The adoption of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) in non-agile organizations

The high project failure rate has been recognized as one of the challenges within the project management space and agile methodologies have been proposed to solve this challenge. In the last several years, many organizations have been using traditional project management methodologies, but they are now in the process of choosing an appropriate agile methodology as a substitute for the control-oriented, rigid, and inflexible traditional methodologies. Some are thinking about the move. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is an agile approach that brings into line collaboration between various teams in agile software development. It is not clear how non-agile organizations can implement the SAFe to derive organizational benefit and achieve transformation. The purpose of this study is to develop best practices to help in guiding agile adoption in non-agile organizations and determine the benefits, and challenges inherent to organizations implementing SAFe. The study outlines a 10-step implementation roadmap to be followed by non-agile organizations and identifies additional benefits experienced by the project team which includes defect reduction, skills sharing, and improved quality and productivity. The top three steps include (1) Train Lean-agile change agents, (2) Train executive manager leaders, and (3) Identifying value streams & ARTs.