Scaling Agile Development
With technology and market demands evolving at breakneck speed, organizations are under immense pressure to radically transform the way they do business. The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is a popular method to advance digital business transformation. It lays out how to implement agile software development practices at an enterprise scale.
Staying competitive in today’s digital market all but necessitates agility. The ability to thrive in the digital age by empowering your company to quickly respond to market changes and leverage technological innovation. This applies to both software development and the business as a whole. While Agile comes from the software world, it has now been extended into an organizational philosophy and framework.
Business agility goes beyond isolated groups of people (e.g. the software or product team) doing and being Agile within your company. In order to be considered an Agile business, everyone involved, all the way from IT to finance to support and marketing, needs to embody Lean and Agile practices. Truly agile companies also foster a culture of continuous learning within their organization which is supported by their leadership teams with relevant values and principles.
An Agile transition generally starts with the software team(s) experimenting with Agile methodologies. For enterprise use, several frameworks help to scale the Agile approach and extend it to the entire organization. If you’re looking for more information on scaling Agile methods, then you’ve come to the right place: the SAFe® Agile methodology is one of the structured frameworks that will get your organization from where it is to where it wants to be.
The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®)
The Scaled Agile Framework®, also known as SAFe, is a set of organizational principles, processes, and best practices for implementing Agile methodologies at an enterprise scale. Originally released in 2011 by Dean Leffingwell and Drew Jemilo, the SAFe Agile process provides a comprehensive guideline to the roles, responsibilities, workflow patterns, and values that help companies adopt Agile working methods.
SAFe covers the application of Agile principles to five main business areas, namely:
- Architecture
- Integration
- Governance
- Funding
- Roles
These five aspects are assessed and tackled on four different levels within an organization:
- Essential SAFe
- Large Solution SAFe
- Portfolio SAFe
- Full SAFe
Scaled Agile for enterprises promotes alignment between various Agile teams in the same organization in order to foster Agile collaboration and delivery. The foundation for this framework comes from three main schools of thought: systems thinking, Agile software development, and lean methodologies. SAFe also puts a significant emphasis on focusing on customer needs before anything else, leveraging Agile product delivery and innovation to grow, and organizing a parallel operating system for organizations which is based on value streams instead of hierarchical departments.
Benefits of scaled Agile methods
SAFe 6 is the latest version and it introduces the Seven Core Competencies for SAFe, a set of competencies that organizations need to develop to become a Lean-Agile enterprise.
The seven core competencies are:
- Lean-Agile Leadership
- Team and Technical Agility
- Agile Product Deliver
- Enterprise Solution Delivery
- Lean Portfolio Management
- Organizational Agility
- Continuous Learning Culture
It can also help to transform and modernize company culture by empowering people to make quick decisions, use resources wisely, and put the right people in charge of the right projects. SAFe Agile project management also emphasizes that it’s not down to the framework to realize a successful transformation, it’s the organization’s people, particularly transformational leaders, who can make it happen by leading by example.
Challenges of scaling Agile development
Many companies find that the hardest part of trying to achieve business agility and scale Agile is creating a culture and mindset shift as well as transforming the way work management runs.
Top nine blunders organizations run into:
- Building a framework from the ground up
- Individual resistance
- Organizational resistance
- Lack of ALM capabilities
- Monolithic architecture
- Lack of high-level planning
- Failure to adopt a common process
- Lack of meaningful customer feedback
- Continuous scope creep