Large companies not only generally have a difficult time making the change, but often also tend to act much more slowly than their smaller competitors. The reasons for this lie primarily in a corporate culture (mostly grown over decades) and the sheer size of the organization, which in turn brings with it policy and process-related hurdles – the bureaucracy overkill is the order of the day in large companies.
However, many large companies are still trying to unlock the benefits of Agile – although that doesn’t actually go together. The Scaled Agile Framework – SAFe – can be a welcome tool for larger companies to change just that and keep the risks to project success as low as possible. SAFe offers large companies a framework to become more agile and bring products to market faster.
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This article focuses on the advantages and basic principles of the Scaled Agile Framework and gives you some tips to help you implement SAFe and its methods profitably.
The Scaled Agile Framework contains a set of basic principles, processes and best practices that are intended to help large companies adapt agile methods such as Lean or Scrum in order to be able to develop better quality products and services.
SAFe is particularly suitable for complex projects that involve a large number of larger teams at different levels. The current version (SAFe 4.6) focuses on five core competencies which, in the provider’s words, are intended to help companies “successfully navigate through digital disruption and provide an effective response to volatile market conditions, changing customer needs and emerging technologies to have”:
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Lean agile leadership: Managers should support and drive forward entrepreneurial change and effective overall operations. Ultimately, only management has the authority to influence individuals and teams in such a way that they exploit their potential in the best possible way.
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Technical agility: Within a team, certain skills must be available and certain lean and agile methods must be used in order to quickly design good solutions. It is particularly important that the technical agility of a team is ensured – after all, it produces the product that is delivered to the customer.
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DevOps: A consistent, ongoing pipeline for products or services is essential in order to be able to meet the needs of your customers in the long term.
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Lean systems engineering: The more companies push agile methods to drive blueprints, development and deployment, the higher their innovative strength.
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Lean portfolio management: A coherent corporate strategy that balances financial considerations, portfolio management and compliance aspects is the basic requirement for success with the Scaled Agile Framework.
SAFe enables large companies to make the benefits of Scrum and Kanban scalable. This enables companies in the enterprise class to manage projects in a much more agile manner and also to provide the stakeholders involved with much faster feedback across teams. This accelerated feedback loop in turn leads to higher employee engagement, increased productivity and satisfaction – and ultimately ultimately to an improved quality of work.
The Scaled Agile Framework focuses on streamlining, teamwork and delivery across a variety of distributed, agile teams. However, there are other popular frameworks that want to make agile methods practical for large companies – such as Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) or Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). You should know and understand each of these frameworks to determine the best solution for your company and projects.
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Disciplined Agile Delivery: DAD focuses on the end-to-end lifecycle of products and is based on seven fundamental principles.
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Large-scale scrum: With LeSS, all teams involved in the project should have the final product in mind instead of just looking at their own subarea.
SAFe is built around nine key principles based on existing lean management and agile methods:
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Take an economic perspective for an optimal lead time while delivering the best quality and greatest added value;
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Include all facets of software development when implementing systems;
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Maintain flexible choices and promote innovative ideas;
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Develop step by step with fast, integrated learning cycles that allow customer feedback and reduce risks;
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Set milestones and evaluate functioning systems to ensure an economic benefit;
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Reduce “work in progress” as much as possible, reduce batch sizes and manage queues to guarantee an ongoing workflow;
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Cross-divisional synchronization in order to identify new business opportunities and to be able to implement necessary corrections if necessary;
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Equip knowledge workers with intrinsic motivation to unlock their full potential;
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Decentralization of decision making for more agility and effectiveness;
- Generate constructive conflicts and criticism
“Conflict” does not have to be negative. It can also have a positive impact if it is used constructively in an agile team. IT management consultant Ivan Kovynyov gives tips on how managers can create a positive conflict culture in a team and thus improve performance and project success. - Form a heterogeneous team
You need a heterogeneous team. For example, if the team consisted exclusively of middle-aged white men, it is foreseeable that they will all have a similar style of thinking. - Conflict-free team building
Team members should already have met and worked together. It would be counterproductive to start the team building phase with a constructive conflict. - Remove impediments
Barriers to freedom of expression in the team must be identified and removed: irrational need for harmony, excessive consensus orientation, strong opinion leaders, warehouse building, authoritarian project manager or product owner, zero-error tolerance, targets contain solutions, etc. - Take the right path
The middle way is not always the best way: if one wants to pass the tree on the left and the other on the right, the way through the middle is obviously not the best. - Define consensus rules
Seek a qualified consensus: Rules have to be defined for situations in which the team does not reach an agreement. For example, the team calls an independent expert or the project manager or the product owner to decide. - Set common goal
Common goals as Nordstern: Debates can easily separate participants from an agile team. A common understanding of the goal and the mission of the team creates the opposite and has a balancing effect. - Humorous handling
When all else fails: humor always helps!
To implement a scaled agile framework, a step-by-step procedure is recomm
ended:
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Communicate the “Need for Change”: There are many factors that can trigger change in companies – such as a change in the legal framework in certain industries, best practices or the desire to achieve certain goals. Whatever the stumbling block: The management level of a company must identify and communicate the reasons for switching to SAFe. Subsequently, managers should accompany this change and motivate all project stakeholders to act in accordance with the common vision.
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Use “change agents”: The management level should identify those people in the company who can act as “change agents” and ideally establish them as certified “program consultants”. In return, they take on not only the technical guidance of the stakeholders in terms of the Scaled Agile Framework, but also that of the managers.
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C-level onboarding: Only managers who demonstrate agile methods to their employees fulfill their role model function. SAFe training for the C level is therefore mandatory.
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The “Lean Agile Center of Excellence”: In order to establish lean and agile methods across the entire company, it is advisable to create a “Center of Excellence”. This contributes to a company-wide optimized performance of these methods.
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Identify “Agile Release Trains” (ARTs): ARTs are the agile teams that develop value-adding solutions. The combination of people, internal processes and technologies carries this value to the customer.
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Prioritization and road mapping: Once entrepreneurial goals have been set, they must be prioritized and a corresponding roadmap drawn in order to achieve the overall goals of the SAFe transformation. In the course of the implementation, a “Value Stream” is selected first, then an ART.
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Defined parameters: In order to successfully establish an ART, it must first be defined. This is followed by deadlines, agile teams, training staff and a “readiness assessment”. It is also important to prepare an appropriate backlog program.
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“Know your role”: The people who develop the systems in a team are essential for the success of the respective ARTs. It is therefore imperative that each and every one of these team members knows their respective roles, fulfills them and has the necessary skills to be able to do so successfully.
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ARTs in practice: The key to success when running Agile Release Trains is to sustainably fill out the individual SAFe roles.
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Expansion to portfolio level: All of the above steps have been completed and should now be transferred to the portfolio level in order to consolidate the corporate culture as a whole, to improve the company’s performance and overall target achievement.
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Company-wide process efficiency: The sustainability of business processes depends on whether new business opportunities are recognized and implemented in good time. At this level, the entire management level of a company has a mindset in the sense of lean and agile.
This article is based on an article from our US sister publication CIO.com.