Why SAFe Failed in a Bank Despite Executive Buy-in

The Setup

A Top-10 Global Bank wanted to compete with Fintechs. The CIO hired a Big 4 consultancy to roll out SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework). They trained 5,000 people, renamed "Project Managers" to "Scrum Masters", and launched "Release Trains".

What Went Wrong

1. Semantic Agile: The teams were doing standups, but deployments were still tied to a quarterly release window on the mainframe.
2. Dependency Gridlock: PI Planning (Program Increment) revealed that every "feature" depended on the same 3 Shared Services teams (Security, Identity, Database), which were not part of the trains.
3. The "Watermelon" Status: Dashboards were Green (On Track) because teams marked "Story Completed" when code was written, not deployed. Real status was Red.

Early Warning Signs

• Proxy Product Owners: The real business owners were too busy to attend meetings, so they sent delegates who couldn't make decisions.
• Hardening Sprints: They added a 2-week "Stabilization" sprint at the end of every PI. This is just disguised Waterfall testing.

Decision Matrix: Anatomy of Failure

What Winners Did Differently

Capital One and JPMC succeeded by:

1. In-Sourcing Engineering: You cannot do Agile with 80% vendors.
2. Cloud First: They broke the infrastructure dependency before scaling the process.
3. Product Funding: They funded value streams, not projects.

Interactive Postmortem Analysis