Leading SAFe (5.0) — tips and lessons on becoming a SAFe Agilist

SAFe is a relatively new framework that I was exposed to while working on an agile project at a major Energy client.

Without going into all of the details, what started out as a waterfall project became an agile project about halfway through. This required a complete transformation of our mindset and working practices. My role switched from being a project manager to more of a program coordinator and scrum master. To further help the team with being more agile, we brought in an agile coach who had a long list of letters after his name. Of course, being the curious person I am, I started to look at what all the letters meant and found that there was a whole world of agile that I had no idea about.

SAFe stands for Scaled Agile Framework and is a mixture of scrum, kanban, devops, and other agile frameworks to give organizations a structure that works for any level of ‘project’. Perhaps I did not understand scrum that well, but it did not seem to scale as well at the biggest levels. There were scrums and scrums of scrums for coordination, but past that, it seemed like there was not an elegant framework for managing that level of complexity.

This is not a post about SAFe, but a post on a recent course I took called Leading SAFe (5.0), and I’d like to share the tips and lessons I learned…