22
Scaled Agile Framework®

THE SCALED AGILE FRAMEWORK® (SAFE®), developed by Dean Leffingwell, is “a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles, practices, and competencies for achieving business agility using Lean, Agile, and DevOps.”1 Figure 22.1 shows a high‐level overview of the latest version of the Scaled Agile Framework. SAFe has evolved over the years from a layered approach to enterprise management to a very robust and well‐integrated set of core competencies, principles, and values that can be used to define a complete, top‐to‐bottom enterprise‐level Agile approach.

SAFe® COMPETENCY AREAS

SAFe is composed of seven core competency areas:

1. Continuous Learning Culture

SAFe recognizes the importance of having an organizational culture that is consistent with an Agile environment as a foundation for the overall framework:

The Continuous Learning Culture competency describes a set of values and practices that encourage individuals—and the enterprise as a whole—to continually increase knowledge, competence, performance, and innovation.

This is achieved by becoming a learning organization, committing to relentless improvement, and promoting a culture of innovation.2

Schematic illustration of SAFe 5 for Lean enterprises

FIGURE 22.1 SAFe 5 for Lean enterprises

2. Team and Technical Agility

SAFe uses an approach similar to Scrum including a Product Owner and a Scrum Master for the team‐level development approach. However, it is not prescriptive about following a specific Scrum approach and is primarily focused on important team‐level principles that are essential to a successful team‐level approach.

It also defines an Agile Release Train mechanism for coordinating and integrating the work of multiple development teams. “The Team and Technical Agility competency describes the critical skills and Lean‐Agile principles and practices that high‐performing Agile teams and Teams of Agile teams use to create high‐quality solutions for their customers.”3

3. Agile Product Delivery

SAFe recognizes the need for going beyond typical team‐level development practices and focusing on a complete product delivery approach that includes:

  • Customer Centricity and Design Thinking: Customer centricity puts the customer at the center of every decision and uses design thinking to ensure the solution is desirable, feasible, viable, and sustainable.
  • Develop on Cadence; Release on Demand: Developing on cadence helps manage the variability inherent in product development. Decoupling the release of value assures customers can get what they need when they need it.
  • DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline: DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline create the foundation that enables Enterprises to release value, in whole or in part, at any time to meet customer and market demand.4

4. Enterprise Solution Delivery

SAFe recognizes the need for also going beyond a product delivery process and defining a broader process for enterprise solution delivery that includes:

  • Requirements analysis
  • Business capability definition
  • Functional analysis and allocation
  • System design and design synthesis
  • Design alternatives and trade studies
  • Modeling and simulation
  • Building and testing components, systems, and systems of systems
  • Compliance and verification and validation
  • Deployment, monitoring, support, and system updates.

5. Lean Portfolio Management

SAFe also recognizes the need for a portfolio management approach that integrates multiple projects and solutions into an overall portfolio management strategy. “The Lean Portfolio Management competency aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance.”5

6. Organizational Agility

According to the Scaled Agile Framework:

In today’s digital economy, the only truly sustainable competitive advantage is the speed at which an organization can sense and respond to the needs of its customers. Its strength is its ability to deliver value in the shortest sustainable lead time, to evolve and implement new strategies quickly, and to reorganize to better address emerging opportunities.6

The organizational agility competence in SAFe is expressed in three dimensions:

  • Lean‐Thinking People and Agile Teams: Everyone involved in solution delivery is trained in Lean and Agile methods and embraces their values, principles, and practices.
  • Lean Business Operations: Teams apply Lean principles to understand, map, and continuously improve the processes that deliver and support businesses solutions.
  • Strategy Agility: The enterprise is Agile enough to continuously sense the market, and quickly change strategy when necessary7

7. Lean Agile Leadership

According to the Scaled Agile Framework:

The Lean‐Agile Leadership competency describes how Lean‐Agile Leaders drive and sustain organizational change and operational excellence by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential. They do this through leading by example; learning and modeling SAFe’s Lean‐Agile mindset, values, principles, and practices; and leading the change to a new way of working.8

SAFe® CORE VALUES

The core values in SAFe are essentially the same as most other Agile approaches and provide alignment to integrate the entire framework.

1. Alignment

SAFe recognizes the need for alignment to integrate all aspects of an enterprise‐level Agile approach:

  • Alignment is needed to keep pace with fast change, disruptive competitive forces, and geographically distributed teams.
  • While empowered, Agile Teams are good (even great), but the responsibility for strategy and alignment cannot rest with the combined opinions of the teams, no matter how good they are.
  • Instead, alignment must rely on the Enterprise business objectives … Alignment, however, does not imply or encourage top‐down command and control. Alignment occurs when everyone is working toward a common direction. Indeed, alignment enables empowerment, autonomy, and decentralized decision‐making, allowing those who implement value to make better local decisions.9

What that means is having a business architecture including corporate culture where all parts of the organization work together collaboratively and in alignment with the overall business goals of the company.

2. Built‐in Quality

SAFe and most other Agile approaches are based on the idea of making quality an integral part of the product development process rather than relying heavily on inspection and testing to find and fix defects later.

  • Built‐in Quality ensures that every element and every increment of the solution reflect quality standards throughout the development lifecycle. Quality is not “added later.”
  • Building quality in is a prerequisite of Lean and flow—without it, the organization will likely operate with large batches of unverified, unvalidated work. Excessive rework and slower velocities are likely results.10

This principle is essentially the same as the general Agile principle of integrating quality and testing with the development effort so that the development team is responsible for the quality of the product that they produce.

3. Transparency

Agile requires a collaborative relationship between the development team and the customer, based on a relationship of trust and partnership.

To achieve that kind of relationship, it is important to be open and transparent in this relationship: To ensure openness—trust is needed.

  • Trust exists when the business and development can confidently rely on another to act with integrity, particularly in times of difficulty.
  • Without trust no one can build high‐performance teams and programs, nor build (or rebuild) the confidence needed to make and meet reasonable commitments. And without trust, working environments are a lot less fun and motivating.11

4. Program Execution

SAFe recognizes the overall importance of delivering results and business value:

Of course, none of the rest of SAFe matters if teams can’t execute and continuously deliver value.

  • Therefore, SAFe places an intense focus on working systems and business outcomes.
  • History shows us that while many enterprises start the transformation with individual Agile teams, they often become frustrated as even those teams struggle to deliver more substantial amounts of solution value, reliably and efficiently.12

LEAN AGILE MINDSET IN SAFe®

Having the right mindset is important in any Agile implementation and it is particularly important and recognized in SAFe:

  • The Lean‐Agile Mindset is the combination of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and actions of SAFe leaders and practitioners who embrace the concepts of the Agile Manifesto and Lean thinking.
  • It’s the personal, intellectual, and leadership foundation for adopting and applying SAFe principles and practices. SAFe is firmly grounded in four bodies of knowledge: Lean, Agile, systems thinking, and DevOps. . . For leaders, it requires a broader and deeper Lean‐Agile mindset to drive the organizational change required to adopt Lean and Agile at scale across the entire enterprise.13

SAFe® Lean Agile Principles

  1. Take an Economic View: “Delivering the ‘best value and quality for people and society in the shortest sustainable lead time’ requires a fundamental understanding of the economics of building systems. Everyday decisions must be made in a proper economic context.”14
  2. Apply Systems Thinking: “Deming observed that addressing the challenges in the workplace and the marketplace requires an understanding of the systems within which workers and users operate. Such systems are complex, and they consist of many interrelated components. But optimizing a component does not optimize the system.”15
  3. Assume Variability, Preserve Options: “Traditional design and life cycle practices encourage choosing a single design‐and‐requirements option early in the development process. Unfortunately, if that starting point proves to be the wrong choice, then future adjustments take too long and can lead to a suboptimal design.”16
  4. Build Incrementally with Fast, Integrated Learning Cycles: “Developing solutions incrementally in a series of short iterations allows for faster customer feedback and mitigates risk. Subsequent increments build on the previous ones.”17
  5. Base Milestones on Objective Evaluation of Working Systems: “Business owners, developers, and customers have a shared responsibility to ensure that investment in new solutions will deliver economic benefit. The sequential, phase‐gate development model was designed to meet this challenge, but experience shows that it does not mitigate risk as intended.”18
  6. Visualize and Limit Work‐in‐Progress (WIP), Reduce Batch Sizes, and Manage Queue Lengths: “Lean enterprises strive to achieve a state of continuous flow, where new system capabilities move quickly and visibly from concept to cash.”19
  7. Apply Cadence, Synchronize with Cross‐Domain Planning: “Cadence creates predictability and provides a rhythm for development. Synchronization causes multiple perspectives to be understood, resolved, and integrated at the same time.”20
  8. Unlock the Intrinsic Motivation of Knowledge Workers: “Lean‐Agile leaders understand that ideation, innovation, and employee engagement are not generally motivated by individual incentive compensation. Such individual incentives can create internal competition and destroy the cooperation necessary to achieve the larger aim of the system.”21
  9. Decentralize Decision‐Making: “Achieving fast value delivery requires decentralized decision‐making. This reduces delays, improves product development flow, enables faster feedback, and creates more innovative solutions designed by those closest to the local knowledge.”22
  10. Organize Around Value: “Many enterprises today are organized around principles developed during the last century. In the name of intended efficiency, most are organized around functional expertise. But in the digital age, the only sustainable competitive advantage is the speed with which an organization can respond to the needs of its customers with new and innovative solutions.”23

SAFe® ARTIFACTS AND SUPPORTING CAPABILITIES

A SAFe implementation typically includes a number of key artifacts and supporting capabilities:

  1. Vision: “The Vision is a description of the future state of the Solution under development. It reflects customer and stakeholder needs, as well as the Feature and Capabilities proposed to meet those needs.”24
  2. Roadmap: “The Roadmap is a schedule of events and Milestones that communicate planned Solution deliverables over a planning horizon.”25
  3. Milestones: “Milestones are used to track progress toward a specific goal or event. There are three types of SAFe milestones: Program Increment (PI), fixed‐date, and learning milestones.”26
  4. Shared Services: “Shared Services represents the specialty roles, people, and services required for the success of an Agile Release Train (ART) or Solution Train, but that cannot be dedicated full‐time.”27
  5. Communities of Practice: “Communities of Practice (CoPs) are organized groups of people who have a common interest in a specific technical or business domain. They collaborate regularly to share information, improve their skills, and actively work on advancing the general knowledge of the domain.”28
  6. System Team: “The System Team is a specialized Agile Team that assists in building and supporting the Agile development environment, typically including development and maintenance of the toolchain that supports the Continuous Delivery Pipeline.”29
  7. Lean UX: “Lean User Experience (Lean UX) design is a mindset, culture, and a process that embraces Lean‐Agile methods. It implements functionality in minimum viable increments and determines success by measuring results against a benefit hypothesis.”30
  8. Metrics: “Metrics are agreed‐upon measures used to evaluate how well the organization is progressing toward the portfolio, large solution, ART, and Agile team’s business and technical objectives.”31

SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

SAFe® Competency Areas

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a very complete, robust, and well‐integrated framework for implementing an overall Agile approach at an enterprise level.

  1. It has evolved over the years from a somewhat prescriptive and layered approach to enterprise management to a much more general, principles‐based approach that recognizes the need to fit the approach to the needs of the organization.
  2. It includes a team‐level development process similar to Scrum but goes well beyond Scrum in defining an approach for coordinating and integrating the work of multiple teams into an overall Agile Release train.
  3. It also recognizes the need for a product development process and an enterprise solution delivery process that goes beyond the typical team‐level development found in Scrum and focuses on products and overall solutions.
  4. It also defines higher‐level, business competencies that are essential for developing an overall business agility approach including
    • Lean Portfolio Management
    • Organizational Agility
    • Lean Agile Leadership.

SAFe® Core Values

SAFe embodies some important core values that are common to most Agile development approaches, but it puts additional emphasis on the importance of these values. The SAFe core values include:

  1. Alignment: all parts of the organization are well integrated and work together dynamically to achieve an overall business goal.
  2. Built‐in Quality: Quality is not an after‐thought. It is integral to the design of the product and the development team is responsible for the quality of the product they produce. It is not some other organization’s responsibility to test the product later to ensure that it is a quality product.
  3. Transparency: Agile requires a collaborative relationship between the development team and the customer based on a relationship of trust and partnership.
  4. Program Execution: SAFe recognizes the overall importance of delivering results and business value.

Lean Agile Mindset

SAFe requires a mindset shift away from a traditional management mentality to embrace a Lean and Agile mindset that is essential for successful implementation.

Lean Agile Principles

SAFe is based on a number of important principles that are common to most Agile development approaches, but it puts additional emphasis on the importance of these principles. The Lean Agile principles that SAFe is based on include:

  1. Take an Economic View.
  2. Apply Systems Thinking.
  3. Assume Variability; Preserve Options.
  4. Build Incrementally with Fast, Integrated Learning Cycles.
  5. Base Milestones on Objective Evaluation of Working Systems.
  6. Visualize and Limit Work‐in‐Progress (WIP), Reduce Batch Sizes, and Manage Queue Lengths.
  7. Apply Cadence, Synchronize with Cross‐domain Planning.
  8. Unlock the Intrinsic Value of Knowledge Workers.
  9. Decentralize Decision‐making.
  10. Organize Around Value.

SAFe® Artifacts and Supporting Capabilities

A SAFe implementation normally is based on a number of artifacts and supporting capabilities including:

  1. Vision
  2. Roadmap
  3. Milestones
  4. Shared Services
  5. Communities of Practice
  6. System Team
  7. Lean UX
  8. Metrics.

DISCUSSION TOPICS

SAFe® Competency Areas

  1. How is a SAFe team‐level capability similar to Scrum? How does it go beyond Scrum?
  2. Why is an appropriate corporate culture important to SAFe? What is the likely impact of not having a well‐aligned culture?
  3. How does SAFe go beyond a typical development process? Why is that important at an enterprise level?

SAFe® Core Values

  1. What do you think is the most important core value in a SAFe implementation? Why?
  2. What’s different about SAFe Core Values as compared to other Agile development approaches?

Lean Agile Mindset

  1. Why is a different mindset needed for implementing SAFe? How is it different from other Agile development approaches? What’s the likely impact of not having the right mindset?

SAFe® Lean Agile Principles

  1. Do the Lean Agile Principles in SAFe go beyond the principles in the Agile Manifesto? How do they compare to other Agile approaches? Are there any SAFe principles that would not be applicable to any other Agile development process?

SAFe® Artifacts and Supporting Capabilities

  1. What is the impact of not having some of the defined SAFe artifacts and capabilities? Why are they important?

NOTES

  1. 1.  Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., SAFe 5 for Lean Enterprises, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/?_ga=2.62692971.67100464.1647009048-1592209035.1647009048.
  2. 2.  Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Continuous Learning Culture, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/continuous-learning-culture/.
  3. 3.  Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Team and Technical Agility, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/team-and-technical-agility/.
  4. 4.  Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Agile Product Delivery, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/agile-product-delivery/.
  5. 5.  Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Lean Portfolio Management, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/lean-portfolio-management/.
  6. 6.  Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Organizational Agility, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/organizational-agility/.
  7. 7.  Ibid.
  8. 8.  Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Lean Agile Leadership, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/lean-agile-leadership/.
  9. 9.  Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Core Values, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/safe-core-values/.
  10. 10. Ibid.
  11. 11. Ibid.
  12. 12. Ibid.
  13. 13. Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Lean Agile Mindset, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/lean-agile-mindset/.
  14. 14. Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., SAFe Lean Agile Principles, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/safe-lean-agile-principles/.
  15. 15. Ibid.
  16. 16. Ibid.
  17. 17. Ibid.
  18. 18. Ibid.
  19. 19. Ibid.
  20. 20. Ibid.
  21. 21. Ibid.
  22. 22. Ibid.
  23. 23. Ibid.
  24. 24. Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Lean Agile Mindset, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/vision/.
  25. 25. Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Roadmap, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/roadmap/.
  26. 26. Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Milestones, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/milestones/.
  27. 27. Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Shared Services, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/shared-services/.
  28. 28. Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Communities of Practice, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/communities-of-practice/.
  29. 29. Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., System Team, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/system-team/.
  30. 30. Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Lean UX, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/lean-ux/.
  31. 31. Scaled Agile Framework, © Scaled Agile, Inc., Metrics, https://www.scaledagileframework.com/metrics/.
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