Improving Your SAFe Adoption with Lean-Agile
Making SAFe faster, simpler, and more cost effective
SAFe can provide a good start for organizations that can’t deliver quickly or are even stuck. SAFe provides:
- a holistic view
- an introduction to first principles
- a cost-effective method of training teams
- a way of providing alignment across the organization
The challenge for most organizations is that SAFe provides just enough to get started, not enough to finish the job of continually being able to improve. Most SAFe adoptions start with Essential SAFe and never move to the higher levels because of SAFe’s complexity. Many others stagnate after 2-3 program increments and even revert back to where they started.
What’s Missing
While SAFe provides a method to identify dependencies and coordinate teams, it must go beyond this and remove dependencies. This can increase innovation and the speed of value delivery. This is not done by adding more to SAFe but rather by providing a few key concepts that are missing from it. These include:
- making the value streams in the organization visible
- better Agile artifacts – the MVP has been stretched too far in SAFe to become somewhat useless
- a way to better organize ARTs
- a way to extract teams from ARTs to focus on particular products, especially when innovation is needed
- a deeper understanding of Lean-Management
Improve Your SAFe Adoption
You can improve your SAFe adoption but it requires a deeper understanding of the principles of Flow and Lean that SAFe provides as well as adding a few key concepts not in SAFe. These include:
- Understand what parts of SAFe are effective and keep doing them
- Improve your SAFe adoption in place – no need to abandon what works
- Look at SAFe from a value stream perspective
- Add concepts that can make it both simpler and more effective
This article outlines how to improve SAFe implementations without abandoning them.
Recognize What SAFe Does Well
SAFe does several things well. These are shown in figure 1. Click the image to see the details.
SAFe starts with leaving this out
One of the challenges with SAFe is that it starts its adoptions at the team level. While it suggests having executive buy-in, it is organized around a top-down sponsored, bottom-up implementation. This has several aspects of SAFe that even small organizations need being left out.
The first step is to view SAFe from a value stream perspective
One of the challenges with SAFe is that it starts its adoptions at the team level. While it suggests having executive buy-in, it is organized around a top-down sponsored, bottom-up implementation. This has several aspects of SAFe that even small organizations need being left out.
Why view from a value stream perspective?
Attending to value streams is essential for many reasons.
- Systems are about the relations between their components. Viewing SAFe from a value stream perspective enables everyone to see how the different parts of the organization relate to each other.
- They are not just the components. Different parts of the organization must work together.
- Value streams highlight these relationships. Making the relationships between the groups visible to work together becomes clearer.
- Upstream has a significant effect on downstream. The value stream helps everyone see how everyone affects everyone else.
- You want to start thinking in terms of flow. SAFe’s planning events are too long to be Agile.
- It is less disruptive to expand functionality by adding activities to the value stream than by adding new hierarchy levels.
The Four Phases of a Lean-Agile Driven SAFe Improvement
- Improve in place. Use new FLEX concepts and a few plays to improve SAFe’s core practices. Enables quicker releases, better management of shared services, and improved cross-functionality of teams
- Restructure teams and shorten planning cycles as possible. Use Lean thinking and a deep understanding of workflows to decompose ARTs into Focused Solution teams. This allows for shorter program increments.
- Align teams to business stakeholders and implement agile budgeting. Achieve the desired network of semi-autonomous teams aligned with business stakeholders and implement agile budgeting as possible.
- Guided continuous improvement. Using proven techniques designed for your context. The journey never ends; keep improving.
Phase 1: Improve in place
1. Use minimum Business Increments in addition to MVPs (and notice the difference)
a. Improve PI Planning with MBIs
b. Use shared services as service providers
2. Use shared services as service providers
3. Learn the Value Stream Impedance Scorecard
4. Improve cross-functionality of teams using ”borrow team member.”
5. Adopt ATDD / BDD to at least a minimum level
Phase 2: Restructure teams and shorten planning cycles as possible
1. Make your workflow explicit
2. Untangle the value stream in ARTs
a. Move as many people as possible to be in one value stream
b. Use Basic Lean-Agile Solution Teams when possible
3. Let decoupled value streams operate at different paces in PI planning events
Phase 3: Organize around products and start Agile budgeting
- Align autonomous value streams to stakeholders
- Implement Agile Budgeting and Lean-Allocation
Phase 4: Guided Continuous Improvement
SAFe’s Inspect and adapt focuses on how well ARTs achieve their objectives.
Lean and flow thinking suggests focusing on removing constraints and lowering delays between steps
Methods are provided to:
- Improve teams, use BLASTs and ART formation
- Improve workflow
- Improve planning/flow methods
Success Engineering offers services on how to improve SAFe adoptions.
Al Shalloway, CEO of Success Engineering, offers two services on how to improve SAFe adoptions with Lean-Agile methods:
- Two-hour private seminar on the general approach
- Daily consulting on improving SAFe adoptions