Safe Agilist

The Scaled Agile Framework??(SAFe?)?is a set of organizational and workflow patterns for implementing agile practices at an enterprise scale.?The framework is a body of knowledge that includes structured guidance on roles and responsibilities, how to plan and manage the work, and values to uphold.

SAFe promotes alignment, collaboration, and delivery across large numbers of agile teams. It was formed around three primary bodies of knowledge: agile software development, lean product development, and systems thinking.

As businesses grow in size, SAFe provides a structured approach for scaling agile. There are four configurations in SAFe to accommodate various levels of scale: Essential SAFe, Large Solution SAFe, Portfolio SAFe, and Full SAFe.?

Dean Leffingwell and Drew Jemilo released SAFe in 2011 to help organizations design better systems and software that better meet customers’ changing needs. At that time, teams used traditional project management processes to deliver software. But as the need to rapidly respond to changing market conditions increased, new frameworks emerged to help businesses improve solution delivery across their enterprises, and SAFe was born. Today, SAFe is one of the most popular scaled agile delivery frameworks, and SAFe’s worldwide community of practitioners continue to evolve it.

Core principles and values

Core Values

SAFe’s core values describe the culture that leadership needs to foster and how people should behave within that culture in order to effectively use the framework.

Alignment

SAFe requires that companies put planning and reflection cadences in place at all levels of the organization. With these in place, everyone understands the current state of the business, the goals, and how everyone should move together to achieve those goals. By synchronizing people and activities regularly, all levels of the portfolio stay in alignment. Information flows both upward and downward in a timely fashion, unlike traditional top-down, command and control structures.

Built-in quality

In the SAFe framework, agility should never come at the cost of quality. SAFe requires teams at all levels to define what “done” means for each task or project and to bake quality development practices into every working agreement. According to SAFe, there are five key dimensions of built-in quality: flow, architecture and design quality, code quality, system quality, and release quality.

Transparency

SAFe encourages trust-building behavior, including planning work in smaller batch sizes so problems can be surfaced sooner, providing real-time visibility into backlog progress across levels.

Program execution

Program execution is the heart of SAFe and powers everything else in the framework. Teams and programs must be able to deliver quality, working software and business value on a regular basis.

Leadership

SAFe requires lean-agile leadership behavior because only leaders can change the system and create the environment necessary to embrace all of the core values.