In the current day & age, no single management process or methodology can help in finding solutions to all uncertainties & problems. Such is the reason why Scrum, Lean and Agile should be treated as approaches more than methodologies, and all of them allow enterprises to follow a specific set of principles. Understanding the aforementioned principles is necessary to ensure that the said principles are implemented properly.
What is meant by Scaled Agile Framework?
SAFe or Scaled Agile Framework can be defined as a set of workflow as well as organizational patterns which are specifically designed to properly implement Agile practices on the enterprise scale. Join the Leading SAFe course to understand more about the SAFe.
SAFe is created around the following three bodies of knowledge:
- Systems Thinking
- Agile Software Development
- Lean Product Development
It should be understood that SAFe helps in promoting collaboration, alignment, and delivery across more than one agile team.
Why is the usage of SAFe essential?
The following are some of the major reasons why the implementation of SAFe is crucial:
- Helps teams to work independently.
- Helps in the implementation of agile across multiple programs & teams.
- Helps in mitigating failures, delays, and obstacles for multiple teams implementing agile.
- Helps consistent scaling of agile across an entire organization.
- Helps in obtaining success through the DevOps department.
What are the various SAFe principles?
The following SAFe principles should be remembered and one can get an idea of these by attending the SAFe Agilist certification training.
1. Obtaining a financial perspective
As a business owner, when the objective is to deliver the highest quality products to the consumers, then the economics of creating such products must be understood. By learning about the same, decision-making will become a seamless process. With the help of SAFe, the operational costs, economic trade-offs and the cost of delays can be obtained.
2. Implement systems thinking
When it comes to SAFe, systems thinking is primarily applied in three different areas – the enterprise building of the system, the solution, and the value streams. Solutions can be in multiple forms such as services or products. Comprehending the aforementioned three areas will help the teams & leaders to know how complex it would be to develop a solution and the time required for the same to be released in the market.
 3. Maintain versatility
Working on a project that has only one concept is nothing but a recipe for disaster. If there’s an issue midway through the project, making adjustments will take a longer time. That’s why SAFe encourages the creation of multiple design options as well as requirements for a long development cycle.
4. Incremental building
Obtaining the required feedback when developing a system isn’t easy, which is why SAFe suggests the use of integrated points to understand any uncertainties relating to problems or risks. Integrated points can also be utilized to obtain feedback from consumers, which will help in understanding the needs of the user. Thus, a better solution can be created that will satisfy the user.
5. Creation of milestones
When large systems are developed, large investments are also required. Thus, it’s the responsibility of the developer as well as the customer to create a system that will help in bringing economic benefits to the developing organization. The integration points utilized in SAFe will create objective milestones for evaluating the solution throughout its development cycle.
6. Increase productivity
Limiting the overall amount of work that is to be done in a process will help in assessing the system’s productivity. Moreover, such a process also helps in reducing the batch sizes, which helps the system to be more reliable & fast. The objective of this principle is to optimize for the ideal results.
7. Utilisation of cadence
Cadence helps in reducing the complexity of the development process while also creating rhythm & predictability. By using cadence, variance accumulation can be prevented while enabling small batch sizes. Furthermore, with the help of synchronization, it will be possible to resolve, understand and integrate different perspectives simultaneously.
8. Motivating employees
SAFe helps in finding ways to motivate the workers so that the ideal potential could be unleashed. There are various ways to obtain such an objective such as creating a seamless working environment or reducing working constraints. Motivated employees & teams tend to produce better results for the enterprise at large.
9. Decision-making should be decentralized
To deliver the most value within the shortest possible time, decision-making must be decentralized. SAFe allows the leaders to only decide on areas related to strategic importance and allows the rest of the decisions to be made by the workers.
10. Value creation
To gain a competitive advantage in the market, enterprises must focus on delivering the maximum amount of customer value in the shortest possible time frame, without sacrificing the quality.
