How The Scaled Agile Framework Helped

About a year ago, the company I work for adopted the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). It's been a huge undertaking and is something we're still adjusting to and refining for us. Overall, I think it's been a huge improvement over what we were doing before. While SAFe won't work for everyone, here are some of the benefits we've seen from implementing SAFe.

1. Executive Support

From the very beginning, our CEO was on board with this. That made the whole process that much easier. Because he was supportive of it, that influenced the other executives to also lend their support. All this support made it much easier for us to successfully and quickly implement SAFe. The consultants we hired said one of the biggest things that hold companies back from successfully changing processes like this is executive buy-in. Because we had that support all along, it made our transition go much more smoothly.

2. New Roles

Before SAFe, we didn't have dedicated Scrum Masters. We also had hybrid Product Owner/Product Managers. While that worked when the company was much smaller, we had definitely hit the limits of that being effective. Since SAFe, we've hired dedicated Scrum Masters and split the Product Owner (PO) and Product Manager (PM) roles in two. This has required some people to become more specialized, but it's also made the whole team more efficient.

3. Best Practices

While we're not doing everything perfect and we're not doing all the best practices we can or should be doing, since SAFe we've definitely adopted more best practices. We've automated more tasks, we've standardized the way we write stories, we use acceptance criteria, and many other things. There are a lot of improvements still to make, but we're following Agile and other things we value a lot better now.

4. Focus

Before SAFe, we had product teams. Each product team had things that they worked on that their PM thought was valuable. Sometimes those things aligned with the big company goals, and other times they were very low priority things when compared to the company goals. Since SAFe, we've aligned the entire department so that we all focus on the most valuable item(s). Instead of Team A working on what they thought was a high priority and Team B working on whatever they thought was important, every feature we work on has been researched to some degree and evaluated by a number of people to make sure it really is as valuable as we think it is. Essentially, we've limited Work In Process (WIP). This has helped align the department and give us all something to focus on.

Still Learning

There are definitely other benefits that we've seen. From more measurable statistics to clearer vision. Overall, SAFe has disrupted us in a good way. But it's not without its challenges. We still have open questions such as "how do managers fit in?" and "how do we protect the teams but keep a sense of community?" among others. Slowly but surely, we're figuring it out. We're making small adjustments and trying to stay within the guardrails. We're definitely not in a perfect state, but we're making improvements and I'm hopeful for the future.

Consultants

When transitioning to SAFe, we couldn't have ever done it without the help of the great consultants and Net Objectives. We had the great opportunity to work with Kelley Horton (who has since left for an exciting new position) and Guy Beaver. The training and coaching we received from them has been exceptional.

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