Thinking lean with SAFe

13 July 2025

Enterprise-class agile development is a natural continuation of project-level agile to address the needs of large-scale software management. Agile adoption has mostly been driven from the bottom up. Top-down strategic adoption of agile is being driven by digital business efforts that need rapid delivery of answers to new types of problems. Fortunately, we have access to a vast and ever-expanding body of knowledge that can assist us. Agile methodologies and principles, Lean and systems thinking, product development flow patterns, and Lean processes are all covered. Thought leaders have gone before us on this journey, leaving a trail of hundreds of books and references for us to follow.

Lean is a concept that refers to the elimination of waste and inefficient procedures in order to improve a result. To put it another way, it's a method for streamlining. Agile also involves frequent customer checkpoints, in which the customer is an integral part of the development team, allowing for constant and timely adjustments to the software service or product being developed. In a proper Agile setting, self-organizing teams are common.

All agile methodologies are, in truth, techniques for applying lean principles to software development. Although lean methodology originated in the manufacturing industry, it may now be applied to a variety of commercial and technical operations. Companies employ numerous lean methods and ideas to reduce the “uselessness” or “in the process.”

SAFe extends Agile's core concepts and ideals by offering particular assistance for scaling in big, complicated, distributed, or high-compliance environments.

SAFe extends Agile principles from individual teams to teams of Agile teams and portfolios, resulting in increased efficiencies and a stronger link between corporate strategy and execution.

SAFe combines Agile-adjacent principles such as Lean, DevOps, and systems thinking to create an effective, ever-improving system that is updated with customer learnings and the most current thinking and practises.

Improved time-to-market is one of the advantages of scaling Agile with SAFe. Leading organisations can address customer needs faster by uniting cross-functional Agile teams around value. They may make faster choices, communicate more effectively, streamline operations, and stay focused on the customer by utilising the SAFe.

One of the key SAFe ideals is built-in quality, which emphasises the significance of incorporating quality into every phase of the development cycle. SAFe enables high-performing teams and teams of teams to avoid needless work, detect and eliminate delays, continually improve, and ensure they are developing the correct things, resulting in measurable productivity gains. Scaling Agile with the Scaled Agile Framework has the added benefit of assisting knowledge workers in achieving autonomy, mastery, and purpose, all of which are critical components in unlocking intrinsic motivation. Organizations that use SAFe have the tools they need to reduce burnout and boost employee happiness.

Iteration planning is a refinement and change of the initial iteration plans established during PI planning in the SAFe framework. A pre-elaborated Team Backlog is used by teams to plan iteration planning. The iteration planning event takes a variety of inputs: During PI planning, the team and programme PI objectives were defined.

Values of SAFe

Agility should never be sacrificed for quality. SAFe requires teams at all levels to define what it means to be "done" for each job or project, as well as to incorporate quality development techniques into every working agreement. SAFe believes that Flow, architectural and design quality, code quality, system quality, and release quality as the five essential dimensions of built-in quality.

In this model only leaders can modify the system and create the environments required to accept all of the key values. So, this model needs lean-agile leadership style. Lean-Agile executives guide their organisations toward bettering systems through iterative and incremental learning, mentoring, and process development.

Principles of SAFe

SAFe techniques are based on nine principles that combine Agile approaches, Lean product development, systems thinking, and decades of expertise in the sector.

Examine the situation from a financial standpoint.
Think in terms of systems.
Assume variability and keep your alternatives open.
With quick, integrated learning cycles, you can build progressively.
Milestones should be based on an impartial assessment of working systems.
Reduce batch sizes and manage queue lengths by seeing and limiting work in progress.
Sync with cross-domain planning and use a cadence.
Unlock knowledge workers' intrinsic motivation
Decision-making should be decentralised.

SAFe allows a product team to be more flexible. Furthermore, it aids in the management of some of the issues that larger organisations have while implementing Agile. SAFe is a knowledge repository of tried-and-true best practises. SAFe is also used by product teams to produce successful software products.