Evaluating SAFe®: A measured response to SAFe® critisim

SAFe®, the Scaled Agile Framework®, is - according to their own words - the world’s leading framework for Business Agility. SAFe® integrates the power of Lean, Agile, and DevOps into a comprehensive operating system that helps enterprises thrive in the digital age by delivering innovative products and services faster, more predictably, and with higher quality.

SAFe® often draws criticism for being rigid rather than agile. Critics argue that it merely masks traditional phase gate processes under the guise of agility. But is this criticism justified, or does SAFe® offer substantial benefits under certain conditions? This article explores the effectiveness of SAFe® in fostering organizational agility and its impact on delivering value.

The Essence of Agility in Business

Firstly, it’s essential to understand that the primary objective of any business, from manufacturing to non-profit sectors, is to deliver valuable products and services to their customers. In an increasingly volatile environment marked by rapid technological advancements and shifting market dynamics, agility becomes crucial. These conditions lead to changing customer needs and preferences, prompting the question of what constitutes a “valuable product” in the eyes of customers under the current circumstances. A company’s agility is measured not by a binary scale but by how well it adapts to these challenging conditions. Instead of asking, “Is SAFe® truly agile?”, we should consider whether SAFe® can enhance a company’s ability to thrive in complex scenarios.

How SAFe® Facilitates Value Delivery

To assess SAFe’s® utility, we begin with its basic structure: Essential SAFe®. This setup includes Agile Release Trains (ARTs), which are groups of up to 125 individuals across 5-12 cross-functional teams. These teams converge approximately quarterly during a two-day event called PI Planning. This event aligns high-level goals and plans the delivery schedule, fostering coordination and risk management. Despite skepticism about the agility of quarterly planning, this structure supports faster and more frequent adjustment and alignment pivotal for navigating complex environments compared to a classical waterfall approach. By providing room for the teams to adjust to and integrate new insights into their work the approach increases its ability for adjustment and team level self-organization towards aligned goals.

Pre-Transformation Scenarios in Organizations

Many organizations are siloed, with minimal communication across departments, which can hinder agility. SAFe® aims to unify these groups, align goals, and open direct communication channels. Even without further changes, such alignment can significantly enhance operational effectiveness.

Key Factors for Achieving Sufficient Agility

Focus on customer satisfaction

The main indicator for a companies’ success is its ability to create value for the customers. Quick and regular feedback, and close collaboration with customers not only improve their satisfaction but also make developers happier and the process more cost-efficient. The cost efficiency in agile approaches doesn’t come from delivering more of the same faster; rather, it arises from the ability to learn early which parts of the product deliver the most value and which don’t. This focus on continuous learning and adaptation helps direct efforts toward what truly matters. Strong product ownership also helps prevent scope creep and keeps the project on track.

A team is only a team if they have a common goal

Teams need a shared purpose – otherwise it’s just a group of people. That’s true on the team level as well as for the ART level. To set up an agile release train only makes sense if the teams work on the same product or have other dependencies they need to manage. Otherwise, SAFe® imposes a lot of regular meetings that make no sense if the people don’t need to resolve issues together. Adapting the ART and team composition as well as the communication structure should be part of the retrospectives.

A team is a relatively small, clearly defined group of people who work together towards a shared purpose.

Room for continuous improvement

“True” or even sufficient agility requires frequent, systematic improvements at both team and organizational levels. A company is sufficiently agile when it can succeed with the complexity, volatility, uncertainty and ambiguity of its products and circumstances under the consideration that the conditions are getting more and more challenging.

SAFe® (Scaled Agile Framework®) is designed not just to change current practices but to instill an ongoing capacity for adaptation and improvement. SAFe® uses methods that might appear clumsy or forced for organizations with a high level of agile maturity. However, SAFe® is not intended to make highly agile companies that can deliver new features multiple times a day like Spotify or Amazon more agile, but to enable a first step for traditionally structured organizations.

Room for unplanned work and to integrate new insights

Leadership understanding and support are crucial for agile practices to be effective. Leaders must recognize that not all work can be planned in advance, otherwise there would be no need for agile methods. Accordingly, planning should not consume all available team capacity. This flexibility is essential for maintaining agility and should be a core consideration in any agile transformation, including those initiated with SAFe®.

Respect the people who do the work

No framework, including SAFe®, can fix a lack of trust overnight. While management may sometimes see agile methods as an excuse for uncommitted behavior and developers may perceive “Agile” as a form of micromanagement, these issues are not inherent to any specific framework—they are cultural problems. The true value of frameworks like SAFe® lies not in the roles and processes themselves but in their ability to support a broader cultural transformation.

Skilled Scrum Masters and coaches play a crucial role in fostering empathy, understanding, and trust across the organization. Changing a company’s culture requires more time and effort than simply implementing new roles and processes, but it is achievable if leadership is truly committed to the journey. SAFe® supports this transformation with specific, well-defined elements that go beyond structure, aiming to embed cultural change throughout the organization:

LACE (Lean-Agile Center of Excellence): A dedicated team to lead and drive the transformation across the entire organization.

IP Sprints (Innovation and Planning): Time set aside for innovation, planning, and a buffer to complete promised work, encouraging sustainable delivery.

Roles like RTEs (Release Train Engineers) and Scrum Masters/Team Coaches: Facilitators of continuous improvement who help teams learn and adapt.

Capacity Allocation: Structured time to address technical debt, maintenance work, and improve overall delivery capabilities.

Built-In Quality: An emphasis on integrating agility not only into the approach to work but also into product architecture and quality standards.

Self-Assessments: Tools for systematically identifying the biggest issues and areas for improvement.

By embedding these elements, SAFe® enables the company to go beyond superficial changes and provides a framework that can help sustain cultural transformation. It will rarely be great from the start, but SAFe® provides various mechanisms to collect feedback from the people doing the work and improve based on their feedback.

Agile Transformations with SAFe®: A Continuous Journey

While SAFe® might not suit highly agile organizations like Spotify or Amazon, that already developed their own way of agility, it is specifically tailored for large, traditionally structured companies embarking on their agile journeys. SAFe® integrates well-established lean-agile principles to get an agile transformation started effectively. If a company already possesses a more efficient method, it might bypass SAFe®. However, for many, SAFe® provides a valuable starting point.

How to evaluate if (parts of) SAFe® are the right approach for your company

Does your company already implement the values and principles?

SAFe® is built on core values, the lean-agile mindset, and guiding principles. Every element in the SAFe® framework is designed to support one or more of these principles and values. For example, backlogs at different levels promote “alignment” and “transparency” while also following the principle of “Taking an economic view” by prioritizing objectives effectively.

If your company already has a successful approach to applying these values and principles, there’s no need to change it.

On the other side, if the current implementation of these SAFe® elements doesn’t help your company to implement these values and principles, they are not serving their purpose. This is a strong call to inspect and adapt.

Are your processes working?

If the processes for financing and developing new products are still working and only lack a little bit of efficiency, you might be far better off with a slim systemic improvement approach like Flight Levels.

If your processes are already failing, the rigid structure of SAFe® can act as a cast or splint to enable the healing of the broken processes.

With the right intention, leadership support and understanding of the underlying principles SAFe® helps to restore the ability to deliver value. It establishes clear responsibilities and structures as well as a frame for systematic improvement. It is very important that leadership commits to remove impediments. Otherwise, SAFe® stays a splint for a broken process and cannot act as enabler to overall improve the way of working.

Do you need to invest in a common language?

SAFe® provides a common language for roles, skills and certain elements to enable agility. This is incredibly helpful if you need to prioritize and agree on internal actions. It also enables you to hire and train the employees for certain skills. Even if you need little from the structure of the framework itself, it is very useful to have a common understanding of the principles and terms like build in quality, release on demand and so on.

Conclusion: A Balanced View of SAFe®

As an Agile Coach or Scrum Master working across all organizational levels, it’s vital to approach SAFe® with a nuanced perspective. SAFe® has successfully distilled numerous agile methodologies into a multi-layered framework. Rather than questioning its agility, we should focus on whether it enhances the company’s operational practices and ability to deliver valuable products and services. For organizations with a mature agile practice, SAFe® might offer limited benefits. SAFe® can deliver a lot of value for traditionally structured organizations at the beginning of their agile transformation. Independent of the agile maturity of an organization, its components, like the DevOps Health Radar, can provide valuable insights for systematic improvement.