According to the Scrum Guide, the Scrum Team is a self-organizing team:

“Self-organized teams choose the best way to carry out their work and are not directed by people outside the team. Cross-functional teams have all the competencies needed to carry out the work without relying on others who are not part of the team. The team model in Scrum is designed to optimize flexibility, creativity and productivity.”

The adoption of the Agile mindset at the team level is a reality. Hardly anyone questions the advantages that Agile offers the team. However, in most organizations, products, projects and processes are not carried out by a team of 3 to 11 people. But they often require 30 or more people, and that’s when it helps to have frameworks or resource libraries that give us the tools to continue to retain the benefits of Agile on a larger scale.

The Agile community has been trying to optimize the different parts of an organization. One way to do this is to downsize, de-escalate organizations, create self-organizing teams. In some contexts this is not possible, we cannot create teams where in each team we have a person from the “Legal” or “Finance” or “Marketing” department. Rather, we need to look for frameworks that allow different departments to collaborate with each other while maintaining alignment around business objectives.

SAFe

SAFe® (acronym for Scaled Agile Framework Enterprise) is a framework for scaling Agile practices based on Lean and Agile principles for software and systems development at the enterprise level. SAFe has also proven useful to me as a Lean Agile framework in environments that do not develop software or systems, but for teams involved in a process.

SAFe® is a framework for scaling Agile practices.

There are people who do not consider SAFe as an Agile framework, in fact, I know of cases where this framework has been implemented not as a supporting framework to achieve agility but as a goal in itself. This has generated very contrary opinions, which I understand. However, my goal is not to discuss whether SAFe is or is not Agile, but to share my experience how SAFe has helped us to adopt or scale Lean Agile practices in organizations with several teams working on the same product or process.

my goal is not to argue about whether SAFe is or is not Agile, but to share my experience how SAFe has helped us to adopt or scale Lean Agile practices.

Strict framework or Library

SAFe works very well if we interpret it as a resource library for scaling Agile practices. It will hardly give us good results if it is applied as a rigid framework where all roles and events must be present simply because they appear in the “big picture”.

First of all, as explained in this other article, SAFe is based on a set of Lean Agile principles.

Another reason why we can state that SAFe is Agile and that all scaling frameworks should follow is the fact that the foundation is Lean Agile teams.

SAFe is based on Agile teams.

Agile Teams

SAFe promulgates that nothing should interfere with the equipment, which is the basic building block of scaling. The team is the DNA on which everything is built, it is at the heart and it is where the scaling of Lean and Agile practices begins.

The characteristics of this equipment, as reflected in the SAFe library, are as follows:

• Empowered, self-organized, self-managed and cross-functional
• They jointly deliver value, tested, through a system running every two weeks.

It is true that SAFe seems to impose a condition on teams: “2-week iterations”. The rationale behind this imposition is to facilitate synchronization between teams to facilitate alignment at the team (train) level although the length of iterations should be that which allows us to acceptably manage business risk and synchronize development with other business events. Iterations could be 3 or 4 weeks or even 1 week, although it is highly advisable that ALL teams work in iterations of the same duration or multiples of each other.

Apart from this restriction, in all escalations where SAFe is used as a framework, the basis is Agile teams.