The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a group of patterns related to workflow and organization. It is used to apply Agile at the enterprise level. SAFe guides the individual roles and responsibilities of the team members, planning and organizing the work, and the values that follow the work done. SAFe consists of multiple teams and aims to collaborate and align these teams to deliver value across all the teams. There are three knowledge bodies in SAFe: System thinking, Lean product development, and Agile development. SAFe is generally used at the enterprise level for the entire organization that wants to achieve Business Agility and where several Agile teams work together to create and deliver quality products. But what is Business Agility?

Organizations should always adopt digital technologies to boost their existing digital model in the current fast-paced digital world. So, Busines Agility is an organization’s ability to quickly adapt to changing technologies and market conditions and deliver a functional product. The SAFe framework helps organizations flourish in this digital age by building and delivering innovative products faster and with high quality.

Almost every organization attempting to implement the Scaled Agile Framework will have to face the challenges and it has to understand them. These challenges can be overcome with the help of SAFe Agile best practices and can be successfully achieved at scale. We will discuss these SAFe Agile best practices in detail in this article.

SAFe Agile Practices

Many organizations report that implementing SAFe in the organization has been one of the hardest but most rewarding changes they have undertaken. Implementing the Scaled Agile Framework can become easier if the following key practices are followed by the companies that will push the smooth implementation of SAFe in the organization.

1. Train the teams

First, you need to have a team that will propel change in your organization. Initially, this team may consist of external consultants but with time, this team would expand and become your Lean-Agile change agents. This team will navigate the change in your organization by providing the required knowledge and impetus. So, these Lean-Agile change agents must be known to everyone in the organization so that this team can be used as a resource both at the time of implementing SAFe and after implementing it. To implement any change in an organization, everyone must understand and appreciate its values and the need for change from top leadership to the executive level. It is the same with the implementation of SAFe. So, these Lean-Agile change agents will train and coach the team members about the advantages of adopting SAFe. How it will help improve, develop, and organizational effectiveness. The change agents will work with the team members to change their mindset from the earlier managerial style of working and infrastructure to an Agile framework at the enterprise level. Once the mindset of the team members changes and they are ready and willing to embrace change, it becomes easier to take everyone along and implement SAFe in the organization.

2. Use architectural runway for managing technical complexity

If there are strict safety-related or mission-critical requirements, then this increases technical complexity and risks. Technical complexity arises when tasks take more than one iteration to complete and can not be broken and given to other teams with different technical skills so that they can build their part of the solution independently and simultaneously. When such situations arise, a successful method for handling this technical complexity is to have the most urgent features defined early on at the organizational level, like an infrastructure platform. Pre-defining these urgent features at the organizational level so developers can leverage them is known as “architectural runway” in Agile terminology. The architectural runway provides some level of stability needed for aiding future development iterations. Once you have a defined architectural runway, detecting technical risks early in the iteration cycle becomes easier, hence managing the system’s complexity. On the other hand, identifying such risks after several iterations have occurred will give rise to substantial rework leading to delays. So, it is important to have the architectural runway in place to avoid any negative fallout of technical complexities.

3. Team autonomy and coordination

The next in the Scaled Agile Framework practices are creating and maintaining a balance between team autonomy and collaboration. This plays a significant role in the implementation of SAFe in any organization. Agile Release Trains are created with different cross-functional teams for delivering solutions to complex problems. Managers and executives in an enterprise will find it extremely difficult to closely watch the work of all the teams in different value streams. The team members must be able to work independently or in their immediate teams as per the requirement. Still, they should be able to collaborate with other teams. But they must own their work and take responsibility for it, just like the change agents. There should be complete harmony and coordination among themselves and other teams, facilitating cross-functionality. This means that the individual team members should work well within their teams and with multiple other teams that make the ART, as it will comprise 50 to 100 members.

4. Program Increment planning should be done early and frequently

The most important part of the Scaled Agile Framework is the Program Increment (PI) planning. Its significance can be gauged from the quote, “if you are not doing PI planning, you are not doing SAFe”. All the teams in an ART sit together and the mission and vision are shared with them in the PI planning, which is a cadence-based event. The Release Train Engineer organizes this two-day event and it aims to provide the teams in an ART with a platform where they can collaborate, share, find, and resolve such issues which, if tackled separately by them, would take a long time to resolve. So, they must be planned and executed properly. And for this, Agile teams must be clearly told about the outcomes expected from each PI. Seen in this light, early PI planning is crucial for successfully implementing SAFe in any organization. Members of the teams in an ART discuss items of an iteration in these meetings, where each iteration can take 8 to 12 weeks. Only when they have a proper briefing and discussion will the teams go back to basics for a discussion on finding the most effective way of working to deliver the desired value. And there should not be any let up in the intensity. When one PI is completed, they should be prepared to begin the next one. So, it is the responsibility of the PI planning team to keep a regular backlog of PI initiatives and prioritize PIs so that ART can take them up in a set order.

5. Make sure review and retrospection are done separately

The work finished by the team is commonly reviewed at the end of the PI or sprint. This is called iteration review. Teams show the work they have completed in the last iteration during this review. Here, stakeholders get a chance to give their feedback before this part of the value is delivered. SAFe has another ceremony called Iteration Retrospective. This platform allows the teams to discuss what has been done well and where improvements are needed. The foundation of the Agile manifesto is continuous improvement and will always remain in all Agile methodologies and SAFe. So, this is an important ceremony whose focus is on finding opportunities for improvement from the viewpoint of process and people. The teams look for areas within their part of the ART where they can improve. The important thing is that the review and retrospective meetings must remain separate and should not be mixed up. The review meeting demonstrates the features and discusses the product’s functionality, while the retrospective discusses the process and the opportunities for improvements in the next iteration. Since it provides the teams with opportunities for innovation with the help of better ideas obtained during these meetings, the review and the retrospective meetings make an important step in implementing SAFe.

6. Inspect and Adapt

This is another important part of SAFe that has been developed with a view to guiding enterprises in scaling Lean and Agile. Apart from the review of the process of ARTs and doing retrospectives for the increments, the change agents or the team responsible for deploying SAFe in the organization must regularly inspect the Agile Release Trains responsible for delivering within a value stream. The results to be monitored may include: Is there a reduction in the lead time (the time taken from the proposal stage to the actual delivery stage)? Do the teams have clarity about what they are working on and the reason for working on it? Do all the levels of the organization know how their work’s purpose aligns with the organization’s goals? Continuous checks in SAFe help find answers to these questions if things appear to be going off-track. Moreover, a thorough inspection of both product and the process enables improvement in the next PI and makes it better.

So, these are the Scaled Agile Framework best practices for a smoother transition to SAFe. In conclusion, we can say that implementing any change is not an easy task, and it takes time. The important thing is to make sure that the employees are motivated and enthused to accept the change. There is certainly no standard way of implementing SAFe as every organization has different circumstances. But the team working on implementing the SAFe should have abundant knowledge about SAFe and must be the best in their field. However, if the roadmap and the practices are followed carefully, organizations have a better chance of ensuring a smooth transition to SAFe and into the area of Business Agility. If enterprises implement SAFe using these best practices and in an orderly manner, they would be better able to serve the continuously and fast-changing requirements of the customer.