the success of a project (management leadership, project managers, and senior individual contributors) will periodically think, "Next week we will do X, but only if Y is going to be done soon, so I need to check in with the team working on Y," and people constantly keep their finger on the pulse of work relevant to their own. SAFe claims to replace this with process, so people don't do it.
In the company where I work now, there's no plan (I mean, there are various plans and timelines, but they're tools, not totems) and we constantly talk. I can message anyone I want or schedule a quick informal meeting with anyone I want without thinking about the political ramifications. Under SAFe sometimes we needed info from another team and discussed how to approach them, who to ask, how to frame it, etc., and ended up deciding there wasn't a good way and it would be better to make our best guess and not engage with them. A few times I was put in the position of refusing to say how I knew something, because I found a way to get the information I needed to do my job, and I didn't want my source to suffer any consequences from communicating outside the SAFe process.
I'm not sure which way the causality points, maybe you're right and organizations that already have poor communication tend to adopt SAFe, but my experience is that it discourages communication between teams and encourages passive-aggressive irresponsibility. In a healthy organization, anyone responsible for the success of a project (management leadership, project managers, and senior individual contributors) will periodically think, "Next week we will do X, but only if Y is going to be done soon, so I need to check in with the team working on Y," and people constantly keep their finger on the pulse of work relevant to their own. SAFe claims to replace this with process, so people don't do it.
In the company where I work now, there's no plan (I mean, there are various plans and timelines, but they're tools, not totems) and we constantly talk. I can message anyone I want or schedule a quick informal meeting with anyone I want without thinking about the political ramifications. Under SAFe sometimes we needed info from another team and discussed how to approach them, who to ask, how to frame it, etc., and ended up deciding there wasn't a good way and it would be better to make our best guess and not engage with them. A few times I was put in the position of refusing to say how I knew something, because I found a way to get the information I needed to do my job, and I didn't want my source to suffer any consequences from communicating outside the SAFe process.