Top benefits of Scaling Agile

Agile project management has become a prominent issue. Many of the world's most successful companies want to scale Agile across whole enterprises. Despite its current popularity, Agile is not a new idea in project management. Agile's beginnings date back several decades and have been used to assist teams to succeed in fast-paced occupations where the nature of work is continuously changing. In this blog, we are going to be talking about what is scaling Agile and the benefits of scaling Agile.

What is Scaling Agile?

Scaling Agile is a catchphrase that is sweeping the software industry and finding traction in other industries such as manufacturing, eCommerce, and retail. Agile software development has been around for more than two decades. Since its start, the approach to software development has developed to assist organizations in keeping up with the market pace. Agile is based on the idea that software should be supplied at periodic intervals, allowing the client the opportunity to accept or reject the software rather than waiting for them to do so.

Because growing Agile necessitates changes in management, culture, and technology, the advantages far outweigh the hurdles. The Scaled Agile framework's (SAFe) main values include alignment, built-in quality, transparency, and design implementation. The most significant advantage of implementing SAFe is the ability to leverage a relatively lightweight framework that increases productivity in software development while preserving the centralized decision-making required at the enterprise level. SAFe, in essence, extends the Agile concept beyond the front lines of software development to software executives who must solve higher-level strategic problems.

SAFe, in particular, was built to preserve a broad picture view of software development, so it can certainly manage a coordinated approach for large-scale and complicated initiatives with hundreds of teams. However, because it is based on Agile and Lean concepts, it is more efficient than conventional software delivery methodologies.

SAFe is especially useful for enterprises that need to collaborate across teams since its centralization allows for multi-team collaboration. In this context, it enables consistent processes across teams and aids in the avoidance of hurdles and delays that may arise when diverse teams must collaborate.

Another major benefit of scaling Agile is its capacity to assist teams in remaining aligned with corporate goals. This alignment is sometimes lost in Agile organizations that pursue a bottom-up approach, as developers and testers might lose sight of larger-picture business goals. SAFe's top-down alignment and centralized decision-making, on the other hand, helps to ensure that strategic objectives stay top of mind and that all choices are taken in support of those objectives.

Why Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?

The SAFe philosophy relies on two fundamental concepts: Agile iterative development and the lean manufacturing philosophy. Lean thinking focuses on employing fewer resources while increasing productivity, delivery quality, and ROI.

It also makes the staff more engaged, which leads to job satisfaction. A successful project is defined by four factors: time, quality, team spirit, and productivity. All of these issues are handled concurrently in this framework, thus it goes without saying why it is critical for enterprises to adopt this framework.

Shifting an organization's operations to a scaled Agile framework provides several practical and intangible benefits. Businesses that scale Agile are more likely to be first to market, while also enhancing customer happiness and ROI. Furthermore, successful Agile firms report being able to recruit more top talent than their less Agile valued Agile peers. Let us go through some of these benefits of scaling Agile in further detail below:

• Align strategy and work

Scaling Agile connects the organization's top-level goals with the individuals in charge of realizing them. This alignment has a variety of impacts, including improved cross-team cooperation, more transparency, and speedier reaction times, among others. Scaling Agile also stresses the development of ARTs (Agile Release Trains) to ensure that team objectives are aligned and that everyone in the business is focused on delivering value to consumers.

• Improve capacity management

Capacity management is linked with the ARTs and is examined on a regular basis using a Scaled Agile framework. These strategies emphasize flexibility and change, allowing leaders to reflect and rebalance on a frequent basis while avoiding disruption to organizational flow. Management assists in a variety of ways, from organizing teams based on certain criteria to make educated judgments about who can take on how much work.

• Assist teams of teams planning 

Scaling Agile throughout the enterprise necessitates bringing together employees from many teams and departments under the same framework. It may happen anywhere in the company, including Dev and Ops, but it always demands more cooperation.

Scaled Agile frameworks address this issue with quarterly organizing events that bring together cross-functional teams to create plans that highlight possible dependencies, operate against the company's objectives, and address problems. These "teams of teams" serve important roles in Agile scaling by providing clear insight into quarterly deliverables for everyone in the business.

• Enable enterprise-wide visibility

Visibility does not come just through preparation. Scaling Agile increases transparency throughout the business by linking and displaying the work of each team member. Leaders and managers obtain a comprehensive view of possible impediments and make informed decisions about how to assign work. Scaling Agile enables them to see how ARTs or teams of teams monitor performance and progress, produce products, and calculate the financial impact of their efforts.

• Engage employees

Scaling Agile is based on trust at both the individual and team levels. People are given the ability to choose how their job is delivered, which has an influence on the overall corporate goals. This trust correlates to better and more engaged workers, who will ultimately benefit the company with a lower turnover rate, more output, and a better user experience.

• End-User driven ideology

Having an empathic mentality when it comes to product design, build execution, and delivery is important to the success of any product. SAFe advocates a predominantly research-driven, customer-centric enterprise, with an emphasis on creating empathy maps prior to the design process to precisely understand how each decision made by the company would affect the end-user. This also allows the business to better understand market cycles and remain ahead of the hype cycle, allowing it to tap into vital undiscovered regions and gain a much-needed competitive advantage.

• Alignment to business goals

SAFe accomplishes (and does it well) by breaking down some of the boundaries between business and technology. It aggressively means encouraging stakeholders to connect and collaborate with the appropriate IT product delivery teams. Stakeholders also assist in objectively prioritizing initiatives/work items by providing each item a business value, connecting the business and technology in the context of enterprise-level objectives, values, and final vision. Interaction occurs primarily through various events engrained in the framework itself, such as PI planning, system demos, scrum of scrums, and so on. Note that the last thing we want to see in an enterprise-wide change is a complete mismatch of business strategy and IT delivery.

• Enterprise Business Agility

At the end of the day, any methodology an organization adopts to scale Agile is useless unless it helps the business flourish in this chaotic digital environment where the key is the time it takes to adapt to market changes and deal with uncertain yet growing possibilities. As previously said, SAFe aids in the alignment of business and IT strategies, ensuring that a developing hierarchical structure runs concurrently with an entrepreneurial network. This type of customer-centric structure aids in providing both efficiency and stability, with a dash of innovation thrown in for good measure.

What Does Adopting Agile at Scale Mean?

One should conceptually understand as to what is scaling Agile for it to be implemented in a great manner. Scaling Agile allows you to adjust and remain competitive by reacting rapidly and sufficiently to consumer demands and offering delightful details to maintain customer loyalty for more. Finally, and practically, it means extending Agile working to every unit at every level and in every sector, including top management and minimizing control and coordination.

Autonomous teams, agreement on values and goals, and responsibility and openness at every level both vertically and horizontally what remains of an original hierarchical organization are the essential instruments for this. Undoubtedly, expanding Agile to one or more teams in the same department will present distinct challenges than expanding to departments other than software engineering or IT (where Agile originated).

Scaled Agile frameworks vary in their structure and techniques, as well as the specific concerns they address. Which one is best for you depends on where you are in your Agile journey and how well the goals of a framework align with your goals for expanding Agile and ultimately becoming an Agile business. This is significant since the benefits of scaling Agile are much more than simply embracing a framework.

Conclusion:

To summarise, in this blog we talked about what is scaling Agile and why SAFe is to be preferred. SAFe, a regularly reviewed Agile approach, is the most preferred framework for expanding Agile within organizations since many of its aspects focus on minimizing team members' issues. In other words, if your company is starting to migrate to agility, SAFe is the greatest solution for bridging the transformation gap. A SAFe framework is a more prescriptive method, which gives greater freedom but needs an organization to fully embrace the Agile mindset.

References:

1. https://scaledagile.com/what-is-safe/scaled-agile-benefits/
2. https://www.business2community.com/business-intelligence/top-5-benefits-of-scaling-agile-02438563