Under what conditions would SAFe be a great solution for an organization?
The following assumptions, or conditions, would need to be true for SAFe (Scaling Agile Framework) to be a great solution for an organization.
- Multiple teams necessary to deliver a solution/product to a customer.
- A lack of organizational agility
- Teams are overburdened and stressed
Multiple teams necessary to deliver a solution
If your organization have multiple agile teams, and those teams need to coordinate their efforts and synchronize their delivery to deliver a product or solution to a customer, SAFe is a great agile scaling framework for you.
A great example is an autonomous car.
It requires agile teams in the hardware manufacturing, software engineering, and firmware departments to deliver a working product or feature to customers.
All the elements in software engineering need to integrate with hardware and firmware, and so the software engineering team cannot, necessarily, deliver a solution on their own. They must work with other teams, sometimes in different departments, to produce a working product or feature.
A lack of organizational agility
Often, you find that an organization has pockets of agility that work alongside traditional departments and functions.
Those pockets of agility may believe that they are agile, but when you talk to a senior leader or manager, they will tell you that their time to market is not decreasing, product quality is not improving, and their costs to produce are increasing.
Yes, they can observe pockets of agility in the organization but there is no cross-departmental or cross-functional alignment, nor are teams aligned to organizational objectives and customer objectives.
They may simply be focused on their department objectives and attempting to deliver as many features as possible, without thinking about how valuable those features may be to customers and the organization.
Teams are overburdened and stressed.
A team may have unrealistic productivity targets that don’t take interdependencies into account, nor do they make allowances for organizational impediments that frustrate efforts to deliver.
If your teams are not aligned and coordinated with other teams, you may find that dependencies frustrate the team and create stress because there are unnecessary delays between hand-offs, or elements of work that are shipped to that team are not complete or ready for hand-off.
If there is no coordination between departments, the organizational strategy, and customer objectives, it can be a bit of a free-for-all, and teams are overburdened with work, stakeholder expectations, and customer demands.
If that team are overburdened and there are increased frustrations such as dependency on another team before a product or feature can be shipped to customers, the degree of stress endured by the team increases and results in low team morale, low performance, and low employee satisfaction.
If these conditions exist, SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) is a great fit for your environment.
Ultimately, SAFe ensures that your teams of teams are coordinated, synchronised, and aligned. It also ensures that those teams are building products and features that customers value, in a way that creates and captures economic value for the organization in alignment with strategic objectives.
About Value Glide
Value Glide are a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) consultancy, coaching practice, and training specialist who work with organizations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.
As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team are invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and use the data and evidence we gather from each implementation to inform our training, coaching, and consulting services.
In a nutshell, empirical process control or empiricism.
If you are thinking of adopting agile within your organization and have identified SAFe as a great agile framework to adopt, implement and improve your business agility, visit our SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program page or view our SAFe Consulting Services page.
If you have identified a need for an agile coach and SAFe coach to help your organization adopt and implement SAFe, visit our SAFe Coaching Services page.
If you want to know more about SAFe and how to lead SAFe, visit our SAFE Training page for a host of options, from Leading SAFe to a SAFe Release Train Engineer course.
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