A Detailed Guide About SAFe Implementation

For businesses, implementation of Lean-Agile practices is not that easy as there are plenty of complex processes included. Therefore, various companies look for the most effective and reliable business frameworks to expand themselves in the right way. At this point, SAFe takes a role. SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) is nothing but a structure that aids in forming top-quality leads by satisfying your potential or existing customers. It usually involves a roadmap or workflow patterns that help the teams to develop Agile practices and scale Lean successfully for the growth of the organization. As it is highly customizable and flexible, it can fulfill all the needs of your customers without any hassle. So, in order to gain the skills of the Scaled Agile Framework, it is recommended to take Leading SAFe training. Moreover, SAFe consists of three distinct foundations or levels such as team, portfolio, and program.

Essential Core Values of SAFe

Check out some of the essential core values of SAFe which are as follows:

Built-in quality: As per SAFe, you should not compromise with the quality to gain the Agility to add later, and also every incremental delivery must be of high quality that truly reflects the satisfaction of the customers.
Alignment: The term ‘alignment’ is nothing but the matching of planning and cadences while working on a software solution to make sure that all the individuals of the enterprise perceive the organizational objective and what to do to achieve it. This further helps the foundations of the portfolio to be in alignment that assists an organization to render stunning results to their customers.
Program Execution: SAFe adopts a great focus on resultant business outcomes and working systems. As per SAFe, if the team cannot deliver new values to the company, then the particular team is not effective.
Transparency: SAFe looks for practice transparency which is to decrease batch sizes and when a few complications or issues arise, they should be discovered and delivered on time without any inconvenience.

Three Foundations of SAFe Implementation

The adoption of SAFe stands on three levels namely the Team level, the Portfolio level, and the Program level. Each level consists of main players who play various key roles which you can see below. In order to gain a better understanding of the SAFe framework join SAFe Agilist certification training where you will learn the concepts to implement the learned skills in organizations.

Program Level

During the implementation of the Program Level, teams, stakeholders, and resources operate towards a mission of system development. Every hand sync with each other and are responsible for a certain role as a valuable part of the solution. In addition, the teams who work at this level are called Agile Release train that survives by a common set of principles and they incrementally deliver value at a fixed cadence and iterations. Moreover, this level constitutes the combined efforts of the Release Train Engineer, Product Manager, Shared Resources, System Architect, System Team, UX, DevOps, Release Management, and Business Owners. Significantly, the product manager is responsible for the requirements of end-users and customer-defining features for the team.

When it comes to the architect and system team, they would implement the systems thinking to define the overall architecture of the system in development. On the other hand, DevOps include technical practices used in developing, planning, deploying, testing, and maintaining the system. The role of the release train engineer is to ensure maximum optimization of the resources and guide the flow of value through this level with the use of different mechanisms. The business owners are none other than the stakeholders who are responsible for governing the project and its value of business whereas UX creates the user experience interface of the system.

Portfolio Level

This level involves the roles, practices, and practices needed to begin, construct, and handle solutions and systems which the company requires to meet its goals as well as objectives. Hence, this level would include the Management, Program Portfolio, Epic Owners, and Enterprise Architect.

Team Level

At the team level, the typical Agile team structure is used and Scrum processes are adopted. Moreover, the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and a team are the key players who support and deliver the project. As a matter of fact, an Agile team is a group of members with essential skills to draw stories determined by the Product Owner from the backlog and expand them to build, design, deploy, and test solution value elements. Besides, the Scrum Master is the main coach who guides the entire Agile team. At last, the Product Owner is the one who stands as the customer in the process of Agile. Its role is to do the prioritization of the story and make sure that the value rendered by the team satisfies the requirements of the end-users.