When Dennis Lizano first encountered SAFe®, he was a technical project manager in Costa Rica who had just started hearing about something called Scrum. That was fifteen years ago. Today, he's a SAFe Program Consultant based in New York, and he's spent the last seven years facilitating Inspect & Adapt events for a large utilities client, an organization that has run not dozens, but hundreds of I&As over that span.
If you want to know what actually works in a mature, high-functioning ART, Dennis is the kind of person worth listening to.
That might sound like a conservative take, but Dennis has a very specific reason for it.
"In the case of Inspect & Adapt, we didn't just go to a problem without having spent the time to discuss what's leading us to that problem," he says. "If anything, we understand that to get the benefit, you cannot skip to what you think is going to give you the result."
For a team that's been doing this for seven years, that discipline is a choice, not a crutch. The ART Dennis supports runs a 60–80 person train across platform, system, and specialized teams in a heavily regulated industry. They know the format. They could shortcut it. They don't.
The agenda runs exactly as SAFe prescribes: open with the PI System Demo, move into quantitative and qualitative performance review, run a retrospective, vote on the most important problems to solve, then break into smaller teams for the Problem-Solving Workshop. The whole event runs four hours.
"We're always looking for opportunities to bring something to the table," Dennis says of the performance review, "even when it feels like we delivered within the threshold."
One nuance Dennis has developed over the years: by the time the I&A rolls around, most features have already been demoed.
"Our ART releases a lot of features. We don't have time in the session to demo everything that's been released. We already have System Demos implemented during the PI so things that have already been demoed to stakeholders? We don't demo them again."
Instead, the team presents a complete list of everything delivered, then demos only what hasn't been shown yet. It's a subtle shift, but it keeps the celebration of the full PI's work visible while respecting the timebox.
"We share this awareness and this celebration: look at all the work we completed together."
"This is the moment when us, the leads, discuss: out of these items, which ones do we want to bring into the Problem-Solving Workshop?"
Dennis typically plans for three breakout teams, each tackling a different problem. If there aren't enough distinct issues to fill three teams, he'll sometimes assign the same problem to two teams and compare their findings at the end.
Facilitators are a mix of Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and volunteers from across the ART. Dennis doesn't just assign them on the day. Instead, they receive some coaching and a recording of a previous workshop session to review at their own pace, plus access to a sandbox environment where they can practice with Horizon™ Engage and run through timers and voting ahead of time.
"I'll be jumping between sessions as a facilitator of facilitators," he explains. "I don't like to be too disruptive. I first check how each team is doing by looking at the board which tells me a lot based on the post-its, whether they're having a conversation, whether one person is doing all the work."
Here's something Dennis does that you won't find in the SAFe Big Picture: he spends real time choosing the names for the breakout teams.
Not colors. Not numbers. Names, and different ones every single PI.
"I cannot just use colors. And you have to be mindful. We work with people from everywhere; offshore, Asia, North America, across different time zones, different cultures, different beliefs. Whenever you pick something, it has to be so generic that people will find it entertaining and it won't trigger anything you don't want in an environment like this."
Last PI, the teams were named after recent good news stories from around the world — a species of seahorse reappearing, spider robots replanting the Amazon. This time, he's going with mythical beasts: Phoenix, Griffin, Pegasus.
"It's not just 'oh, five minutes, I'm going to give them this name.' It's actually quite an exercise with a purpose."
The point isn't whimsy for its own sake. It removes hierarchy from the presentation order. "Names don't have an order," he notes. "I'm not Team 1, so I have to go first. I let them volunteer."
Dennis's ART has been using the same collaborative platform for their Problem-Solving Workshops since they adopted SAFe, first as SAFe Collaborate, now as Horizon Engage. When Scaled Agile announced the sunset of SAFe Collaborate, Dennis immediately started evaluating alternatives.
He looked at shared presentations. Clunky. Tested it with a group, discarded it before ever using it in a real session.
He explored Miro, even brought in someone with deep Miro expertise who showed him timers and voting functionality. It looked promising until he thought seriously about replication.
"One thing that I like about a tool is that you can replicate things. With Engage, you can just do a copy-paste and you're set in five minutes. I don't want to have to prepare for a whole day for an event if I can do it in five minutes."
Creating a new board in Miro from scratch each PI would have required delegating to a Miro specialist, someone he didn't want to burden, and a dependency he didn't want to create. There were also questions about navigation: "If they're not good at Miro, they can just get lost where the items are."
"Once you build the muscle memory," he says, "once you know what's effective for you in an event like this, if it works and it gives us the results we're looking for, I'm not the kind of person who changes it just to change it."
When he learned Horizon Engage would continue as the successor platform, the decision was straightforward. His teams already know how to use it. Facilitators already know the timers, the voting, how to create elements. Onboarding someone new takes a brief coaching session, not a training day and he can download the results of every session as a spreadsheet and image set.
"That's one of the marvelous things about Engage, there's not a lot of preparation for people to be part of the session."
Ask Dennis what the best part of the Problem-Solving Workshop is, and he doesn't hesitate.
"Hearing the restated problem compared to the original problem."
After the root cause analysis, after the 5 Whys, the fishbone diagram, the cluster voting, the teams almost always discover that the problem they thought they were solving is different from the one they're actually solving.
"It's very, very interesting to see how the problem that we thought becomes something else after the conversation," he says. "So hearing the restated problem compared to the original problem is very satisfactory for someone like me — oh wow, so it's not what we thought the problem was. It's something else that we can solve."
This, he believes, is why you can't skip the structured process. The restated problem is the point. If you go straight to solution mode, you never get there.
Here's the piece many teams leave out: what happens after the I&A is over.
Dennis's team doesn't just capture improvement items and move on. Every subsequent I&A opens with a status slide. They reflect on what we identified last time, here's what's been completed, here's what's still in progress.
"A lot of those are mindsets. A lot of those are changing processes with stakeholders that cannot be solved in a single PI. We still provide them: these are all the things that even though we're not telling you they're done yet, just remember, we listened, we chatted about it, we're still working on it. This is the progress."
The improvement items themselves get triaged through the LACE. Some go directly into the Program Backlog for the next PI. Some get tagged for Coach Sync or PO Sync. Some require capacity conversations with Product Management and leadership, especially when they touch architectural runway or cross-team collaboration changes.
"Whatever they brought into these sessions is being acted on," he says. "It doesn't just go through a shredder in an empty room."
Dennis's ART is now preparing to extend SAFe to additional value streams impacting teams that are earlier in their agility journey, less familiar with digital tools, needing more hand-holding around what each session is for and why it matters.
He's excited about it, not daunted.
"After going through this implementation with a different team and seeing where we were before, where we are now, it's only exciting to see what's going to turn out with this other team."
Inspect & Adapt, he believes, is the mechanism that makes all of it possible. "Inspect and Adapt as a tool helps us listen to them. It gives us things that they are the ones asking for. The power that brings into collaborating with people — there's no comparison with having a random lead telling them how to operate."
Seven years. Hundreds of I&As. And they still run every single one in Horizon Engage.
Want to see how practitioners like Dennis are running Inspect & Adapt events in Horizon™ Engage? Check out the video to learn more.