Strengthen your agile ways of working and accelerate value flow across the enterprise with SAFe
A strong SAFe setup ensures that all your agile teams work together to deliver the right products to customers. This is why the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) may be relevant for your organisation if you work with agile development processes and have multiple agile teams in play.
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a framework for both product and software development, created by Scaled Agile, Inc. SAFe defines a set of structures and processes that enable organisations to apply agile methods (such as Scrum) at an enterprise level, ensuring alignment and coordination of collaboration and deliveries across multiple agile teams.
SAFe – in short
SAFe accelerates and aligns value flow across the organisation, increasing product quality and reducing time to market – in the most effective and commercially viable way.
The benefits of a SAFe setup include:
- Greater organisational agility through more flexible planning and implementation of projects and products.
- Improved collaboration across teams and departments, forming the foundation for a more coordinated and efficient way of working.
- Increased delivery transparency through open and transparent communication between teams and departments, leading to better understanding and fewer misunderstandings.
- A strong focus on Built-In Quality, supported by continuous improvement and ongoing delivery.
- Higher employee engagement and greater autonomy and accountability, helping to increase motivation and job satisfaction.
- Improved adaptability to market changes and evolving customer needs, resulting in a more resilient organisation.
SAFe: Effective collaboration across agile teams
SAFe is a framework for managing coordination, optimisation and impact – in short, enabling effective collaboration between multiple agile teams in larger organisations.
The agile team
An agile team typically consists of 3-11 people who work closely together within clearly defined boundaries. Around the team are specific roles that ensure progress, focus and prioritisation, for example the Scrum Master and Product Owner.
The core philosophy behind the agile approach is to put the customer at the centre. Development work is driven by customer needs and requirements and is carried out in sprints: short time periods, typically lasting 2-4 weeks. The agile team delivers incremental outputs on an ongoing basis, ensuring that customer needs are met in the best possible way.
As such, the agile development process allows for a high degree of flexibility and potential unpredictability in relation to the final product.
But what happens when an organisation needs to develop a larger product that requires several agile teams? The organisation must ensure that the agile teams work together to create the final product. This can be challenging, as the agile approach allows customer requirements and needs to evolve over time as incremental deliveries provide an increasingly complete picture of the final solution. At the same time, challenges may arise if other departments and functions within the organisation are not working in an agile way.
This is where SAFe comes into play. SAFe enables organisations to scale their agile approach and provides a foundation for implementing agile processes at an enterprise level. This means that agile development teams are closely connected to ensure cross-functional efficiency, while other functions (such as finance, procurement and service) also adopt more agile ways of working. It also means that activities such as overall business development are supported by agile methods and setups.
At the same time, SAFe is built on Lean Thinking, an agile principle that ensures time, effort and resources are not wasted during the development process. This mindset underpins and permeates the organisational culture.
SAFe customer cases
Customer cases show that successful implementation and use of SAFe typically result in:
- 20-50 percent increase in productivity
- 25-75 percent improvement in quality
- 30-75 percent faster time to market
- 10-50 percent increase in employee motivation and satisfaction
The seven core competencies of SAFe
- Lean-Agile Leadership: Leadership that takes responsibility for operations, optimisation and development, leading by example
- Team and Technical Agility: High-performing, cross-functional teams with the right technical and methodological capabilities
- Agile Product Delivery: Continuous delivery of customer-centric solutions
- Enterprise Solution Delivery: Governance that enables innovative, cross-functional solutions at scale
- Lean Portfolio Management: Portfolio management that aligns strategy and funding while handling high levels of market and customer uncertainty
- Organisational Agility: Agility that enables rapid adaptation and continuous improvement
- Continuous Learning Culture: A learning culture that supports ongoing individual and collective learning, skills development, innovation and creativity
See a detailed graphical overview of SAFe here.
The four levels of agile organisation
SAFe defines four levels of agile organisation, as well as a foundational level that supports everything from the development of small, independent solutions to very large and complex systems across multiple business areas:
Team Flow
The team level is the foundational level, where agile teams work together to deliver value. Each team is cross-functional and self-organising, meaning it contains all the skills required to deliver functionality within a given area. Scrum and Kanban are typical methods used at this level.
ART Flow (Programme)
The programme level focuses on coordination across multiple teams working within a shared value stream. This level introduces Agile Release Trains (ARTs), which are teams of teams that coordinate their work collectively. The programme level includes activities such as Program Increment (PI) planning, where teams plan their work across a defined time frame, typically 8-12 weeks.
Solution Train Flow (Large Solution)
This level addresses the challenges of coordinating multiple Agile Release Trains working across a large solution or system. The solution may span multiple value streams and requires additional coordination and governance to ensure coherent value delivery. The Solution Train is the central element at this level.
Portfolio Flow
The portfolio level represents the highest level in SAFe and focuses on coordinating investments, strategy and prioritisation across all organisational value streams. This level addresses portfolio management and includes budget governance, strategic themes and prioritisation of value streams to maximise organisational value.
Lean-Agile Leadership (Foundation)
This level brings together the supporting processes and elements that ensure, sustain and spread agile thinking across the organisation. This includes Lean-Agile leaders, communities of practice, SAFe values and SAFe principles.Each level in SAFe is designed to address specific challenges and needs. By embedding SAFe principles and practices at these levels, organisations can better manage the complexity of large-scale agile implementations and achieve more effective and coherent value delivery.
Why SAFe is a good idea
Do you use agile methods in your development work? And do you need multiple agile teams to collaborate effectively? If so, you need structures and processes that ensure cross-functional coordination and value creation. SAFe defines these overarching frameworks and helps you realise the many benefits of an agile approach.
SAFe focuses on continuous organisational development and adaptability – capabilities that are essential if you want to keep pace with rapid change and continue to grow. SAFe helps future-proof your organisation and can also serve as inspiration, even if you do not implement the full SAFe framework.
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