As businesses grow larger they tend to develop an increasingly larger number of relationships. Many experts hold the opinion that Agile and the Scrum system is only meant for small units at the team level. Even though these are important philosophies in product management, customer feedback and reducing turnaround times, anyone who has undergone Leading SAFe® training knows that Agile mainly suffers from a problem if we try to implement it at the large scale. This is where SAFe® or Scaled Agile Framework® tries to solve the problem of scalability by giving workers Leading SAFe® Training.
Basics of Agile:
In order to understand how Agile is scaled for large firms, we first need to define Agile and its purpose. Agile is a philosophy for developing routine and repetitive products that need to be developed and delivered in a timely and continuous time frame. Under the Agile system, all the teams work from a single backlog where the work is divided into smaller tasks called Sprints. These Sprints are assigned to different individuals in a team and are time limited. This way, the work is efficiently divided in a project team where everyone knows their role. The core principles of Agile are:
- Collaborating with customers for contract negotiation.
- Faster response times on contracts.
- Applying software for work documentation.
- Process and tool based individual task allocation.
As you may be able to guess, the principles and working of Agile are most well suited to smaller teams, and as soon as we get to an enterprise level, we see that it becomes increasingly more difficult to divide and subdivide the same task among people. The second problem is that on the organisational level, there are very few repetitive tasks. Organisation management often has to tackle dynamic problems, and this can throw Agile teams off their rhythm.
How does SAFe® solve this problem?
In reality, there is not a valley of difference between what SAFe® and Agile do. SAFe® simply takes the basic principles of Agile and creates a system to fulfil them on an organizational scale. Here are how the ideals of SAFe® work on scalability:
- Alignment: The benefit of alignment primarily lies in the fact that individual teams are often not aware or aligned with the overarching organizational goals. SAFe® harmonizes individual teams by bringing them under a single banner of control.
- Transparency: In a situation where everyone’s roles and processes are clearly defined, this allows enterprises to solve a lot of problems and have clarity in operations.
- Built-in Quality: When you have a certain benchmark of quality in mind, all your processes can be focused to achieve that level of quality. This way, everyone is aware of the output that is expected from them.
- Program Execution: Through the usage of an Agile Release Train, there is a well planned process that is implemented for program execution. This effectively divides work between individual Scrum and Lean teams.
There are several things that a Leading SAFe® Training will teach you about scaled implementation. Therefore make sure that you are aware of the possibilities that the SAFe® 5.1 offers to your organization!