What is the Scaled Agile Framework?

Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe for short, is a large interactive knowledge-based of best practices, case studies, courses and toolkits.  The patterns and resources are proven, backed up by numberous case studies.  It is specifically designed to work for very small businesses, right through to multi-billion dollar corporate giants.  How does it do that? 

Well there are a number of components that allow the method to scale.  This includes a list of the key principles, outlined above, but also used the concept of Agile Release Trains.  These are teams of teams, containing all your resources, including suppliers and partners, that are co-ordinated through program increment (PI) planning.  These planning sessions ensure all the trains are moving in the same direction and that all the work is decomposed into features and stories.  This results in working code shortly after the first sprint.

The framework itself comes in four flavours:

1. Essential SAFe
2. Portfolio SAFe
3. Large Solution SAFe
4. Full Safe

The order and selection of the above configurations is highly dependent on the organisation's vision, committment and maturity to adopting Agile.  Below are all the frameworks for comparison.

Essential SAFe

Portfolio SAFe

Large Solution SAFe

Full SAFe

Still not convinced.....well there are a wealth of case studies on the SAFe site:

www.scaledagileframework.com/case-studies/

Below is are a few of my favourites:

Want to know more about how to use SAFe?  Please check out my Leading SAFe 2 Day Course.  Please let myself or ALC Training know when and where we can run this course for your organisation: