So many organizations worldwide have adopted the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) today for executing large and complex projects to deliver the value of high quality to customers. This has helped them in remaining relevant in the market. They have benefitted from SAFe in many ways as it has helped them improve productivity and collaboration along with a quicker response to changes and customer needs. Since the industry is overgrowing, its challenges have also grown manifold. And for larger organizations, challenges can crop up from any area and throw any of the three important areas of operation, time, cost, and scope off balance. With the ever-changing industry, SAFe has become a boon for teams working on solutions of different sizes. They are now able to maintain alignment with the business goals. So, organizations are getting a host of benefits by implementing SAFe. Now lets take a look at the advantages of Scaled Agile Framework.

The Scaled Agile Framework Benefits

SAFe, brings a wide base of knowledge and experience, so both teams and organizations can benefit from it. And since it has large benefits, many organizations worldwide have started using SAFe to boost their services and handle large and complex projects. The biggest benefit of the Scaled Agile Framework is that each level of organization is taken care of and it provides end-to-end solutions at the level of organization. SAFe has been designed to support a bigger view of development as it can take care of an integrated plan for large and complex projects with large teams. With SAFe, organizations can make their work processes better. Here are the benefits of SAFe for organizations.

1. Improved quality:

In the present times, quick changes are happening worldwide and becoming more volatile. Enterprises can sustain themselves only if they can compete in this volatile market successfully and engineers are trying their best to keep up with these quick changes. The Scaled Agile Framework has proved to be a blessing as it has immensely helped them improve product quality and services. One of the core values of SAFe is in-built quality. It brings to the fore the importance of synchronizing quality with every stage of the development cycle. The quality policies of SAFe have helped organizations to stay relevant as they can use quality to move towards excellence and perfection. Organizations benefit from these policies because the focus shifts from looking at quality as a last-minute job to making everyone responsible for it. Moreover, better quality means products or services can perform for a longer period, thus helping the organization to enhance its reputation in the market. Built-in quality also helps avoid Cost of Delays (COD) due to reworks, recalls, or fixing defects.

2. Improved productivity:

Productivity is usually a major concern for organizations; they constantly look for ways to improve productivity. An increase in productivity means that the organization is getting more output from the same amount of input which would translate to more revenue. The Scaled Agile Framework fosters collaboration and cooperation among the team members and the teams. This helps everyone in having an explicit understanding of deliverables which in turn, helps in fulfilling the expectations of stakeholders by executing the plan in a better way. SAFe provides power to high-performing teams to remove unnecessary work, look for and eliminate the causes of delays, and improve continuously. All these combine to help improve the productivity of individuals and teams.

3. Faster time-to-market:

Customers prefer to take their time for products or services in today’s highly competitive and fast-paced world. Hence, businesses have to be proactive in making faster deliveries. SAFe allows organizations to deliver value faster. This is done by aligning cross-functional teams of agile teams to fulfill customer demands faster. Using the Scaled Agile Framework, organizations can make decisions faster, communicate more effectively, streamline operations, and focus more on the customer’s needs. Faster decisions mean faster workflow, effective communication means no confusion during the process, and streamlined operations mean smooth workflow. All these add up to allow companies to deliver their products and services faster and stay ahead of the competition.

4. Visibility and Transparency:

Achieving visibility and transparency in an organization takes work. SAFe allows the organization’s leadership to connect with every member of the organization so they can openly exchange ideas and knowledge, thus ensuring flexibility in the visualization of work by every member of the organization. It helps teams visualize how Agile Release Trains (ARTs) will monitor performance and track progress, ensuring faster product delivery. SAFe brings about transparency in the organization by breaking the traditional storehouse of development and operation and enabling cross-functional operation. All this allows the organization and people to grow in confidence, a prerequisite for innovation and continuous improvement.

5. Alignment:

This is another core benefit of SAFe to the organizations that align all levels of the organization working on developing the solution. It also helps align larger organizational objectives and goals with teams involved in achieving them. This means the organization’s leadership and the members of the agile teams share the same goals and objectives. This way, a better, cross-functional response can be achieved, which is more flexible and faster. So, everyone can focus on one thing – the project at hand. Agile Release Trains are also created in SAFe to align the team objectives so the emphasis is on delivering products or services of high value to the customer.

6. Better employee engagement:

SAFe is so designed to build trust at the individual as well as at the team level. A better way of working keeps the employees happy. The benefit of SAFe here is that knowledge workers get autonomy, purpose, and mastery. This helps in bringing out the inherent motivation in employees. When employees are empowered to make informed decisions and given the required autonomy, they can easily achieve the business goals. An organization practicing SAFe will have ample tools to boost employee satisfaction. The trust so developed means that employees are happy, motivated, and more engaged with their entire focus on achieving business returns. This automatically means they will have higher productivity, and the organization will enjoy less attrition and enhanced customer satisfaction.

7. Facilitates cross-domain planning:

Team planning becomes a major problem in most organizations. The Scaled Agile Framework has a solution for this. It uses Program Increment (PI) planning to achieve this. PI is a meeting of different teams in an Agile Release Train. These teams meet to create a roadmap, work on features, and identify how they rely on each other for the successful execution of the project and delivering a high-value product to the customer. The biggest benefit of PI planning is that it allows face-to-face interaction between the members of different teams in ART and helps in establishing a common vision among the team members and the teams. It also helps build trust and promote collaboration between different ARTs, enabling faster decision-making and facilitating finishing the work in less time.

Conclusion:

The Scaled Agile Framework is today the most popular framework for providing solutions to daily problems faced by teams in organizations for production and delivery. Today SAFe is being used by over 800000 people in almost 20000 organizations globally. This is great evidence of its popularity and usefulness. So many organizations have adopted SAFe to move with the times and stay relevant in this fast-changing world. For any organization desirous of transformation and scaling agile, SAFe is the best bet for achieving results. The benefits of SAFe that we have listed above are testimony to the fact that the Scaled Agile Framework will help your organization to improve productivity and quality and deliver value faster. Whatever product or service your organization might create, a holistic approach to its design, execution, and delivery will ensure its success. SAFe promotes a strategy focused on the end-user so it transforms to a higher level of customer satisfaction which will boost the image of your organization. So, adopt SAFe if you still need to do it.