What value does SAFe hold for organizations and why is Requisite Agility needed?

In a big organization, it is not possible to agilize and transform your entire operations to fit with all-embracing Agile structures. This is where SaFe fits perfectly and that is why it was designed for bigger and larger organizations to use Agile principles, without restructuring your entire organization. I feel it is a framework made to fit the large organizations that have multiple departments as it makes it possible for them to optimize their operations. You don’t need to be totally transformational , SAFe gives you a way to work with your existing structures, operations, and goals while fitting the Agile processes as required. It's a great way to introduce Agile principles to your organization, your people who have no prior experience in Agile and all you need is to put effort to assign teams who are willing to work together within the SAFe approach. 

The biggest advantage that SAFe provides a lightweight framework that can help organizations to create efficiency in their development operations and it still has the power to maintain the centralized important decision-making that is essential at the top level. It is the best way to extend the idea of agile beyond the front lines to the software leaders who are involved in higher-level strategy operations. It does so because SAFe has been designed to take care of the coordinated strategy for large and complex projects that have large teams on it. It remains efficient than other traditional approaches to software developers because it is deeply rooted in agile and lean principles. Its centralization makes multi-team coordination easy and because of this, it is possible to standardize processes across multiple teams which ultimately helps to avoid impediments and delays that emerge when multiple teams work together on the same project. 

With SAFe you can help teams maintain alignment with your organization's goals. This is often lost in agile approaches that always take a more bottom-up approach where agile teams may lose the sight of bigger picture business objectives. In comparison, SAFe takes a top-bottom alignment and centralized decision making that ensures that an organization's strategic objective remains the top priority and all decisions are made in support of those objectives. 

SAFe does bring in some initial advantages on the table for large organizations that are starting with their agile journey but it also has many drawbacks. For instance, it takes too much of a top-down approach. It does provide extra layers of oversight, management, and coordination. This is what benefits large organizations, but sadly they resemble the waterfall approach that so many teams are trying to move away from. Other agile methodologies tend to provide more freedom to teams to recognize and solve issues that emerge due to different sprint rhythm, dependencies, etc., SAFe can often slow down existing processes and limit the required agility compared to an agile environment. I think it has a place in certain contexts, environments and in certain organizations and at the right time. SAFe is not for everyone and it doesn't work at all times.

Now that I have explained the value of SAFe in organizations, I will explain that why one method or best practice is not efficient to solve all the organization's problems and help them in their agile transformation journey and this what the Requisite Agility movement is all about. 

Sometimes different methodologies are complementary, making different assumptions about the problem situation, and that it is, therefore, necessary to choose as to which methodology(ies) is(are) appropriate for a particular intervention. RA contends that to make the most effective contribution in dealing with the richness of the real world, it is desirable to go beyond using a single (or, on occasions, more than one) methodology to generally combining several methodologies, in whole or in part. We need to use a transdisciplinary approach like #Requisite agility both on theoretical/philosophical grounds, and on the practical grounds.

"There isn’t one single situation where agility is needed – other than the existential one of “survive & thrive” - and there isn’t one single approach that will deliver it. RA in all living systems including individuals, teams, and organizations. RA enables you to adapt and apply what is absolutely required (requisite) in your unique, continuously changing context and environment (agility) to thrive." 

As Jan De Visch says: If there is one constant in setting up successful organizational development pathways integrating different frameworks, then the level of integrative thinking and self-reflection of the facilitators/initiators is crucial. A real paradigm shift would be to focus attention on this and to provide tools to assess the quality of the interpretation and integration of frameworks by the user. This would be a real meta-approach. One can build here on the range of thinking structures (such as these have been determined by cognitive developmental psychology) that are used to delineate problems and formulate possible solutions.

Requisite agility doesn’t take a Bottom-up or Top-down approach but instead takes Outside-in and an Inside-out approach.

Send me a private message if you want to part of the Requisite agility movement, we have a lot of exciting things coming your way.