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.