SAFe for small development teams?

Can you downscale Scaled Agile Framework? Be brave and give it a try!

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has gained a lot of traction the last couple of years, and is the dominant agile scaling approach according to the 10th State of Agile report. (Well, Scrum-of-Scrums is actually the no 1 scaling method according to the report, but that's a recurring meeting rather than a scaling method if you ask me.) SAFe is aimed at development organizations from around 50 people, to huge organizations with hundreds of teams and thousands of developers. At least according to Mr SAfe himself, Dean Leffingwell.

But do you really have to be as many as 50 people to reap the benefits of SAFe?

Not at all...

SAFe can for sure be successfully downscaled. Many components of SAFe can be highly beneficial for smaller organizations. How do I know? I've tried myself with good results. :-)

Here is a list of SAFe principals and tools for you to consider, even if your development organization only consists of 2-3 teams.

• Agile Release Trains - Cluster your teams into an Agile Release Train (or Tram?) for better coordination of dependencies, releases, architectural roadmap etc.
• Program Board - Create a common picture of what lies ahead of you the next couple of months, and give the business the so desired forecasting.
• Big Room Planning - Gather all the people, plan together and have fun! Same benefits, but less cumbersome to find a suitable room.
• System Demos - Focus your demos on the big picture from time to time, instead of just demonstrating your ever evolving system team by team, story by story.
• Epic Kanban - Structure the preparation and development of your epics into a kanban workflow to improve visibility, throughput and productivity.
• Value Streams - Traditional projects are rather useless vehicles for driving your continuous development, in my experience. Value streams help you out of the dreadful start-stop paradigm, and counteract many other agile anti-patterns as well.

So, this is just a few examples of how SAFe, or at least parts of it, can be utilized in smaller development organizations. Remember that you don't have to be a slave under the framework. Experiment and learn! Pick and choose principles and tools from whatever framework you want. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, try something else.

 Be agile! Be brave! Be SAFe!