Essential SAFe: Building a Strong Foundation
James Halprin, helping organisations through Lean-Agile Transformation
The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is aimed at solving one of the most important yet challenging problems for the modern enterprise — how do you achieve the business benefits of Lean-Agile development at scale?
In the last article of this five part series, we discussed the Lean and Agile values and principles that underpin SAFe and how they ultimately act as a compass to ensure we’re moving in the right direction. With our compass in hand, we can now turn our attention to Essential SAFe.
Attempting to implement Lean-Agile at scale is not a trivial effort, so SAFe is not a trivial framework. Against this backdrop, when looking to implement SAFe the following questions will often arise:
- What is the starting point for implementing SAFe?
- How closely does an organization need to follow the various SAFe practices to get the desired outcomes?
The answer is Essential SAFe.
While there are four configurations of SAFe — Essential SAFe, Portfolio SAFe, Large Solution SAFe and Full SAFe — Essential SAFe is the primary configuration and the foundation on which everything else is built. It provides a starting point for implementing SAFe and describes the most critical elements needed to realise the majority of the framework’s benefits. Only after this foundation is in place should the other three configurations of SAFe be considered.
The Ten Essential Elements of Essential SAFe
#1 — Lean-Agile Principles
While similar patterns can be observed, every enterprise is different and faces their own set of challenges. Using a framework that only contains a set of practices will likely lead to ‘going through the motions’ rather than understanding the ‘why’. SAFe practices are grounded in fundamental Lean-Agile values and principles so even if certain practices are contextually inappropriate, the underlying principles will act as your compass to ensure you are moving in the right direction.
#2 — Real Agile Teams and Trains
The Agile team is at the heart of the framework. An Agile team is a cross functional, self-organizing and self-managing team that has everyone necessary to produce a working, testable and most importantly, valuable increment of the solution. SAFe scales this concept by creating an Agile Release Train (ART). All the same principles of an Agile team applies — ARTs are self-organising and self-managing teams of Agile teams comprised of up to 125 cross functional people that deliver working, testable and valuable increments of the solution. A minimal set of additional roles are required to ‘keep the train on the tracks’ including the Release Train Engineer (RTE) aka the ‘chief Scrum Master’, the Product Manager who has content authority over the Feature / Program backlog and the System Architect who helps define a shared technical and architectural vision for the Solution under development.
#3 — Cadence and Synchronization
Just as our Agile teams need a rhythm, so too does our ART. The rhythm of two weeks at the team level and 8, 10 or 12 weeks at the Program / ART level provides the heartbeat that turns the otherwise unpredictable into a more predictable cadence. In addition to cadence we also need synchronisation so that all the teams on the ART start and stop their iteration / Program Increment (PI) together, which ultimately allows for coordinated cross domain planning.
#4 — PI Planning
Program Increment Planning is the seminal planning event for an ART. It brings everyone on the train together for a structured and high energy 2 day planning event once every PI i.e. once every 8, 10 or 12 weeks. Providing an opportunity for up to 125 people to share, collaborate and plan together allows teams to rapidly uncover and resolve issues that would otherwise potentially take months to resolve, and ultimately create a shared understanding and alignment.
#5 — DevOps and Releasability
DevOps is a mindset, a culture and a set of technical practices that attempts to bridge the gap between development and operations. DevOps should be a core capability of every ART, which ultimately allows an organization to achieve better economic results by having more frequent releases and faster learning cycles. SAFe promotes a CALMR approach to DevOps, which is an acronym for the key elements of DevOps including Culture, Automation, Lean Flow, Measurement and Recovery.
#6 — System Demo
How often have you worked on a project that uses traffic lights to indicate the current status? For most of the project the traffic light is green only to turn red as you approach the all important release. That’s called ‘watermelon reporting’, because it’s green on the outside but really red on the inside! SAFe rightly promotes an objective measure rather than the illusion of progress. To achieve this, every two weeks the full system i.e. the integrated work of all teams on the train for that iteration, is demonstrated to the train’s stakeholders. Demonstration occurs in a staging environment that mimics production as closely as possible and in mature ARTs working software is also regularly released to Production without the normal trauma associated with the release process. Stakeholders provide the feedback the train needs to stay on course and take corrective action as required.
#7 — Inspect and Adapt
Just as the retrospective is a key event for any Agile team, so to is the Inspect and Adapt (I&A) workshop for the ART. The I&A workshop is a program level event where the whole train comes together once per PI to achieve three things: assess the solution in the final System Demo for the PI, review key ART level metrics and participate in an ART retrospective, which utilises Lean root cause analysis tools.
#8 — IP Iteration
Whether you run an 8, 10 or 12 week PI, the last iteration in the PI is called the Innovation and Planning Iteration (IP), and it serves three purposes. Firstly, the ‘I’ stands for ‘Innovation’ and the IP Iteration provides a cadence based opportunity to participate in innovation activities such as hackathons. Secondly, the ‘P’ stands for ‘Planning’ and so it is in this sprint when the all important two day PI Planning event takes place as well as any pre-planning activities. Finally, the IP Iteration provides an estimation guardband so that if the team’s need a little more time to ensure ‘the train leaves the station on time’ there is some buffer built into every PI.
#9 — Architectural Runway
SAFe places a strong emphasis on building out the Architectural Runway. The Architectural Runway consists of the existing code, components and technical infrastructure necessary to support the implementation of high priority, near-term features, without excessive delay and redesign. There is an inherent tension between Intentional Architecture and Emergent Design and teams must strike a balance between the two. That is, building out too much Architectural runway risks locking down a solution prematurely and skipping the all important learning cycles while too little runway risks solution robustness and maintainability.
#10 — Lean-Agile Leadership
One of the key distinguishing factors in SAFe is with the large emphasis it places on the role of Lean-Agile leaders and the need for the enterprise’s leaders and managers to take responsibility for Lean-Agile adoption and success. They must become leaders who are trained and become trainers in these leaner ways of thinking and operating as without leadership the transformation will likely fail to achieve the full benefits.
A framework is often easier to explain than it is to implement, so in the next article we’re going to turn our attention to the SAFe Implementation Roadmap, which is a proven strategy to effectively implement SAFe.
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