SAFe sees itself as a company’s overarching operating system and consists of seven different core competencies with principles and workflows contained within them to implement agile practices throughout the company.
In its framework, SAFe offers different expansion and user levels that build on each other and are also suitable for large or growing structures: Essential, Large Solution, Portfolio or Full-SAFe.
The basis for all expansion stages are the seven values oriented around customer needs.
- Lean Agile Leadership: Employees, especially executives and managers, support the agile transformation and live it through their thoughts and actions.
- Team and technical agility: cross-functional teams are assembled to have the necessary technical skills and tools to deliver high-quality solutions.
- Agile product development: The customer-centric strategy generates a continuous delivery pipeline with small, fast release cycles.
- Providing enterprise solutions: Lean principles are also applied across the enterprise to build large systems and continuously develop existing live systems along the entire value chain.
- Lean portfolio management: In portfolio management, strategy, financing and execution are coordinated across the board to enable decentralized decisions to be made with little effort.
- Organizational agility: The company should be set up in a lean-agile manner in order to process daily business efficiently and to be able to react quickly to challenges and threats.
- Continuous learning culture: Everyone in the company learns and grows together. Continuous learning and improvement of processes, services and solutions is the task of every employee.
On this basis, various structures-agile teams, program structures, and portfolios-are established and supported by further agile ways of working in daily task management.
The roles that employees take on are clearly defined and named in the first level as in Scrum. With each expansion stage, additional roles are added, which can also be combined depending on your own requirements.
The implementation of the tasks is done classically with Design Thinking, Scrum or Kanban and organizationally by at least two team instances (Agile Team and Release Train Team).
The development results are then fed to the “Agile Release Train” in incremental integration loops and tested, thereby generating a system-dependent high-quality product for the customer.
Advantages
– Clear structure and organizational units
– Introduction and implementation according to a clear step-by-step plan – Also suitable for complex companies
– Uniform vocabulary and product view
Disadvantages
- Increased training and implementation time
- The barrier to entry is quite high
- Use only makes sense at a later stage of the company from a certain size onwards
- Additional hierarchies in larger structures contradict agile principle