The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is a set of organizational and workflow patterns for implementing agile practices at an enterprise scale. The framework is a body of knowledge that includes structured guidance on roles and responsibilities, how to plan and manage the work, and values to uphold.
Here are some common problems with scaled Agile approaches that could arise in your company. Lack of Flexibility – Of the Agile approaches, SAFe is one of the more rigid. There is little room for adjustment to the approach, making it difficult to adapt the framework to any specific needs your organization may have.
SAFe is the most popular framework in use today to guide an organization's efforts to scale agile practices beyond the team level.
Agile is mainly developed for a small team of ten or fewer people. SAFe, on the other hand, is an agile framework for an enterprise which is not limited to smaller teams and guides enterprises in scaling lean and agile practices.
verb. safetied; safetying. Definition of safety (Entry 2 of 2) transitive verb. : to protect against failure, breakage, or accident safety a rifle.
In short, SAFe is not agile. The activities that make teams truly agile require flexibility in planning. They require alignment on customer success, not a predetermined set of features. They require a continuous discovery process that inevitably leads to unplanned course corrections.
A strong accusation against SAFe is that it's only a different name for "Waterfall", i.e. while the structure and names are different - the underlying process (and corresponding problems) remain unchanged - so let's clarify how SAFe really changes your development process.
Epic owners are the coordinating portfolio epics through the portfolio system. The epic owner role sits at the portfolio tier of agile release train i.e on the SAFe. They will be firstly responsible for recognizing a need for anything for an organization.
SAFe Full Configuration consists of four levels: Team, Program, Large Solution and Portfolio. It is constantly being improved, and its latest version is 4.5.
SAFe drives faster time to market, an increase in productivity and quality, and also higher customer engagement. A core benefit of SAFe is that it not only provides alignment between teams, but also to all levels of the enterprise that are involved in solution development: Team, Program, Large Solution and Portfolio.
