LeSS or SAFe? When to use which one?

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

Thank you Wade, so you see SAFe as top down and LeSS as bottom up? And the relation to the Scrum Alliance is also very interesting. Do you have practical experience with them? What are they biggest benefits in real life?

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.

Thank you Sante.
I’m looking at both of them and I also tend to SAFe but at the same time I’m a bit worried about so much structure and vocabulary it contains. I have experience with DaD and agile transformation of large organization, lots of Lean practices, Kanban... The whole transformation took time but it felt also quite natural, people had enough time to get used to the new way of working, new culture, and at the end the transformation was impacting the whole organization and functions. That’s why I’m looking to learn practical feedback on having SAFe or LeSS and if that’s applied also in non IT environment.

Lenka -

I agree with Sante. I haven't heard any organisation using LeSS, so far. Many large organisations have started adopting SAFe and have successfully implemented. You may check the case studies https://www.scaledagileframework.com/case-studies/

If organisational change is required at the larger-level, starting from Portfolio strategy and then into Large Solutions, Programs and finally the Scrum teams then SAFe will be a best choice.

But if products are to be delivered by only a few Scrum teams and if Agile culture has to be adopted quickly then LeSS will be a good choice.

There will be many other differences between SAFe & LeSS. More analysis has to be done to make a decision.
It all depends on what is the vision and need of the organisation, expectations of its customers and market foresight.