Blog | What is Scaled Agile (SAFe)?

The newly-founded Digital Development Center of KBC in Varna is one of the few major companies in Bulgaria who embrace the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). So we reached out to them to get their insight into SAFe, how it works and how they are implementing the framework and its values and principles when it comes to software development.

An introduction to Scaled Agile (SAFe)

There are all kinds of Agile methods and even more different kinds of Agile teams. Scrum, Kanban… development teams only have to choose their favorite one. But what about the whole company? How do you manage to align each agile team with the overall business strategy and hence to be agile at enterprise scale? With SAFe, you can make it happen.

This methodology was actually conceptualized and published by Dean Leffingwell – a management consultant and software developer – in 2011. According to the author itself,  SAFe can be defined as a business framework, “a body of knowledge integrating skill sets, practices and values that have proven their worth and efficiency, making it possible to scale Agile across the enterprise.

Since 2011, hundreds of the world’s largest organizations have discovered its benefits: faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in productivity and quality, and more motivated and engaged employee

How is SAFe different from the other agile methodologies

SAFe belongs to the Agile family and is using other agile frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban on team level, thus putting a framework on top on how to work in an agile way on entеrprise level… the only-but main- difference being that its framework SAFe is rather meant to be part of the whole business strategy. This method considers agility as a business-wide, cross-functional process: that’s why we talk about Agile at Enterprise Scale. Bringing agility to the company through SAFe means setting a common language and common ground, to facilitate the development of working software products of high business value to be delivered.

To say the least, the purpose of implementing SAFe (an agile framework at enterprise scale) is to encourage a profound, in-depth transformation of the organization, to promote agile values (just like Scrum) throughout all company departments. That way, we ensure that software development projects are truly aligned with and integrated into the corporate strategy of KBC, and that customers’ requirements and expectations are met. For short, Scrum enables one team to be agile; SAFe enables a whole enterprise to be agile, by aligning and synchronizing all teams (business and IT) to work towards common goals, with common processes and tools.

Main values of SAFe

SAFe sets out main principles of working in an agile way on enterprise level, but at the same time this way of working is organized around value – for the company, the clients and the team.

At its core, SAFe places the highest value on four things:  alignment, built-in quality, transparency, and program execution. And actually those 4 things are the buildings blocks for the agile teams working at KBC Digital Development Center.

Alignment
Alignment is needed to keep pace with fast change, disruptive competitive forces, and geographically distributed teams. Alignment is supported by clear lines of content authority and PI (Program Increment) Objectives and Iteration Goals are used to communicate expectations and commitments. Cadence and synchronization are applied to ensure that things stay in alignment, or that they drift only within reasonable economic and time boundaries. Architectures and user experience guidance and governance help ensure that the solution is technologically sound, robust, and scalable.

Built-in quality
In the SAFe framework, agility should never come at the cost of quality. SAFe requires teams at all levels to define what “done” means for each task or project and to bake quality development practices into every working agreement. According to SAFe, there are five key dimensions of built-in quality: flow, architecture and design quality, code quality, system quality, and release quality.

Transparency
SAFe encourages trust-building behavior, including planning work in smaller batch sizes so problems can be surfaced sooner, providing real-time visibility into backlog progress across levels, and inspect and adapt rituals.

Program execution
Of course, none of the rest of SAFe matters if teams can’t execute and continuously deliver value. Therefore, SAFe places an intense focus on working systems and business outcomes. History shows us that while many enterprises start the transformation with individual Agile teams, they often become frustrated as even those teams struggle to deliver more substantial amounts of solution value, reliably and efficiently. That is the purpose of the ART (Agile Release Train).

Agile Release Trains align teams to a shared business and technology mission. Each is a virtual organization (typically 50 – 125 IT and business people) that plans, commits, develops, and deploys working software solutions together. ARTs are organized around the Enterprise’s significant Development Value Streams and exists to realize the promise of that value by building solutions that deliver benefit to the end-user. The main roles that we have on ART level at KBC Digital Development Center are Product Manager, Release Train Engineer and System Architect. Additionally, at team level we have Product Owner, Scrum Master and the development team itself.

SAFe certification at KBC Digital Development Center

To make sure that that all SAFe principles are followed and applied for all trains, KBC is putting their focus on building a knowledge center and has successfully hired their first Knowledge Managers. The knowledge community will be growing in maturity and results, and the company will focus on internalization and growth of the coaches, ensuring a more sustainable support for the Agile community.

All of the crucial roles at the KBC Digital Development Center, including Delivery Managers, Release Train Engineers, Product Owners, Scrum Masters etc. that will bring the SAFe framework to live, will have the incredible opportunity to be SAFe certified, where the company will cover the external trainings provided by one of the leading global SAFe Training Academies.

This makes joining the newly founded KBC Digital Development Center even a more exciting journey, powered by the principles of Scaled Agile, and the digital transformation which they have embraced as part of their company strategy.