LeSS or SAFe? When to use which one?

Agreed Lenka, SAFe does tend to be top heavy.

If you ask me, I go with DaD. Mainly because I fully sustain that Agile is not a matter of software. In fact, if organization think that is a matter of software then it will fail to implementa Agile practices. In my actual work place the reason was top management believe that the inherent prescription oriented nature of SAFe will help us. In fact, I was the only person that think totally different and presented an analysis demostrating other things according to our actual reality. But I do not have the final decision so here I am working on charge that make things happend related to SAFe implementation. Lenka, go with DaD if and only if after making an analysis the impact is low. I worked a lot with DaD including with Scott Ambler. Just to add some information the method we use to evaluate the current organization readiness is this (hope it helps): https://www.projectmanagement.com/blog-pos...-right-solution

Lenka -

SAFe ceremonies, roles and cadence cannot easily be introduced a piece at a time. Even in the Essential SAFe configuration, there's enough of a change being introduced to make it feel like a revolution. You could pilot it, but it would have to be at the granularity of a department as the organizational changes might not be feasible for just a single product.

I have a hard time seeing LeSS scale well beyond a handful of teams working on a single product. They've taken a very simplistic approach of scaling up Scrum and my concern is that many of the orchestration activities (e.g. requirements alignment, solution alignment, organizational blocker management) which are needed to scale agile to an enterprise context are no covered in any detail.

The limited partner support is also a concern to me - scaled agile requires a fair bit of external support in the early days and if there are limited practitioners in the local area, that could be a big blocker.

Kiron

Lenka, that's generally true. SAFe is a top-down organizational model where ideas are generated and managed until they work their way down to the development teams. If you search for Scaled Agile Framework, you can find some of the models they use. LeSS is a bottom-up model that takes team-level scrum and scales it up to the entire organization. I'm speaking in very general terms; you could find examples that prove me wrong.

I do not have practical experience with SAFe, only what I've been taught and what I've learned from practitioners. I've know a number of SAFe coaches, and some of them believe in it. Others go along with it because they like having a job. You can look and find some very unflattering opinions about it from Agile communities. SAFe seems to be more popular with large organizations that want some benefits associated with agility but also want to maintain their structure. The structure(s) of SAFe seems familiar to management and may contribute to the relative popularity of it.

I'm not a religious believer in either framework, but if you need a quick pro/con of each, I'd say that SAFe is probably easier to adopt because it more closely resembles a traditional management model, but for the same reason it will not be as transformative. LeSS could be difficult to implement unless your organization already has a solid Scrum foundation, but it would introduce a very different way to work.

I would like to understant those particulars too as I am no expert in both so I look forward to see others feedback. Cheers. !

I’m sorry to hear that you need to do it even if you’re not happy about that. But perhaps you’ll find positives. I always found challenging to work in enviroment of various maturity levels. And for several teams it is easier to go through a change that’s more prescriptive and less creative. It helps to reduce the anxiety related to a change. Wish you good luck!!