What are the benefits of using SAFe?
One of the primary benefits of SAFe or Scaled Agile Framework is that it offers an opportunity to align teams of agile teams with customer and organizational objectives in a way that other agile frameworks don’t.
Organizations tend to fall into two categories:
- They aren’t agile but are exploring the opportunity of transitioning to agile.
- They have pockets of agility within the organization, but those teams can’t scale effectively, and they are having difficulty aligning teams of agile teams with customer objectives.
It can be frustrating when you have one team that are performing incredibly well, but there are pockets of dependency within the organization, and the teams cant synchronise or align their efforts in a way that creates value for both the organization and the customer.
One always suffers. In most cases, both the organization and the customer suffer.
When you speak to executives in these organizations, they will tell you that:
- They aren’t seeing improved times to market.
- They aren’t seeing increased customer satisfaction.
- They aren’t seeing improved product quality.
- They aren’t seeing improved flow of work throughout the system.
- They aren’t seeing cost efficiency within production teams.
And so forth.
A lot of the metrics that matter to organizations simply isn’t being achieved through a single product development team, nor does it happen with pockets of agility spread across the organization.
So, people turn to SAFe because it is a proven scaling agile framework that coordinates, sychnonizes, and aligns efforts to ensure both organizational and customer objectives are being achieved.
SAFe in action
SAFe aligns the product development framework with the organizational purpose.
The next step is designing the metrics and measures that will allow executives, leadership teams, and product development teams to witness how their efforts are moving the needle on the things that matter most to the team.
A live, real-time and visible scorecard that inspires teams to dig deep and commit to the work.
As they move forward, that progress is visible, and inspires teams to persist through moments of adversity. Inspires them to build and sustain momentum in their work.
- What are the organizational goals we are trying to achieve?
- What are the competencies we must develop to achieve those objectives?
- What are the flow measures that demonstrate we are improving with each iteration?
So, the measures are incredibly important and also help to prove the business case for SAFe.
Agile can sometimes be accused of being too warm and fuzzy, and too soft on hard metrics of performance, but that isn’t true in SAFe.
We have a strict focus on metrics and measurements, and we know that our efforts must move the needle on those metrics for the SAFe adoption to be considered a success.
SAFe is built on the pillars of empiricism: Transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
As we inspect our efforts, we see how that translates into movement on the scorecard. If it isn’t moving the needle in the right direction, we adapt and respond. If it is moving the needle in the right direction, we develop a new hypothesis for improvement, and build on the great work we are doing.
Growing through an increasing body of knowledge.
The SAFe community are committed to product development in the same way that our clients are. So, there are literally tens of thousands of SAFe adoptions in the world, and as each new adoption happens, we have a growing body of knowledge, skills, and experiences.
Things that flow back into the SAFe community and help all of us improve what we are doing, how we are doing it, and how we can innovate based on successful experiments in other applications.
The goal of SAFe, and the SAFe community by extension, is to help our clients achieve their business goals and objectives, in a way that delights customers and product development teams.
Employee satisfaction is just as important as customer satisfaction.
We want to take the growing body of SAFe knowledge and use what we have learned in other applications to improve the environments we work in. This worked really well in that application over in Sydney, Australia, great lets run that experiment in our environment, in Johannesburg, South Africa, and see what we can learn.
And so forth.
So, the growing body of knowledge in the SAFe community plays a massive role in ensuring that our product, SAFe or Scaled Agile Framework, gets better each year and helps our clients achieve the competitive advantage they both want and need.
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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