What businesses gain from integrating SAFe agile practices
The business landscape is in constant turbulence, which begs the question: How do new companies keep up?
The agile framework helps organizations navigate a dynamic economic environment. Agile is an adaptable business methodology that facilitates innovation, flexibility, and responsiveness, particularly for start-ups and smaller companies.
However, expanding agile methodologies beyond the team level – aka Agile at Scale – has proven more difficult, especially for growing companies and large, enterprise-level organizations.
Numerous techniques have emerged to support company-wide agile transformations, including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). SAFe agile offers a structured approach to scaling agile, making it one of the most popular frameworks.
More than 20,000 companies worldwide have adopted SAFe agile. Here’s why.
What Is Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?
SAFe agile is a freely available knowledge base of organizational and project management practices. Designed by Dean Leffingwell and Drew Jemilo and released in 2011, SAFe facilitates agile system formation within enterprise-level organizations. The framework provides the following:
Structured guidance for agile roles and responsibilities
Work planning and management techniques
Values and principles for success
SAFe agile principles
The Scaled Agile Framework ensures company adaptability and responsiveness while inspiring change across functional or organizational groups. By applying Lean Portfolio Management techniques, SAFe shifts the mindset of every employee – from leaders to interns – shifting their thinking from the typical waterfall to the lean-agile perspective.
To foster this switch, SAFe advocates the adoption of 10 principles:
1. Take an economic view
SAFe emphasizes understanding the economic impact of delays to achieve the shortest sustainable lead time. This perspective ensures frequent and early delivery of products and outcomes. But it doesn’t stop there.
The framework also advocates for task sequencing to achieve maximum benefit, understanding economic accommodations of system building, and operating within lean budget constraints. Everyone within the company is equally responsible for adopting this operational perspective, which supports decentralized decision-making.
2. Apply systems thinking
Systems thinking addresses workplace and marketplace challenges. When employees at every level understand the system’s fundamentals, they can find ways to improve working conditions and operations.
This approach recognizes that systems comprise many interrelated components, and optimizing one doesn’t necessarily improve the whole. SAFe takes a holistic view, encouraging the application of systems thinking to three critical operational areas:
The solutions: Any product, service, or system delivered to internal or external clients
The enterprise: Those building the system
The value stream: The sequence of tasks teams complete as part of solution delivery
SAFe adopters should consider the organization’s people, management, and processes when establishing or enhancing a system.
3. Assume variability and preserve options
Product or software development is inherently uncertain. SAFe introduces a set-based design to address those uncertainties. The approach instructs adherents to leave multiple requirements and design options open as late as possible in the development lifecycle. Decision-makers can gradually narrow down choices based on empirical evidence uncovered throughout the design process.
Set-based design integrates learning milestones, marking points within the lifecycle when teams must make a decision. Choices involve assessing options and potential outcomes based on team learning. As data emerges, it reveals the path toward an ideal outcome for the company, team members, and, most importantly, users.
4. Build incrementally using fast, integrated learning cycles
To address risk and uncertainty, SAFe advocates regular assessments of design feasibility via established learning milestones. During these phases, teams consider the system as a whole before finalizing the next steps. A regular cadence accelerates learning and data gathering, speeding up the development process.
A team that develops a solution incrementally using short iterations can incorporate customer feedback and mitigate risks. Previous versions become prototypes that test and validate market expectations. Some become minimum viable products (MVPs), whereas others extend the system with updated functionality. Regardless of outcomes, rapid turnaround generates an actionable feedback stream so project teams can quickly pivot to an evidence-based alternative when challenges arise.
5. Base milestones on an objective evaluation of working systems
Teams that establish learning phases to evaluate success gain an ongoing and reliable flow of quantifiable evidence to support decision-making. This approach is more insightful than project requirements or success metrics. When shared with stakeholders, it builds trust and fosters system thinking.
The lean-agile framework’s integration points offer regular pauses throughout the development lifecycle. During these reflection periods, the team can objectively evaluate the solution rather than waiting until delivery. Regular reviews provide financial, technical, and fitness-for-purpose governance, ensuring stakeholders’ ongoing investment yields a proportionate return.
6. Ensure uninterrupted value flow
In SAFe, agile development teams must prevent interruptions to value flow. Continuous delivery demands that teams visualize and limit work in progress (WIP), reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths. As a result, they optimize “flow” – maximizing throughput and accelerating value delivery.
Limiting WIP offers stakeholders an unencumbered view of a project’s progress. In addition, smaller batch sizes constantly validate that the solution aligns with project plans.
7. Apply cadence and synchronize with cross-domain planning
Teams operating within the SAFe framework establish cadence through sprints or iterations, which help:
Reduce project complexity
Address solution uncertainty
Enforce quality
Foster collaboration
While cadence establishes development predictability and rhythm, synchronization of activities between cross-functional groups further enhances the process, generating additional benefits, such as:
Harmonious team activities
Information sharing
Improved sprint planning
Predictable and rhythmic development cycles
Integration of multiple perspectives into the solution
8. Unlock knowledge workers’ intrinsic motivation
Rather than take a command-and-control approach, organizations operating in the SAFe environment encourage employee coaching through decision-making. This management technique unlocks intrinsic motivation by providing teams and individuals with the following:
Autonomy and purpose
Minimized constraints
An environment of mutual influence
Increased employee engagement
As a result, staff, customers, and the organization experience better outcomes.
9. Decentralize decision-making
Decentralization reduces product backlog queues and establishes an economic decision-making approach, empowering teams to get things done. Agile leadership frees management to focus on mission-critical decisions while fostering the exploration of creative, innovative solutions by those closest to the issue.
10. Organize around value
The Scaled Agile Framework shifts the pursuit of intended efficiency from functional expertise to organizing around value flow, enhancing delivery speed and solution quality. This strategy emphasizes collaboration between functional groups to minimize dependencies and reduce handoffs, waste, and delays. Once successfully integrated, the business can be more flexible and responsive to an evolving marketplace.
How does the SAFe agile process work?
To incorporate the Scaled Agile Framework, an organization needs executive-level support, a solid transformational business case, and a foundation in Scrum, the management framework for self-organizing teams.
With those prerequisites fulfilled, the business is ready to organize its agile teams into a single Agile Release Train (ART). Organizations can follow the 13-step SAFe implementation roadmap, which directs the widespread adoption of SAFe across multiple portfolios. Here are the steps, in brief:
Reaching the Tipping Point
Train Lean-Agile Change Agents
Create a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence
Train Executives, Managers, and Leaders
Lead in the Digital Age
Organize Around Value
Create the Implementation Plan
Prepare for ART Launch
Train Teams and Launch ART
Coach ART Execution
Launch More ARTs and Value Streams
Enhance the Portfolio
Accelerate
Benefits of SAFe agile
Since its inception in 2011, studies conducted by Scaled Agile Inc. demonstrate that SAFe integration improves operations in four key areas.:
Productivity
A SAFe team is empowered with the capacity to:
Eliminate low-value tasks
Identify and remove roadblocks
Drive continuous improvement
Prioritize tasks to focus on high-value deliverables
These high-powered working groups drive measurable productivity improvements of 20–50%.
Quality
A focus on quality throughout every development phase ensures improvements aren’t last-minute adjustments but rather a continuous and shared responsibility. As a result, SAFe agile practices demonstrate 25–75% quality improvements.
Time-to-market
SAFe operations have a 30–70% faster time-to-market rate than other organizations. The framework offers business agility that enables:
Rapid, evidence-based decision making
Effective communication
Streamlined operations
Customer-centric focus
Employee engagement
Thanks to improved workflows and processes, SAFe has a welcome side effect on employee satisfaction. Staff enjoy more autonomy and purpose, which motivates them to succeed. Burnout rates go down as engagement improves by up to 50%.
SAFe agile with Tempo
Tempo has many SAFe agile tools and templates to help with your transformation.
Structure PPM allows you to visualize multiple projects and portfolios from a centralized location, communicating and building alignment across enterprise levels in real time. Strategic Roadmaps helps Scrum teams connect day-to-day planning with broader company strategy, prioritizing tasks that move the needle toward success.
Tempo’s Jira-enabled tools can help you successfully enshrine the agile mindset into your organization.
