Scaling Agile for Enterprise Implementations

Scrum is great when you have a single team, but what about when you have multiple teams working on the same product? This is a complex situation. We call this "Scaling Agile" to large projects.

Cape Project Management Inc. (Cape) supports all of the scaling frameworks (LeSS, Nexus, Scrum@Scale, DaD) and we have a deep experience in the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®). SAFe is currently the most popular scaling approach for large organizations especially for those projects involving hundreds of people.

Cape provides training, coaching and staffing for an effective SAFe implementation. As part of our coaching, we will help you decide which SAFe configuration is right for you. There are four different SAFe configurations, and the 2 most popular models which represent the bulk of the implementations are:

Essential SAFe

Essential SAFe is the core SAFe implementation approach. It has 2 levels; the team and the program level. The team level consists of up to 12 Scrum teams each executing in a pure Scrum approach. The program level introduces the concept of an Agile Release Train (ART) which is team of teams with additional oversight roles and events to manage the coordination and dependencies between the teams. These new roles are:

Release Trainer Engineer (RTE) who is a Scrum of Scrums master
Product Manager (PM) who coordinates the delivery of value with the Product Owners across all the teams
System Architect who is responsible for leading the development of an architectural runway

Cape provides training and coaching to help launch your implementation as well as RTE and PM staffing.

Portfolio SAFe

Portfolio level SAFe provides strategic governance of the Essential SAFe model. It introduces the concepts of Lean budgeting, Value Stream Mapping and Strategic Themes. At this level, work is defined as Epics which have a business case to justify and support the prioritization of the work of the ARTs and Scrum teams. This level introduces the following roles:

Epic Owners who define the business value of the work in the value stream so they can be prioritized against the portfolio level backlog.
Enterprise Architect who establishes the overarching architectural runway and creates architectural Epics
Lean Portfolio Management which includes executive and business owners who define the business’ value stream and adopt a lean budgeting approach.

At this level Cape provide specific leadership training and coaching on value stream mapping, lean budgeting and the overall governance practices in a SAFe implementation.

The SAFe Implementation roadmap

SAFe has a specific set of recommendations of how to proceed with an implementation. They recommend the following steps:

Train Leaders and Executives
Perform Value Stream Mapping
Identify Agile Release Trains
Train Teams
Launch
Grow and Improve

We provide all the SAFe training courses to support this roadmap as well as coaching for each role in the organization. Our coaches provide value in the follow areas:

at the enterprise level, to drive strategic change across the organization and ensure that adoption of Agile techniques is embedded from the most senior levels of the organization
at the portfolio or program level, to help organizations to establish the right processes for managing a portfolio of work in an Agile way
at the team level, working with teams to ensure that delivery teams are adopting Agile and performing effectively
or across all levels to ensure that organizations adopt a pragmatic approach to the way in which they govern delivery and continuous improvement of product and services