The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFE): Basics You Should Know

Embarking on a professional development journey is not only a personal triumph, but also a commitment to expanding one's expertise in the ever-evolving landscape of project management and agile methodologies.

I am pleased to announce that I have recently achieved significant milestones in my pursuit of excellence - securing a perfect score on the SAFE Agilist exam, scoring 91% on the Lean Portfolio Management certification, and achieving a commendable 97% on the Safe Practice Consultant assessment.

With these accomplishments, I am now a certified SAFE Practice Consultant (SPC), equipped to empower leaders, change agents, consultants, and team members to lead enterprise-scale Lean-Agile transformations. As I delve into the intricacies of the SPC certification, I find it imperative to share the basics of SAFe in this article.

Over the course of the next few paragraphs, we will unpack the meaning of SAFe, explore the imperative need for its adoption, delve into its core values and principles, elucidate the various roles within the framework and their dynamic interactions, and shed light on the eight flow accelerators that propel organizations toward successful Lean-Agile transformations.

What is Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?

simply described, the Scaled Agile Framework, often abbreviated as SAFe, is a comprehensive set of guidelines that combines the principles of Agile development, Lean product development, and systems thinking.

This framework aims to assist large organizations in adopting Agile practices at an enterprise level.

SAFe serves as a blueprint for organizations to navigate through the complexities of aligning and coordinating multiple teams and departments within an organization to achieve common goals.

When it comes to moving from project to a product / service approach? within an organization, especially large-scale ones, traditional Agile methodologies may fall short.? This is where SAFe comes in handy.

By providing guidelines to organize and manage work, SAFe enables enterprises to scale Agile practices beyond individual teams. This ensures a streamlined workflow and a harmonious work environment that fosters productivity and efficiency.

The Core Values of SAFE

The effectiveness of SAFe lies within its four core values: Alignment, Built-in Quality, Transparency, and Program Execution. Each of these values plays a critical role in shaping the culture and determining the behavior within an organization:

• Alignment: emphasizes the importance of having everyone in the organization working towards a common goal. Through regular synchronization of activities and transparent communication, SAFe ensures that all teams, regardless of their geographical location, are aligned and coordinated.
• Respect for People: creating an inclusive workplace where every individual feels valued and heard. Respecting people's diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and ideas fosters creativity and innovation, and acknowledging and appreciating the contributions of team .

• Transparency: to foster trust within an organization. SAFe advocates for open communication and visibility in all processes, thereby enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions
• Relentless Improvement: encourages a culture of continuous learning and development. Team members are motivated to seek out opportunities for growth and acquire new skills to enhance their performance. This core value recognizes the importance of adaptability in a dynamic environment, embracing change and learning from both successes and failures is crucial for the ongoing enhancement of processes and outcomes.

The SAFE Principles

The SAFe Principles are the guiding lights that help organizations navigate their agile transformation journey. Derived from Agile and Lean principles, these tenets principles provide a roadmap to help teams deliver value efficiently and effectively. The ten Principles of SAFe are:

• Take an Economic View: To provide people and society with maximum value and quality as efficiently as possible, it is vital to establish incremental value delivery strategies and frameworks for every value stream and their compatibility within their environment. This framework illustrates tradeoffs among risks, manufacturing, operations, and development costs. Each value stream must adhere to an approved budget with decentralized decisions supported by guardrails
• Apply Systems Thinking: understanding the system in which users and workers operate is necessary to meet workplace challenges effectively. SAFe uses systems thinking to both develop the system itself, as well as organize its implementation. Optimizing any individual component won't bring improvement; all must understand its purpose for optimal improvement. SAFe takes this approach when developing their systems or organizations that create them.
• Assume Variability; Preserve Options: Traditional design and life cycle practices advise selecting an option with single requirements early in the development process. If your starting point is incorrect, any subsequent modifications could take too much time and lead to an ineffective design. Before making decisions during the development cycle, it is beneficial to keep multiple design and requirements options in mind for extended periods. By using empirical data as a guideline, designers should eventually focus on finding solutions which deliver maximum economic efficiency.
• Build Incrementally with Fast Integrated Learning Cycles: Iterative development allows customers to provide feedback faster while also lowering risk as subsequent increments build upon those from before. Some increments, as they remain continuously running in a system, can serve as prototypes to test and validate products on the market; others provide minimum viable products (MVPs); still others add valuable new functionality. These early and rapid feedback points help identify when it may be necessary to alter a course.
• Base Milestones on Objective Evaluation of Working Systems: Business owners, developers, and customers all share in the responsibility to ensure investments in new solutions deliver significant business value. The sequential, phase-gate development model was intended to meet this challenge, yet experience has shown it does not mitigate risk appropriately. Integration points provide objective benchmarks to evaluate solutions during Lean-Agile development. Regular evaluation provides the financial, technical, and fitness-for-purpose governance that ensures investments will yield an adequate return.

• Make Value Flow without interruptions: To achieve this, one must understand what flow is, its characteristics and how these attributes can accelerate or limit value transference in any system. Principle #6 provides eight common characteristics of flow-based systems and offers specific recommendations to remove barriers to flow.
• Apply Cadence, Synchronize with Cross-Domain Planning: Cadence provides predictability and serves as a rhythm for development. Synchronization enables multiple perspectives to be understood, resolved, and integrated simultaneously. Development cadence and synchronization, combined with periodic cross-domain planning, provide effective means of operating effectively under development uncertainty.
• Unlock the Intrinsic Motivation of Knowledge Workers: Leaders of Lean-Agile organizations understand that individual incentives may not always be sufficient to motivate employees in terms of innovation, engagement, or ideation. Individual incentives may create competition within an organization and hinder efforts toward reaching its overall goals. Employee engagement can be increased by offering autonomy, purpose and minimal restrictions while creating an atmosphere of mutual influence and understanding the importance of compensation. This Approach has a positive influence on individuals, customers, and organizations.
• Decentralize Decision Making: Decentralized decision-making is essential to fast time to value. Decentralizing decisions reduces delays and speeds product development processes while simultaneously offering faster feedback cycles. Some decisions necessitate global and strategic consideration as well as economies of size which warrant centralized decision-making. As both decisions must be made quickly and with consideration for long-term value creation processes in mind, an environment which empowers employees to make educated choices quickly is necessary for optimal decision-making processes.
• Organize Around Value: many businesses today still abide by principles developed more than 100 years ago, such as structuring around expertise for maximum efficiency. To maintain its competitive edge in today's digital environment, organizations must quickly respond to customers' needs by offering new and innovative products or services that meet them quickly. Solutions to these issues require collaboration among functional departments, with regards to handoffs and waste. For business agility, companies must organize themselves around the value they deliver; when market or customer needs shift, organizations must quickly adapt by restructuring themselves around new value streams.

The eight key flow accelerators

SAFe is a flow-based system, meaning it prioritizes the smooth and continuous delivery of value. Any disruptions to this flow need to be systematically identified and addressed to ensure consistent value delivery.

To enhance the flow of value, SAFe adopts eight key flow accelerators - principles that can optimize and address potential issues, thereby ensuring uninterrupted customer value. These flow accelerators are applicable across all levels of the SAFe framework, including ART, Team Flow, and Portfolio Flow.

• Agile Release Trains (ART)

Agile Release Trains (ART) are long-lived teams of agile teams, which, along with other stakeholders, collaboratively deliver value in a value stream.

ARTs are the primary vehicle by which SAFe delivers value. The effectiveness of an ART can significantly impact the customer's value delivery, making it a crucial element in improving business outcomes, and aim to deliver a continuous flow of valuable features to the customer.

Ensuring this constant delivery requires synchronized efforts and contributions from every individual involved in the ART.

However, the process of digital transformation and adoption of the Lean-Agile way of working can be complex, presenting numerous challenges and impediments. Despite these complexities, there is always an opportunity to enhance the flow of value delivery through ARTs

1. Visualizing and Limiting WIP within ARTs: Excessive Work In Process (WIP) can significantly hamper ART productivity and obstruct the flow of value. It can overload individuals and teams, leading to confusion in priorities, frequent context switching, and long waits for new functionality. Therefore, it becomes essential to visualize all features in process and manage the inventory of all features currently in flight.
2. Addressing Bottlenecks within ARTs: any bottleneck within an ART can limit the productivity of the entire train. Teams must proactively address these bottlenecks to enhance the flow. Common bottlenecks could include an overloaded team, repeated slippage of an activity, or delayed execution of certain types of dependencies.

• Team Flow

Team Flow describes a state where agile teams consistently deliver value to their customers. The small, cross-functional nature of agile teams, their increased level of empowerment, and their direct connection to the customer, all contribute to creating a work environment that delivers value faster and is more productive.

1. Minimizing Handoffs and Dependencies: A 'handoff' occurs when a work product transitions from one process step to another. When a specific person or unique input from another person or a team is required, a dependency occurs. While some handoffs and dependencies are inevitable, excessive, and unnecessary dependencies and handoffs disrupt team flow, create delays, and increase context-switching.
2. Getting Faster Feedback: Solution development critically depends on feedback to guide the team's work. When feedback is delayed or missing, misunderstandings can quickly pile up, leading to rework, slow delivery, and unsatisfied customers. Therefore, teams must ensure that they are constantly receiving and incorporating feedback.
3. Work in Smaller Batches: Working in smaller batches allows teams to receive feedback more quickly and make improvements faster. By breaking down work into manageable pieces, teams can avoid overwhelm and maintain focus, leading to higher quality results. Automation tools like Planview Hub can streamline processes and minimize delays, enhancing efficiency and continuous improvement.

• Portfolio Flow

Portfolio Flow describes a state where Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) provides a continuous flow of new epics to Solution Trains and ARTs to achieve the portfolio's vision and strategic themes. The LPM competency aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, agile portfolio operations, and governance.

1. Reducing Queue Lengths: The length of the queue, i.e., the backlog of committed work awaiting implementation, directly impacts the time it takes for new functionality to reach the customer. Teams can make queues shorter by balancing work-in-process (WIP) against available capacity, adhering to recommended cadence and team size, and adjusting the process to support smaller batches.
2. Optimizing Time 'In the Zone': Solution development heavily relies on creativity, focus, and the intellectual effort of team members. Ensuring that these factors are resolved is an essential task for every leader and coach. The following can help to increase time in the zone: optimize meetings and events, limit work-in-process further, and use innovative collaboration patterns.
3. Remediate Legacy Policies and Practices: Legacy policies and practices that obstruct flow must be identified and addressed. Outdated practices, fixed scope, and unnecessary standards hinder progress and impede flow. By eliminating these obstacles, organizations can cultivate a culture of continuous improvement, optimize flow, and drive innovation.

The Key roles in SAFE

SAFe organizes roles into various layers – Team, Program, Large Solution, and Portfolio. Each layer has specific goals and requires specialized roles to achieve them. The roles are designed to encourage collaboration and ensure work aligns with strategic business outcomes. Here are few critical roles:

• Team Level Roles

1. Agile Team Members: Agile Team Members are the backbone of the SAFe implementation, responsible for the actual development of features and increments. They are cross-functional teams with members from various disciplines like development, testing, design, and more. The collaborative efforts and dedication of Agile Team Members are vital in delivering value to customers regularly and achieving the objectives set by the Business Owners and Product Owners.
2. Product Owner (PO): The Product Owner (PO) in SAFe acts as a bridge between the Business Owners and the Agile Teams, ensuring that the product vision is well understood and translated into actionable tasks. The Product Owner manages the product backlog, prioritizes items based on customer needs and business value, and works closely with Agile Teams to refine requirements throughout the development process.
3. Scrum Master/Team Coach (SM/TC): In the SAFe context, Scrum Masters, also referred to as Team Coaches, are seen as servant-leaders for Agile Teams. They ensure adherence to Agile principles and practices, facilitate the team's progress, remove impediments, and promote a culture of continuous improvement and learning within the team.

• Program Level Roles

1. Release Train Engineer (RTE): the Release Train Engineer (RTE) role is pivotal in orchestrating and facilitating the Agile Release Train's activities. They help identify and resolve any cross-team issues that may arise during the development process and work closely with Product Management, Product Owners, and Scrum Masters to ensure smooth execution of Program Increments (PIs).
2. Product Manager: At the program level, the roles of Product Manager become more complex. They prioritize well-described features, ensuring that everyone understands them. They work to provide guidance, prioritize features, and define the program's vision.
3. System Architect: The System Architect in SAFe is responsible for designing and sharing the architectural vision across the Agile Release Train. Their expertise is crucial for building scalable and maintainable systems

• Large Solution Level Roles

1. Solution Manager: Solution Managers in SAFe are responsible for defining and supporting the building of desirable, feasible, viable, and sustainable large-scale business solutions that meet customer needs.
2. Solution Architect/Engineer: is responsible for designing and sharing the architectural vision across multiple Agile Release Trains. They ensure the solutions delivered align with the overall strategy.
3. Solution Train Engineer: The Solution Train Engineer role in SAFe is responsible for facilitating and guiding the work done by all of the Agile Release Trains delivering the solution

• Portfolio Level Roles

1. Epic Owners: Epic Owners in SAFe are responsible for defining an epic, articulating its benefits, and facilitating its implementation.
2. Enterprise Architect: The Enterprise Architect drives architectural initiatives for the portfolio in SAFe.

Interactions Among SAFe Roles

The success of SAFe implementation is contingent upon effective interactions among various roles. Here are a few critical interactions:

• Business Owners and Product Owners: Business Owners communicate the organization's strategic priorities to Product Owners, who then translate this strategy into actionable plans for development teams.
• Product Owners and Agile Teams: Product Owners work closely with Agile Teams to refine requirements, prioritize work, and ensure alignment with the overall product vision.
• Scrum Masters and Agile Teams: Scrum Masters serve as servant leaders, facilitating the team's progress, removing impediments, and ensuring adherence to Agile principles and practices.
• Release Train Engineers and Other SAFe Roles: Release Train Engineers coordinate with Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and Business Owners to ensure smooth execution of Program Increments and alignment with business goals.

Conclusion

Scaled Agile Frameworks (SAFe) offer organizations an adaptable and flexible environment in a constantly shifting business world, creating an ideal work environment. SAFe helps scale agile practices on an enterprise-wide level to promote harmony throughout your organization by aligning quality assurance procedures with increasing transparency while prioritizing program execution.

By emphasizing ART flow, portfolio flow and team flow principles, SAFe provides organizations with a roadmap they can follow to increase operational efficiency and agility. Adopting and applying these principles will result in smoother workflows and improved resource allocation.

Scaled Agile Framework provides an extremely effective structure for scaling agile methods at scale. SAFe's effectiveness lies in its reliance on roles played by each person within its structure; all roles contribute towards the success of an Agile project and understanding their relationships is vital if organizations plan on adopting SAFe for large-scale Agile projects.

Be mindful that each organization has different requirements; what works well for one may not suit another. Before adopting SAFe for your own organization, it is imperative that you first understand its individual needs and circumstances, as this tool can aid with organizational change management.

CALL TO ACTION

I invite you to take the next step in empowering your team and organization.

Whether you're seeking to instill Lean-Agile principles through Leading SAFe, streamline your project management with SCRUM, or optimize your portfolio strategy with Lean Portfolio Management, I am here to guide you.

If you are looking to elevate your team's skills and certify your employees in these agile methodologies, I would be delighted to assist you.