What is SAFe?

What is SAFe?

SAFe stands for S caled A gile F ram e work and means a scaling of agile teams (Scrum) over the programme level to the company portfolio! It can be understood as an operating system for companies, so to speak. However, it only makes sense at least at the programme level. Here again, everything revolves around the estimation of a story point, which forms a reference for all teams - a standard for the joint workload. In our digitalised world, and especially in software environments, there are significant gains to be made by implementing even small right changes. Together we can achieve more, in an agile and scaled way.

In the agile environment, work is done according to the pull principle, i.e. work is offered and not ordered by a manager (push principle). Mostly, this form is organised via a so-called Kanban Board. Kanban comes from the Japanese and means something like board or card, it has gained its triumphal march through the way of working at Toyota Motors Corporation. The simplest version of a Kanban provides for a backlog where work is created and any employee can take it, the work is then in the category in progress. Once this is done and satisfied, it is finished and visualised in the Done section. This mechanism in turn requires autonomous employees, who are the specialists and therefore also the most important decision-makers, not the higher-level management! Decentralised decisions are made on the basis of personal responsibility, which strengthens one's own competence and self-confidence - personal commitment is valued more highly and is given more weight in the bigger picture. Everyone works as fast as they can and takes care of their own health as well as that of their team colleagues; negative stress and burnout is a relic of industrialisation.  Similarly, SAFe focuses on the cost of delay. What is the point of ploughing through the work with great energy on the verge of a heart attack, only for the inspection of the whole thing to take another two weeks, or more precisely: until the boss has time for an inspection. This waste can be eliminated if the person who did the work also does the final inspection, he is the professional anyway and knows best. The boss or the manager is a servant leader and tries to remove the obstacles from the professionals' path.

The core competence of SAFe is the Agile Release Train, also known as the acronym ART. The ART is a grouping of 5 to 10 agile teams and the total size should be between 50 and 125 people. This size is determined according to the emeritus evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, who says that people can survey and remember relationships with up to 150 other people. This ensures the best possible cohesion and communication.

If a company already has an existing product, it tries to identify a value stream. These are all the steps that are needed so that the product can be manufactured and sold. The special thing about this is that it goes through all areas of the company, silos are blown open. Who or what is important comes into play, everything else disappears! Around this value stream, in turn, the Agile Release Train is then built up organisationally. The product is in the foreground and not a very long planned project. The goal here is a product that evolves permanently in short iterations or runs. The value is therefore in the foreground for the customer. This is reinforced by a lean approach. First, a Minimal Viable Product - MVP (smallest possible viable product) is created, which is then experimented with by the customer, because not even the customer himself knows what he actually wants. This is done according to a basic methodology similar to that used in the natural sciences. If an experiment is successful, the product can be developed further. If it fails, it is discarded and a new one is found.

In order to understand the customer even better, so-called empathy maps are drawn. This is an attempt to think oneself into the customer's mind in order to design a new product including a value stream. It is important that this customer perspective is empirically tested by an MVP and is not a figment of the imagination of a management team in an ivory tower.

The heart of the Agile Release Train, in turn, is Programme Increment (PI) Planning. This is two full days of intensive communication and sophisticated conception. Every three months, all members of the train physically come together to draw up a quarterly plan. And that really means everyone involved at programme level too. This is the unique opportunity where developers can meet directly with product managers and business owners. Short direct talks promote cohesion as well as synergies, provided of course that the developers are inclined to use a common language.

With SAFe, the transition away from the classic waterfall project to the agile-lean product is more than possible! In the process, attention should be paid to a clear focus. Too many stakeholders who want to go in different directions burden the teams with too many areas of competence.

From our many years of experience with our customers Siemens Switzerland in a joint Agile Release Train, we can say: Increased communication and mandatory sociability of all train members are the key to success - the team is always more productive than the individual!

However, too much communication in the form of meetings can lead to unwanted standstill. An experienced ART officer, called a Release Train Engineer, paired with skilled Scrum Masters can remedy this. This makes SAFe an extremely effective framework that is able to produce a product for the current market in the first place - try it out today to make the tasty fruits of scaled work useful for you.