With every project management approach, project managers will face some challenges. As with other Agile approaches like Scrum or Lean, the Scaled Agile Framework has its own unique uphill battles you will need to overcome if you use this approach for your team. Because SAFe was designed specifically for large organisations, challenges may be difficult to spot and even more difficult to remedy. Challenges with implementing SAFe come when we don’t get the starting or setup of the engagement right from the get-go; we are simply doing it because we want to do it as opposed to what our reasons are. Having a clear understanding and knowledge of what SAFe is and how we intend to use it for the betterment of our team, goals, and organisation as a whole is important as this will guide us to where we want to go. 

 

When using SAFe, you should remember that SAFe is not a silver bullet. If problems exist in your organisation before you apply SAFe to your product development environment, those problems are not going to magically disappear. Also, an ineffective implementation of SAFe could actually make the issues worse. 

Some of the common challenges with implementing SAFe are: 

🚀Lack of Flexibility. t is likely that you will find team members stuck in their roles which may result in very little room for innovation and change. It is therefore important to encourage and foster a culture of self-responsibility and collaboration. 

🚀 Top-Down Decision Making.  A the start of a SAFe adoption, the organization is used to centralized command and control rather than decentralized decision-making. This means that a lot of the decisions being made are top-down, which can put stress on team members and lead to them feeling demotivated or uninvolved. It is therefore very important to ensure there is space and a platform for other team members to feel seen, heard and valued.

🚀 Prioritising Epics. Prioritising your work is a challenge when working with many operational systems. Determining which epics have the greatest potential and best return on investments can lead to difficult decisions and tension.

🚀 Conducting Release Planning Sessions.  With SAFe, bringing people together and efficiently running Release Planning Sessions can be a challenge when working in a large organisation. Alignment and transparency is thus paramount. 

🚀 Organising work. One of the greatest downfalls of large corporations using SAFe, is the habit to organise work in large batches instead of small manageable timelines. The result is that teams may not be able to determine how long a task will take or predict what errors may stand in the way during the process. 

How We Can Overcome These Challenges

At the end of the day, change and challenges are always going to be there and are an inevitable part of running a business. What is important however is how we respond to those challenges and the quality of our working relationships with our team members. We need to meet people where they are and assess the capacity to change from both an organisational level and team  level. 

 

Rome was not built in a day, and so the focus should not be on achieving enormous targets all in one day but rather on the small changes and improvements that we achieve along the way. Rather than leaving people behind, we provide the support that people need to make sure that they belong and have a significant role to play in the transformation and implementation of SAFe too. 

 

Do you want to learn more about how you can address common challenges in SAFe?

 

At Value Glide, through the application of  SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), we are able to offer agile consulting, agile coaching, and agile training specialists who work with organisations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.

As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team is invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and uses 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 organisation 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 organisation adopt and implement SAFe, visit our SAFe Coaching Services page. We are committed to equipping organisations with the tools and knowledge to thrive in this ever-changing digital age, and achieve business agility through the Scaled Agile Framework. 

Sounds good to you? Then sign-up today, and learn more about this transformation and revolutionary framework that is changing the game in the world of Agile. It is truly remarkable what can be done when we put our heads together and decide to work as one.

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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