5 Reasons why 'SAFe' is essential for Agile Teams

“Coming together is a Beginning. Keeping together is Progress. Working together is Success.” - Henry Ford

This month I'm all in for deep Learning. People who know me, knows, I have a mandate to Learn each day (literally a 'todo' item in my day list). I learn each morning on any topic that interests me or what I'm in mood of - either by listening to a podcast, reading a book or a workshop that I'm attending in personal development.

I'm currently researching to evaluate various industry practices followed by Agile teams. One of the well known approaches I’m keen into, to scale scrum is SAFe - Scaled Agile Framework.

SAFe is a set of organization and workflow patterns for implementing agile practices at enterprise scale. How is it useful? - It promotes and helps to collaborate and align when there are large numbers of agile teams. Without going into details of its values and principles, there are few good reasons why there is so much need today in this pandemic outbreak for this approach where more and more organizations are going remote and dealing with the change and the uncertainty.

Here are few benefits why SAFe is essential and could be implemented if/when needed:

REASON 1: CONSISTENT AGILE APPROACH ACROSS LARGER MULTI-TEAMS PROGRAMS

Many organizations start with Agile, experimenting at the team level with one or two teams and gradually increasing with the number of teams implementing agile with moderate success and later slowly applying SAFe practices to scale well as the enterprise grows.

REASON 2: DEPENDENCIES, OBSTACLES, DELAYS

Many orgs struggle when planning releases that involve more than 1 agile team (different iteration cadences, different framework etc). SAFe provides a consistent approach and a method called ART (Agile Release Train) to plan, implement and deliver value to work together as team of teams at program level, that uses practices like scrum of scrums, cross team system demos to sync on cross-team dependencies.

REASON 3: WHEN IN DIELEMMA ABOUT NEW ROLES

When you are uncertain on the existing roles that need to be changed, and are not certain on new roles to be created and/or have questions around responsibilities while you are eager to scale agile across organization, SAFe can be used to best address this across Team, Program and Portfolio.

REASON 4: WHEN YOU STRUGGLE TO ACHIEVE CONSISTENT STRATEGY AND ALIGNMENT

SAFe provides a framework when there are multiple handoffs and for implementing Lean to apply agile consistently from portfolio through team levels. When applied these practices consistently, helps to establish alignment and flow at all levels.

REASON 5: IMPROVE PRODUCT DEVELOPEMENT LEAD TIMES

Companies like Cisco, LEGO, Philips, Fedex and many more have adopted SAFe to shorten development lead times and frequent delivery. SAFe is beneficial to almost all domains such as Insurance, Finance, Govt. and not just software/IT companies.

The bottom-line is to identify what your real needs are and start where you are. And if you have mastered practicing Scrum at a small scale then evaluate if its time to scale across.

Useful Links:

https://www.scaledagileframework.com/

https://www.productplan.com/glossary/scaled-agile-framework/

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale/what-is-safe