An independent, community-curated review of the evidence
Does this sound familiar?
If you are running SAFe and it is not delivering what you were promised, you have probably been told you are not implementing it well enough. The evidence points somewhere else.
- Planning has become presentational. The real coordination happens somewhere else. Volvo Cars
- Work spills from one iteration to the next, and the spill keeps growing. Beijer Electronics
- The time between deciding something and a customer having it is measured in quarters. Peaksys
- Dependencies are scheduled around rather than removed. Mary Poppendieck
- Everyone has been trained and certified, and nothing moves faster. Capital One
- It seemed to be working for the first few months, and then it stopped. Al Shalloway, original SAFe Principal Contributor
It isn’t failing. This is what it does.
Across 10 organisations — a Swedish manufacturer, a French marketplace, an Australian bank, a car maker, a global consultancy, the United States Air Force — different sectors, different countries, different levels of capability, and the same shape of outcome.
When a result is that consistent across that much variation, it is a property of the system, not of the people running it.
What the evidence adds up to
No single case study or expert opinion settles anything on its own. Taken together, the guide finds that adoptions of SAFe tend to:
- lack fundamental elements of good Agile that are vital to achieving agility
- amplify some of the well-known problems and limitations of pre-Agile traditional solutions
- waste a lot of time and effort for learning and adopting outdated, or 2nd best practices
The guide’s argument is with SAFe, and not with the coaches and trainers who teach it — many of whom it describes as capable, respected professionals. Scaled Agile Inc. is invited to respond, and any response is published unedited.
Where to start
- We are already running it What you are seeing, what other organisations did next, and how they explained the decision. Getting out →
- I need to show someone One page, in the terms a board measures. Every claim sourced. What it cost →
- We are being sold it The five defences you will hear in the room, and what the evidence says about each. But what about…? →
Everything above is a summary
SAFe for Decision Makers
Now that Agile passed the early adopter stage, there are many companies interested in adopting it, and many practitioners interested in learning it. Yet those companies and practitioners without extensive Agile experience have a hard time evaluating what will bring them value and what not. The information collected in this document is to help them make an informed decision.
