How SAFe is Scrum?

 

One of the issues with Scrum is when we need to expand the team, or the Scrum project size. In other words, scaling Scrum. There are various scaling approaches, but one of the most popular is called SAFe or Scaled Agile Framework.

Many people get confused with the difference between Scrum and SAFe. Is it just Scrum on steroids, or a Scrum project that has outgrown the Scrum Team? Both approaches do share some attributes. For example, they are both based on Agile principles and adopt relatively short iterations.

But what happens when a Scrum project is so large, that there are numerous teams working on different stages of the product? Often these Scrum Teams might have their own Product Backlog, ceremonies and artifacts. Many Scrum Teams also have their own cadence adding more complexity to the project. Coordination of all these activities can start to break down, and Agility is sacrificed.

SAFe extends the functionality of Scrum to allow it to scale to a very large size. It does this firstly by creating four dimensions for the management of these large project: Portfolio, Value Stream, Program and finally Team. Scrum is most applicable at the Team level of the SAFe framework. In other words, when you are viewing SAFe at the Team level, it is very difficult to tell the difference between Scrum and SAFe.

However, at the Program level, we start to see a bigger crossover to SAFe and away from traditional Scrum. At this level, there are multiple Scrum Teams working effectively as a larger team, called the Agile Release Train or ART. They can consist of up to 150 people. Timeboxes here are called Program Increments or PI's which typically consist of 5 iterations. The PI begins with a planning meeting to discuss the vision or goals, and the upcoming features for that PI, in much the same way as a Sprint Planning meeting is performed before each Sprint. Usually the team plans the upcoming 4 iterations, and the fifth and final iteration is called an Innovation Planning iteration or IP. During this "Innovation" part of the iteration, the team can be creative and come up with ideas similar to hackathon. During the "Planning" part of the iteration, the team can hold a retrospective on how to improve the ART during the next PI, demo the achievements of the PI that just concluded, and also plan for the next PI's features.

The Value Stream level put simply is just a bunch of ART's for a larger solution that cannot be delivered using a single ART. At the Portfolio level, you guessed it, the focus is on the management of multiple Value Stream, but also takes into account strategic themes and budget considerations for each Value Stream. During these upper levels, there are many different job roles that we won't get into here, but needless to say, the number, diversity and criticality of these roles also scales with the SAFe framework itself.

So, in order to make Scrum safe when scaling up, we sometimes need to make it SAFe.
 

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