Some Organisations Are Better Off With SAFe Than With Scrum

As long as you know what you are doing

Image by Łukasz Dyłka from Pixabay

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and Scrum are both ways to help organisations to deliver value. Both qualify as Agile approaches. People may disagree about this. Some argue SAFe isn’t ‘Agile’, others even argue both aren’t. That’s fine. I’m not going to discuss this here and now as this is not relevant for this article.

SAFe is heavily inspired by Scrum. It has Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Scrum-like events and much more. Still, SAFe doesn’t work with Scrum. Here are some key differences:

• SAFe has more roles, events and artifacts than Scrum. As a result, SAFe is more complicated than Scrum.
• Product Owners don’t own the Product Backlog. Instead, the Product Manager has the final voice, although it is about the Program Backlog.
• The Sprint Review as a pivotal event to discuss the course of the product with the stakeholders doesn’t exist. Instead, SAFe has Inspect and Adapt events at the end of an Agile Release Train consisting of several Sprints. With that, SAFe’s feedback loops are longer.

SAFe alters or takes away key elements from Scrum. With that, SAFe is less equipped to create valuable products in complex environments. Still, some organisations…