Most businesses find the potential benefits of Agile—including increased efficiency, adaptability, and predictability across project lifecycles—to be an attractive proposition. But sometimes the principles that make those improvements possible seem less than feasible for large enterprises. Businesses may want to increase productivity through increased ownership under the Agile methodology, but it’s not always clear how to make that happen when you’ve already got firmly entrenched systems in place throughout a large and complex enterprise.
Obviously, you’d want to have pretty clear answers to these questions before you made any big changes—which is exactly why we’re writing this post. Below, we’ll do our best to answer those questions and others, hopefully giving you the data you need to choose the right methodologies for your business.
Before you can figure out if Scaled Agile Framework would help your business, you need a clear idea of what it actually is, and what it looks like in practice. Scaled Agile’s website offers this definition: “SAFe provides guidance for all the levels of the enterprise that are actively engaged in solution development: Team, Program, Large Solution, and Portfolio. The result is greater alignment and visibility across the organization, connecting the business strategy to execution, enabling better business results, faster, and with a higher degree of predictability and quality.”
Essentially, this means combining “systems thinking,” Agile software development, and Lean product development, such that you can extend general Agile practices and principles across an entire organization. Some critics complain that result often isn’t “true Agile,” and in a sense they’re right: because the framework is meant to work across so many functions, it requires more top-down leadership than you might expect; by the same token, companies need to synchronize frequently across domains, which means individual touchpoints can’t always take full ownership across the entire cycle. All that being said, the framework is still designed to decentralize decision-making and speed up incremental builds, with the aim of improving agility across the entire enterprise.
Before we get into the benefits of this methodology, let’s take a second to clear up the difference between SAFe and another concept that’s often brought up alongside it: SCRUM and Large-Scale SCRUM (LeSS). While SCRUM as a technique can and does fit into larger Agile methodologies, SAFe and LeSS offer very different visions of how to scale up responsive processes. While SAFe mixes many of the techniques of Agile with slightly more leadership-driven organizational tactics, LeSS is basically turtles all the way down. The idea here is essentially the creation of a “team of teams,” in which representatives from each low-level SCRUM team meets with higher level teams in the same way, and then representatives from those higher-level teams meet as part of an even higher level SCRUM meeting. This has its own set of advantages, but it doesn't involve the seem kinds of formalized processes that SAFe does, which can be a downside.
Of course, these tactics are only as valuable as the benefits that they confer onto your operation. So, what kinds of benefits can SAFe have if implemented correctly?
According, again, to Scaled Agile’s website, these benefits can be quite significant, with some companies seeing time-to-market improvements of 30-70% and productivity increases of 25-75%. In this way, businesses are able to leverage their newfound speed and agility into competitive advantages of all kinds—whether that’s first mover advantages from improved speed to market or simply improved cost efficiency as a result of increased productivity across the board. Essentially, we see many of the benefits of smaller-scale Agile deployments multiplied across a much larger team.
Of course, SAFe is hardly the only methodology that promises those very same operational improvements. The difference here is that it’s building on a framework that's already proven popular across a wide spectrum of different businesses. On some level, it stands to reason that Agile practices have the power to improve key metrics across an organization if they can be scaled successfully—which is precisely what SAFe is designed to do.
All of this brings us to the all important question: is SAFe right for your business? Of course, the answer is: “It depends.” If you’re a tiny, lean organization that only consists of a handful of developers and other personnel, something like SAFe probably provides more top-down oversight than you really need. Instead, you might be able to successfully implement something closer to pure Agile without incurring unnecessary risk.
On the other hand, if your business is too large for a conventional Agile deployment, SAFe should be strong contender. For enterprise businesses that consistently slip on new product releases, run into disruptions when trying to build iteratively on existing software projects, or who deal with higher than expected levels of employee churn and turnover, Agile strategies scaled to meet enterprise needs can present an effective remedy.
To get a little more specific, here are a few questions you could ask yourself to help figure out how suitable SAFe might be for your organization:
If the answers to these questions show a general level of inflexibility or a lack of cohesion to your portfolio, that may be a sign that SAFe would be an appropriate strategic initiative.
Okay, let’s say you see Agile as an opportunity to improve your flexibility and speed up your time-to-market: how do you actually go about putting these sorts of practices into place? As it happens, there are a few basic steps that most companies take for implementation:
This might seem like a lot—and it is. At the same time, every organization is different, and no one list of steps can fully encompass the entire process. For this reason, the early steps can be some of the most important, because that’s where you build up the expertise to figure out how to implement the rest of methodology.
For this reason, even the kinds of larger enterprises for which SAFe is best suited might benefit from outside help in these early stages—whether that’s in the form of consulting help or a near-shoring partner for whom implementing this kind of methodology is routine. In this way, you can potentially augment your internal capabilities when it comes to complex process redefinitions. Once those redefinitions are in place, you can begin to reap many of the benefits that most people associate with Agile, without losing control of the small, self-directed teams that make those benefits possible.
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