The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): What to Know and How to Start
Published: 2021-01-27 11:32:00

According to PMI, more initiatives are meeting original goals and business intent and being completed within budget. There's a 20% decline in dollars wasted due to project failures. In general, project success rates are rising. Organizations today are wasting an average of $97 million for every $1 billion invested. That's a significant 20% decline from previous years' findings. Now, this is encouraging news and shows there's room for improvement. In terms of agile, organizations that are highly agile and responsive to market dynamics complete more of their initiatives successfully than their slower-moving counterparts-- 75% versus 56%. So with that said, why don't we start off by answering the question, what is agile? Well, the heart of agile is a mindset, values, and principles that shape the culture. Again, it's that alternative to the heavy, upfront, plan-driven systems development life cycles that traditionally can be slower to market and in responding to change. Agile is customer-concentric. It can adapt easily to changing requirements. It's collaborative and incorporates continuous improvements.

History of Agile Implementation Process

While [Leading Safe agilest certification](https://www.sprintzeal.com/course/leading-safe-agilist-certification-training) methods have been around for many years, these approaches became really common in the early 2000s. One of the key milestones was the creation of the Agile Manifesto in February 2001. Let's take a look at that manifesto. During a gathering in February 2001, a group of 17 practitioners got together to form an alliance and find common ground for how to best develop software. What emerged was this software development manifesto. The manifesto is really simple and eloquent yet has deep philosophical meaning to those who embrace the approach—for example, individuals and interactions over processes and tools. We really value our people and how we interact and how we collaborate with more processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. We all see the value in working software.
There's nothing better than looking at a product that actually works, as opposed to just seeing it on a piece of paper—customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Again, not that contract negotiation is unimportant, and contracts aren't important, but collaborating with the customer, empathizing with them, understanding their point of view is really valuable. Of course, responding to change over following a plan. Requirements change. Customers may not know exactly what they want. We need mechanisms in place in order to capture those changing requirements. So as practitioners, we certainly value planning but recognize the limits of big upfront planning and design, especially if all the requirements aren't clear. We also value the ability to manage risk, and we expect to deliver high-quality products and services.

What is Project Life-Cycle?

A [project life-cycle](https://theprojectlens.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/the-project-life-cycle/) is a series of stages that work effort passes through from the point of initiation through closure. This is different than a product life-cycle, which usually has five stages. The project life cycle can be part of one or more phases in the product life-cycle. For example, a project's life cycle could be used to create the first stages of a product's life-cycle, for example, development. Also, a product could be enhanced with a project life-cycle, or the product could be taken out of service and put into retirement using a project by the site. So there is a difference between the actual project life
cycle, which can be thought of as -kind of vehicle used to deliver a product or service, and then the product life-cycle, which is the life of that actual product or service. Now, there are three main life-cycles we see in IT, and they can be classified as either predictive, iterative, or adaptive. Adaptive is also known as agile. So now, let's take a detailed look at those differences between more predictive stage-gate methods, iterative, and adaptive approaches used by organizations to deliver products and services. In traditional approaches, the IT life-cycles sequential and non-iterative. That's very important, sequential, non-iterative, where workflows downwards, and hence the name, waterfall. For example, in a waterfall method, we'd start with defining scope. So once the requirements are confirmed, a design phase would be completed. After the design finishes, the development would start. And after development, maybe a test phase would be conducted. And finally, the product or service would be deployed to production in a single big-bang release. Now, iterative or incremental development, on the other hand, is a method to produce a system through repeated cycles called iterations.