Decide if You Are Ready for SAFe
Approach the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) with open eyes and an open wallet.
- Complex application landscapes require delivery teams to work together and coordinate changes across multiple product lines and releases.
- Leadership wants to balance strategic goals with localized prioritization of changes.
- Traditional methodologies are not well suited to support enterprise agility: Scrum doesn’t scale easily, and Waterfall is too slow and risky.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
SAFe’s popularity is largely due to its structural resemblance to enterprise portfolio and project planning with top-down prioritization and decision making. This directly conflicts with Agile’s purpose and principles of empowerment and agility.
- Poor culture, processes, governance, and leadership will disrupt any methodology. Many drivers for SAFe could be solved by improving and standardizing development and release management within current methodologies.
- Few organizations are capable or should be applying a pure SAFe framework. Successful organizations have adopted and modified SAFe frameworks to best fit their needs, teams, value streams, and maturity.
Impact and Result
- Start with a clear understanding of your needs, constraints, goals, and culture.
- Start with an Agile readiness assessment. Agile is core to value realization.
- Take the time to determine your drivers and goals.
- If SAFe is right for you, selecting the right implementation partner is key.
- Plan SAFe as a long-term enterprise cultural transformation requiring changes at all levels.
Decide if You Are Ready for SAFe
Approach the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) with open eyes and an open wallet.
Analyst Perspective
Ensure that SAFe is the right move before committing.
Waterfall is dead. Or obsolete at the very least.
Organizations cannot wait months or years for product, service, application, and process changes. They need to embrace business agility to respond to opportunities more quickly and deliver value sooner. Agile established values and principles that have promoted smaller cycle times, greater connections between teams, improved return on investment (ROI) prioritization, and improved team empowerment.
Where organizations continue to struggle is matching localized Scrum teams with enterprise initiatives. This struggle is compounded by legacy executive planning cycles, which undermine Agile team authority. SAFe has provided a series of frameworks to help organizations deal with these issues. It combines enterprise planning and alignment with cross-team collaboration.
Don't rely on popularity or marketing to make your scaled Agile decision. SAFe is a highly disruptive transformation, and it requires extensive training, coaching, process changes, and time to implement. Without the culture shift to an Agile mindset at all levels, SAFe becomes a mirror of Waterfall processes dressed in SAFe names. Furthermore, SAFe itself will not fix problems with communication, requirements, development, testing, release, support, or governance. You will still need to fix these problems within the SAFe framework to be successful.
Hans Eckman
Principal Research Director, Applications Delivery and Management
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
| Your Challenge | Common Obstacles | Info-Tech's Approach |
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Start with a clear understanding of your needs, constraints, goals, and culture.
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Info-Tech Insight
SAFe is a highly disruptive enterprise transformation, and it won't solve your organizational delivery challenges by itself. Start with an open mind, and understand what is needed to support a multi-year cultural transition. Decide how far and how fast you are willing to transform, and make sure that you have the right transformation and coaching partner in place. There is no right software development lifecycle (SDLC) or methodology. Find or create the methodology that best aligns to your needs and goals.
Agile's Four Core Values
"...while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."
- The Agile Manifesto
STOP! If you're not Agile, don't start with SAFe.
Successful SAFe requires an Agile mindset at all levels.
Be aware of common myths around Agile and SAFe
SAFe does not...
1...solve development and communication issues.
2...ensure that you will finish requirements faster.
3...mean that you do not need planning and documentation.
"Without proper planning, organizations can start throwing more resources at the work, which spirals into the classic Waterfall issues of managing by schedule."
– Kristen Morton, Associate Implementation Architect,
OneShield Inc. (Info-Tech Interview)
Info-Tech Insight
Poor culture, processes, governance, and leadership will disrupt any methodology. Many drivers for SAFe could be solved by improving and standardizing development and release management within current methodologies.
Review the drivers that are motivating your organization to adopt and scale Agile practices
Functional groups have their own drivers to adopt Agile development processes, practices, and techniques (e.g. to improve collaboration, decrease churn, or increase automation). Their buy-in to scaling Agile is just as important as the buy-in of stakeholders.
If a group's specific needs and drivers are not addressed, its members may develop negative sentiments toward Agile development. These negative sentiments can affect their ability to see the benefits of Agile, and they may return to their old habits once the opportunity arises.
It is important to find opportunities in which both business objectives and functional group drivers can be achieved by scaling Agile development. This can motivate teams to continuously improve and adhere to the new environment, and it will maintain business buy-in. It can also be used to justify activities that specifically address functional group drivers.
Examples of Motivating Drivers for Scaling Agile
- Improve artifact handoffs between development and operations.
- Increase collaboration among development teams.
- Reveal architectural and system risks early.
- Expedite the feedback loop from support.
- Improve capacity management.
- Support development process innovation.
- Create a safe environment to discuss concerns.
- Optimize value streams.
- Increase team engagement and comradery.
Don't start with scaled Agile!
Scaling Agile is a way to optimize product management and product delivery in application lifecycle management practices. Do not try to start with SAFe when the components are not yet in place.
Scale Agile delivery to improve cross-functional dependencies and releases
Top Business Concerns When Scaling Agile
1 Organizational Culture: The current culture may not support team empowerment, learning from failure, and other Agile principles. SAFe also allows top-down decisions to persist.
2 Executive Support: Executives may not dedicate resources, time, and effort into removing obstacles to scaling Agile because of lack of business buy-in.
3 Team Coordination: Current collaboration structures may not enable teams and stakeholders to share information freely and integrate workflows easily.
4 Business Misalignment: Business vision and objectives may be miscommunicated early in development, risking poorly planned and designed initiatives and low-quality products.
Extending collaboration is the key to success.
Uniting stakeholders and development into a single body is the key to success. Assess the internal and external communication flow and define processes for planning and tracking work so that everyone is aware of how to integrate, communicate, and collaborate.
The goal is to enable faster reaction to customer needs, shorter release cycles, and improved visibility of the project's progress with cross-functional and diverse conversations.
Advantages of successful SAFe implementations
Once SAFe is complete and operational, organizations have seen measurable benefits:
- Multiple frameworks to support different levels of SAFe usage
- Deliberate and consistent planning and coordination
- Coordinating dependencies within value streams
- Reduced time to delivery
- Focus on customers and end users
- Alignment to business goals and value streams
- Increased employee engagement
Sources: TechBeacon, 2019; Medium, 2020; "Benefits," Scaled Agile, 2023;
"Pros and Cons," PremierAgile, n.d.; "Scaling Agile Challenges," PremierAgile, n.d.
Source: "Benefits," Scaled Agile, 2023
Recognize the difference between Scrum teams and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
SAFe provides a framework that aligns Scrum teams into coordinated release trains driven by top-down prioritization.
Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation
Source: Scaled Agile, Inc.
Info-Tech's IT Management & Governance Framework
Info-Tech Insight
SAFe is an enterprise, culture, and process transformation that impacts all IT services. Some areas of Info-Tech's IT Management & Governance Framework have higher impacts and require special attention. Plan to include transformation support for each of these topics during your SAFe implementation. SAFe will not fix broken processes on its own.
Without adopting an Agile mindset, SAFe becomes Waterfall with SAFe terminology
Source: Scaled Agile, Inc.
Info-Tech Insight
When first implementing SAFe, organizations reproduce their organizational design and Waterfall delivery structures with SAFe terms:
- Delivery Manager = Release Train Engineer
- Stakeholder/Sponsor = Product Manager
- Release = Release Train
- Project/Program = Project or Portfolio
SAFe isn't without risks or challenges
Risks and Causes of Failed SAFe Transformations
- SAFe conflicts with legacy cultures and delivery processes.
- SAFe promotes continued top-down decisions, undermining team empowerment.
- Scaled product families are required to define proper value streams.
- Team empowerment and autonomy are reduced.
- SAFe activities are poorly executed.
- There are high training and coaching costs.
- Implementation takes a long time.
- End-to-end delivery management tools aligned to SAFe are required.
- Legacy delivery challenges are not specifically solved with SAFe.
- SAFe is designed to work for large-scale development teams.
Challenges
- Adjusting to a new set of terms for common roles, processes, and activities
- Executing planning cycles
- Defining features and epics at the right level
- Completing adequate requirements
- Defining value streams
- Coordinating releases and release trains
- Providing consistent quality
Sources: TechBeacon, 2019; Medium, 2020; "Benefits," Scaled Agile, 2023;
"Pros and Cons," PremierAgile, n.d.; "Scaling Agile Challenges," PremierAgile, n.d.
Focus on your core competencies instead
Before undertaking an enterprise transformation, consider improving the underlying processes that will need to be fixed anyway. Fixing these areas while implementing SAFe compounds the effort and disruption.
Product Delivery
- Agile/DevOps Research Center
- Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation
- Understand Agile fundamentals, principles, and practices so you can apply them effectively in your organization.
- Implement DevOps Practices That Work
- Streamline business value delivery through the strategic adoption of DevOps practices.
Product Management
- Product Lifecycle Management Research Center
- Make the Case for Product Delivery
- Align your organization on the practices to deliver what matters most.
- Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision
- Build a product vision your organization can take from strategy through execution.
- Deliver Digital Products at Scale
- Deliver value at the scale of your organization through defining enterprise product families.
- Introduce Program Management to Your Organization
- Use programs to align projects to your strategic goals.
- Optimize IT Project Intake, Approval, and Prioritization
- Decide which IT projects to approve and when to start them.
- Manage Requirements in an Agile Environment
- Agile and requirements management are complementary, not competitors.
- Build a Software Quality Assurance Program
- Build quality into every step of your SDLC.
- Automate Testing to Get More Done
- Drive software delivery throughput and quality confidence by extending your automation test coverage.
- Application Portfolio Management Foundations
- Ensure your application portfolio delivers the best possible return on investment.
"But big-bang transitions are hard. They require total leadership commitment, a receptive culture, enough talented and experienced agile practitioners to staff hundreds of teams without depleting other capabilities, and highly prescriptive instruction manuals to align everyone's approach."
– "Agile at Scale," Harvard Business Review
Insight Summary
Overarching insight
SAFe is a highly disruptive enterprise transformation, and it will not solve your organizational delivery challenges by itself. Start with an open mind, and understand what is needed to support a multi-year cultural transition. Decide how far and fast you are willing to transform and make sure that you have the right transformation and coaching partner in place.
SAFe conflicts with core Agile principles.
The popularity of SAFe is largely due to its structural resemblance to enterprise portfolio and project planning with top-down prioritization and decision-making. This directly conflicts with Agile's purpose and principles of empowerment and agility.
SAFe and Agile will not solve enterprise delivery challenges.
Poor culture, processes, governance, and leadership will disrupt any methodology. Many issues with drivers for SAFe could be solved by improving development and release management within current methodologies.
Most organizations should not be using a pure SAFe framework
Few organizations are capable of, or should be, applying a pure SAFe framework. Successful organizations have adopted and modified SAFe frameworks to best fit their needs, teams, value streams, and maturity.
Without an Agile mindset, SAFe will be executed as Waterfall stages using SAFe terminology.
Groups that "Do Agile" are not likely to embrace the behavioral changes needed to make any scaled framework effective. SAFe becomes a series of Waterfall PIs using SAFe terminology.
Your transformation does not start with SAFe.
Start your transition to scaled Agile with a maturity assessment for current delivery practices. Fixing broken process, tools, and teams must be at the heart of your initiative.
Blueprint Deliverables
Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:
Key Deliverable
Build a transformation and organizational change management plan to guide your transition. Define clear ownership for every critical step.
Scaled Agile Readiness Assessment
Conduct the Agile readiness survey. Without an Agile mindset, SAFe will follow Waterfall or WaterScrumFall practices.
Case Study
Spotify's approach to Agile at scale
INDUSTRY: Digital Media
SOURCE: Unified Communications and Collaborations
Spotify's Scaling Agile Initiative
With rapid user adoption growth (over 15 million active users in under six years), Spotify had to find a way to maintain an Agile mindset across 30+ teams in three different cities, while maintaining the benefits of cross-functional collaboration and flexibility for future growth.
Spotify's Approach
Spotify found a fit-for-purpose way for the organization to increase team autonomy without losing the benefits of cross-team communication from economics of scale. Spotify focused on identifying dependencies that block or slow down work through a mix of reprioritization, reorganization, architectural changes, and technical solutions. The organization embraced dependencies that led to cross-team communication and built in the necessary flexibility to allow Agile to grow with the organization.
Spotify's scaling Agile initiative used interview processes to identify what each team depended on and how those dependencies blocked or slowed the team.
Squad refers to an autonomous Agile release team in this case study.
Case Study
Suncorp instilled dedicated communication streams to ensure cross-role collaboration and culture.
INDUSTRY: Insurance
SOURCE: Agile India, International Conference on Agile and Lean Software Development, 2014
| Challenge | Solution | Results |
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Case Study
Nationwide embraces DevOps and improves software quality.
INDUSTRY: Insurance
SOURCE: Agile India, International Conference on Agile and Lean Software Development, 2014
| Challenge | Solution | Results |
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Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs
| DIY Toolkit | Guided Implementation | Workshop | Consulting |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." | "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." | "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." | "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project." |
Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 1-phase advisory process. You'll receive 4 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
- Call 1: Scope your requirements, objectives, and specific challenges.
- Call 2: Define your primary drivers for SAFe. Create your own list of pros and cons of SAFe.
- Call 3: Assess your Agile readiness. Define enablers and blockers for scaling Agile delivery. Estimate your SAFe implementation risk.
- Call 4: Start your SAFe implementation plan. Summarize your results and plan your next steps.
Contributors
- 9 anonymous company contributors
- 2 individuals completed a survey
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