As agile adoption has increased over the last decade, many organizations have grown with agile and are using scaling methodologies to help them plan, deliver, and track progress across their teams. While many scaling methodologies are available, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has been among the most widely adopted methodologies by larger organizations.
The need to scale agile
- Track large initiatives that combine multiple features from concept to delivery
- Plan and align business value to the team’s delivery work for objective decision making
- Take advantage of multiple skill sets across teams and specialists in the organization to deliver a high-quality release
- Align sprint goals across multiple teams
- Build system architecture and infrastructure needs into a release plan
- Use data to track progress across multiple teams, identify problems between teams, and drive towards solutions as an organization
Thus spawned the need to scale agile beyond a series of teams to the whole of an enterprise. And SAFe was among a handful of frameworks that emerged to head the call.
Introducing SAFe
In 2011, Scaled Agile, Inc. released SAFe to help address these issues and provide a set of organization and workflow patterns for implementing agile practices at enterprise scale. These include ceremonies, roles, metrics, and relationships that promote alignment, collaboration, and delivery across large numbers of agile teams and guide organizations in applying lean-agile thinking.
A central tenet of SAFe is that it continues to evolve in collaboration with its community of practitioners around the world. Most recently, Scaled Agile, Inc. launched the 5.0 version of SAFe. Find out What’s new and what’s changed in SAFe 5.0 on our blog.
Atlassian and SAFe
Jira Align delivers the most comprehensive software solution available for scaling agile to the enterprise. Jira Align transforms the way organizations enable and manage agile productivity across their enterprise, portfolios, programs, and teams by aligning business strategy with technical execution. Offering a solution purpose-built for SAFe, Jira Align provides the flexibility and functionality required to support SAFe adoption at any level with configurable settings for Essential SAFe, Large Solution SAFe, Portfolio SAFe, and Full SAFe.