Scaled Agile – Sirocco’s SAFe way
Scaled Agile – Sirocco’s SAFe way of working
Much of our success as a company is a direct result of how we work.
And how we work is by focusing on delivering value fast and continuously. We selected the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) as our framework of choice for operational excellence and for all our customer projects. As for why we at Sirocco believe it is a superior way of working, SAFe provides a structured approach for scaling agile. It is effective, proven, scalable, and configurable.
Research shows that over 70% of transformations fail.
Contributing factors include insufficiently high aspirations, a lack of engagement within the organization, and insufficient investment in building organisational capabilities to sustain the change, among others.
SAFe promotes alignment, collaboration, and delivery across large numbers of agile teams, mitigating some of those most common risk factors. In a recent “State of Agile” report, almost 60% of survey respondents said collaboration has improved, while 57% saw better alignment to business needs and a quarter saw better quality software delivered. When Agile works, it works.
SAFe gives organizations of all sizes (yes, from small businesses to the most complex ones) a proven system and structured guidance for a better way of working. It allows organizations to respond to disruptive competitors, adapt to changing customer expectations, adjust to market shifts, and capitalize on opportunities.
Here are some SAFe highlights:
Systems Thinking:
The main goal of systems thinking in SAFe is to help you look at the system as a whole rather than focusing on problems in individual components. You don’t want to make isolated decisions without taking into account the interdependencies with other components. You want your decisions to work for the complete system.
Incorporating Systems Thinking into our workflow emphasizes the importance of understanding and optimizing the processes that contribute to our and our customer’s goals. Identifying Operational Value Streams, which represent the sequence of activities required to deliver a product or service to customers/users. By focusing on these value streams, we prioritize a holistic view of production and service delivery, aiming to streamline operations, enhance quality, and maximize value.
Organize around value
In the context of SAFe, organizations are encouraged to establish both planning and reflection cadences across all levels to ensure a unified focus on the core objective: creating value. This necessitates a comprehensive understanding among all team members not only of the business’s status and objectives but also of the specific value we aim to deliver and the intended beneficiaries. By prioritizing value creation in this manner, we align our efforts not just on the procedural aspects of our work but, more importantly, on the substantive outcomes we seek to achieve for our customers.
Alignment
SAFe requires that companies put planning and reflection cadences in place at all levels of the organization. This ensures everyone understands the current state of the business, the goals, and how everyone should move together to achieve those goals.
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.
Transparency
SAFe encourages trust-building behaviour, including planning work in smaller batch sizes so problems can surface sooner, providing real-time visibility into backlog progress across levels, and inspecting and adapting rituals.
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