I have a question about this article "The Role of PI Objectives", where the author stated near the end of the article:
As I captured these thoughts I was reminded of a key difference between release trains, and it strongly impacts the degree of value placed on the "focus on outcomes," above. I tend to see release trains fall to one of two extremes: Either they drive the vast majority of their work, 85-95%, through portfolio epics, and reduce the autonomy of the trains; or they drive the vast majority of their work as features, and reserve epics for the 5-10% of work that truly cuts across trains. While I don’t view either of these approaches as fundamentally wrong, I do believe that we will see that a majority of companies solving the big "system of systems" engineering problems, encouraging a strongly epic-driven approach, will find that SAFe for Lean Software Engineering will be a more effective approach.
Am I understanding correctly that if I had to choose between:
a) organizing trains that are strongly epic-driven
b) organizing trains that are strongly feature-driven
you would recommend (b)?
In recent conversations on how to best organize trains, one proposal has been more along the lines of (a) - where we would form trains by looking at our epics and assigning epics to a train, and then organize teams in each train in a manner where we form cross-functional teams to support individual epics (or form teams that could support multiple epics.)
Any feedback anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated!