Better SAFe than sorry!

Traditionally agile has been used by small teams where the scope of work did not require anything more than what this team could handle. But as the need for enterprise level agility proliferated, large-scale agile implementations made their way to development centers. While considering all the delivery nuances, such implementations help software teams to deliver their products to market faster, and not just develop faster. In spite of many potential benefits, these agile transformations are fraught with challenges such as communication issues, lack of flexibility, and missing coordination. In an attempt to solve these issues, many organizations have turned towards either of the following frameworks:

1. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a simple and light weight large-scale agile implementation technique that offers multiple configuration options depending on size of the team.
2. Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) presents itself as a framework that respects many elements of Scrum and wishes to avoid unnecessary overheads when scaling it.
3. Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) takes a people-first and learning-oriented approach which makes it different from its counterparts. It promotes a hybrid technique to address the full- software delivery life cycle from inception until release stage.

Choosing between these (and many other) options is often difficult because of the lack of an assessment model that can allow to conduct a comparison analysis. Nevertheless, SAFe happens to be widely popular in situations when the aim is to achieve a uniform and consistent strategy across several departments in an organization. Some of the greatest benefits of embracing SAFe are listed below.

• Trust is established throughout the development process by sharing facts and progress openly across all levels. This additional level of transparency enables decentralized decision-making and additional employee empowerment.
• Global focus is considered to be more valuable than the local focus. While Agile recommends priority of team’s goals above personal tasks and responsibilities, SAFe takes it a step further by encouraging an emphasis on vision and program objectives over team goals.
• Shared goal- setting is promoted not only to generate a strong buy-in from development teams but also from executives, business owners and other key stakeholders. SAFe does it in the best way by actively engaging the right people in PI planning process, where the idea is to come up with a meaningful and inspiring strategy that everybody believes in.
• Predictable delivery is made possible by letting the teams plan and iterate at the same frequency. During the execution period, these coordinated, cross-functional teams catch-up frequently to keep a track of their program-level objectives. Any risks or blockages observed are reported in the necessary forums.
• Popularity of SAFe has made it easy to find consultations and training. There are plenty of articles, tutorials and videos online, and the certification process is clear and fairly mature.

Most importantly, SAFe is the only method that helps companies to scale while other frameworks let them grow- not scale. For the sake of clarity, “growing” here refers to hiring more and more resources as the company gets more business whereas “scaling” refers to adding people incrementally with a more thoughtful and forward looking approach.

At the end of the day, SAFe brings a lot to the table, especially by making it possible for organizations of a certain size to adopt a more holistic agile approach towards software development. However, as with many methodologies, there’s no right or wrong when it comes to deciding whether your organization should adopt SAFe or not. It is more about educating yourself on the available options so that you can aptly choose something that meets your organization’s unique needs.

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Originally published at https://siddhithakkar.com on November 22, 2019.