Unlike traditional agile approaches, the Scaled Agile Framework^® (SAFe^®) is for implementing lean-agile practices at an enterprise level. Here, Quinn Dodsworth, Agile Learning Consultant and Facilitator at PM-Partners, explains what it entails, who it’s for, and how training and certification can benefit your organisation. If you’re new to SAFe, or just starting out with the framework, this guide is for you.

Agile as a methodology, framework and mindset, has proven to be an asset for organisations operating in a dynamic environment where the ability to adapt to changing circumstances is a key benefit. While agile approaches, including Scrum, Kanban and lean methodologies, are well embedded at the team and project management level, the real challenge is extending agile across multiple teams, particularly in large more complex organisations. Businesses increasingly need to be able to adapt at enterprise scale to maintain their competitive edge – and in response, frameworks to scale agile have grown in popularity.

What is the Scaled Agile Framework^® (SAFe^®)?

Developed in 2011, SAFe^® was the first of the formal offerings for scaling agile. It was designed as a ‘big picture’ framework for implementing lean-agile practices at an enterprise-wide level considering the different layers of an organisation, from team and project level to the executive segment, and their interdependencies.

While tech startups, software development teams and IT personnel were among the first to use agile, SAFe brings lean-agile to the rest of the business and to other industries. It recognises that agile works differently across various departments of an organisation and identifies how each can adopt agile practices and work with other agile teams. Scrum masters, for example, can use it to formalise agile at scale.

As with other agile practices, SAFe is customer-centric and uses the role of the product owner within the team to represent the voice of the customer.

Scaled Agile versus Scrum

Other scaling methodologies for agile include Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), plus the looser Scrum@Scale and Scrum of Scrums, which requires a Scrum master who can lead these at scale. While all scaled agile approaches are essentially related, compared to DAD and LeSS, SAFe is more structured, which gives organisations – especially those with low agile maturity – an orderly transition path into agile.

According to the 2022 State of Agile report, SAFe is the most popular agile scaling framework with 53 percent of respondents using it, compared to Scrum@Scale/Scrum of Scrums at 28 per cent and lean management at 8 per cent.

SAFe is regularly updated, with the latest release – SAFe 6.0 – launched in March 2023.

Introducing SAFe^® for teams

Three bodies of knowledge form the foundation of SAFe – systems thinking, agile software development and lean product development – which is then structured in a framework so that these intersecting methodologies can scale to an enterprise level. This enables different teams to select their operations around the framework that best suits their functionality while still retaining a reference point for other teams to support alignment.

SAFe’s four core values embody the underlying beliefs that are key to the framework’s effectiveness:

• Alignment, which supports coherence across teams as they work to achieve shared goals and is key to achieving speed and quality in value delivery.
• Transparency, which removes uncertainty and facilitates decision-making while also strengthening trust across teams. A transparency-led process reduces waste and the need for rework.
• Respect for people is paramount because value is created for and by people. This helps guide behaviours and actions and leads to personal development in the process of creating value.
• Relentless improvement, which motivates team members to learn as they strive for better outcomes. This tenet of lean leads to the development of better, more profitable products, produced efficiently and resulting in the greater satisfaction of customers.

Scaled Agile practices and principles

SAFe also comprises 10 core principles aligned with the lean-agile mindset. Once the framework is implemented properly, this should become standard workplace practice.

1. Take an economic view, which is to say, aim for the best quality and value for the smallest expenditure of time, money and effort. This often manifests as ‘deliver early and often’.
2. Apply systems thinking, which is a holistic approach to solution development that considers all aspects of a system and its context for its design, development, deployment, and maintenance.
3. Assume variability; preserve options. This risk management approach asks system developers to go against their natural instinct to reduce variability and instead cultivate potential opportunities for as long as possible so that solutions can readily adapt to changing circumstances.
4. Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles. The iterative nature of agile is probably its most visible practice. It allows teams to seek and integrate feedback and make improvements quickly, in line with established and emerging customer requirements.
5. Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems. This principle recognises the difference between output and outcomes and underlines the importance of measuring outcomes, that is, whether the solution adequately addresses the initial problem.
6. Make value flow without interruptions. This is predicated on the organisation recognising value and optimising its people and systems to increase throughput and deliver value faster.
7. Apply cadence, synchronise with cross-domain planning to reduce uncertainty, increase confidence and implement integrated solutions.
8. Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers through respect for their skills, knowledge and experience. Provide autonomy and encourage innovation.
9. Decentralise decision-making to eliminate delay, increase empowerment and foster innovation. While strategic decisions are best centralised, decisions that are frequent, time-critical and context-specific should be given to the people closes to the situation, who are best placed to evaluate and solve issues. The role of the product owner helps the team to focus on the needs of the customer in this endeavour.
10. Organise around value. This is often the hardest principle for large organisations to adopt because of established hierarchies and the difficulty of securing buy-in for wholesale enterprise-wide change. However, this speaks to identifying value streams and creating organisational pipelines to optimise throughputs and outcomes and may involve reorganising the business structure.

Why use the Scaled Agile Framework^®?

SAFe enables large organisations to ensure their teams are adopting a lean-agile mindset and have the tools and capabilities to attain the benefits from an agile approach. These benefits include:

An increase in speed-to-market: The 2022 State of Agile report indicates that 53 per cent of organisations adapt agile to ‘accelerate time to market’. At a macro level, the way SAFe enables this is to align cross-functional teams in the organisation around customer needs, which means these needs are being met faster. At an operational level, alignment supports teams to communicate more effectively and speed up decision-making, as well as streamline operations.

Better team engagement: The report also highlights the benefits for teams. Of the respondents who are satisfied with the agile practices in their company, 69 per cent nominate ‘increased collaboration’ as a key benefit of the methodology. Furthermore, 55 per cent of respondents listed ‘high levels of cross-collaboration and communication’ as a best practice for high-performing agile teams. This also translates to better employee engagement; SAFe supports knowledge workers to achieve autonomy, mastery and purpose and offers the tools to reduce burnout and boost employee satisfaction.

A boost to productivity: In addition to the benefits from team alignment contributing to productivity, SAFe also helps agile practitioners in the organisation excise unnecessary work and refine schedules by identifying and removing delays. The built-in continuous improvement cycle reinforces the productivity gains.

Improvements to quality: The central focus on customer needs through appointment of a product owner in the team means quality is a core feature of the SAFe methodology at each stage of the project cycle, from conception to delivery, and is owned by all team members, not just product development or quality assurance.

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Implementing the Scaled Agile Framework^®

Four levels of SAFe^®

There are four levels of SAFe implementation to cater for various levels of scale: Essential, the minimum elements needed for scaled agile implementation; Large Solution, large and complex solutions without the need for portfolio management; Portfolio, for strategic portfolio operations and lean governance mechanisms; and Full, the most comprehensive configuration for enterprises that have a portfolio of large and complex projects, products, services and/or solutions.

Seven competencies of SAFe^®

Implementation is centred on seven main functions within the organisation, which creator Dean Leffingwell based on the core competencies of business agility:

1. Lean-agile leadership, including the embedding of the agile mindset.
2. Team and technical agility, where individuals and teams practise agile and exhibit agile behaviours.
3. Agile product delivery, marked by the product owner role, the prevalence of customer-centricity and design thinking, and use of a continuous delivery pipeline.
4. Enterprise solution delivery, incorporating lean systems engineering and continual evolution of systems.
5. Lean portfolio management, including strategic funding and lean governance.
6. Organisational agility, which encompasses lean business operations and strategic agility.
7. Continuous learning culture, following an iterative style of improvement and innovation.

The 12-step implementation roadmap

A proven implementation roadmap describes the “critical moves” that an organisation should take to ensure their SAFe adoption and rollout efforts are a success. This pathway to SAFe is made up of the following 12 steps:

1. Reaching the tipping point
2. Train lean-agile change agents
3. Train executives, managers, and leaders
4. Establish a lean-agile centre of excellence
5. Recognise value streams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs)
6. Create the implementation plan
7. Prepare for ART launch
8. Train teams and launch ART
9. Coach ART Execution
10. Launch More ARTs and value streams
11. Enhance the Portfolio
12. Accelerate

© Scaled Agile, Inc

While all organisations are different and there is rarely a perfect step-by-step implementation, businesses getting the best results have been shown to follow a similar adoption pattern to that laid out in the roadmap. As such, it provides organisations with a safety net of tried-and-tested techniques to facilitate adoption at all levels.

Using SAFe^® for teams

The aim of the SAFe framework is to bring agile practices, tools and mindset into large organisations to ensure all teams are able to use agile and communicate with one another with agility as a forethought. It can be implemented by Scrum masters looking for more structure, organisations seeking to either widen agile practices beyond software development or embed them in their project management.

While smaller organisations can benefit from SAFe, with its four configurations allowing for varied adoption, it is designed for medium-to-large enterprises and organisations in any industry looking to become more agile. There is a minimum size of organisation with a minimum number of development teams that makes the cost and effort of SAFe implementation worthwhile.

SAFe is particularly suited to digital organisations and those concerned about doing business in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. Multinational corporations such as Cisco, Lockheed Martin, PepsiCo and PM-Partners clients including a large insurance provider headquartered in Sydney, have all successfully implemented SAFe.

The structured, sometimes prescriptive, nature of SAFe and its implementation make it ideal for organisations with little or no maturity in agile, or which may have a software development or IT team that is adept at agile but with uneven application within the enterprise that would therefore benefit from a more standardised approach.

Do you need SAFe^® certification?

The certification process involves a SAFe training course, with supplementary study materials, and an exam. Candidates pursue formal SAFe certification for a handful of reasons: 77 percent for professional development and 63 per cent to prove their knowledge in a growing area. Seven in 10 companies are at the beginning of their agile journey, accounting for the increase in demand for SAFe professionals.

PM-Partners offers the full range of SAFe courses with Leading SAFe, SAFe for Teams and Lean Portfolio Management among the most popular options. For best alignment of goals, values and practices we recommend as many people as possible seek certification, though a lot can be achieved by training key people: SAFe for Teams for project managers and team leaders; SAFe for Architects for Scrum masters and solutions/systems architects; Implementing SAFe for those roles who will be stepping up to drive the implementation as the organisation’s SAFe Practice Consultant (SPC), and Leading SAFe for executives and senior project managers, as well as programme and portfolio managers.

Agile, formerly the domain of startups, software development and IT teams, has now entered the mainstream with large organisations looking to implement and benefit from enterprise-wide agile practices. SAFe, the most popular of the scaled agile offerings, is a structured framework that gives organisations at the beginning of their agile journey a comprehensive entry point. Certification boosts knowledge and confidence for key players in an organisation as it transitions to agile at scale.

Want to implement the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) in your organisation? Check out our SAFe courses or SAFe consultation services. Contact us or call 1300 70 13 14 to find out if a scaled agile approach is right for you.

SAFe and Scaled Agile Framework are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.