As a SAFe® Program Consultant over the past four years, I’ve seen SAFe implemented using a variety of tools. Some of them are designed with SAFe as the inspiration for their core design, and others use a plethora of plugins and workarounds to jerry-rig a SAFe implementation. The former are rigid and enforce a precise way of working, allowing no room for flexibility or hybrids. The latter typically confuse and make it much less likely to succeed with the framework.

Considering that one of SAFe’s principles is to assume variability, it makes sense to couple a SAFe transformation with an inherently flexible app, enabling the organization to adapt to changing needs and preserve options as they evolve. Favro provides the flexibility necessary to allow teams to work the way they choose at the team level, align teams of teams into an Agile Release Train (ART) at the program level, and drive the enterprise from the portfolio level. Favro’s design is also scalable by nature, empowering an organization to start with Essential SAFe and move to Large Solution, Portfolio and Full SAFe configurations when and if necessary.

Favro and SAFe® A Clear Roadmap to Success

SAFe organizations typically report the following results:

• 20–50 percent increase in productivity
• 25–75 percent improvement in quality
• 30–75 percent faster time-to-market
• 10–50 percent increase in employee engagement and job satisfaction

The most successful implementations are incremental, starting with a single ART. Early successes provide the momentum to scale across multiple ARTs powering multiple Value Streams, large Solution Trains if necessary, and eventually up to the enterprise Portfolio level. Favro fully supports and facilitates the SAFe Implementation Roadmap. Being cloud-based, it’s effortless to bring additional teams into your Favro organization as the transformation progresses.

Designed to Scale

Favro’s unique design is a natural fit for a successful SAFe implementation. The card and board based user interface is how teams want to work. While other tools don’t offer scalability out of the box, Favro does, with the power to add cards to unlimited locations and the ability to share multiple boards and backlogs across single screen collections, facilitating alignment at all levels.

Also, new to Favro’s All Teams Expansion is the capability to toggle any board from Kanban board to sheets board to roadmap board, visualizing the same cards in different ways.

Embrace What Works — Adapt What Doesn’t

Every organization is unique. To best benefit from SAFe, the framework needs to be tweaked to fit with your business culture. Embrace what works and either leave behind or adapt what doesn’t. The agile tool you choose needs to support this variability, not enforce a one-size-fits-all, prescriptive structure or require a multitude of plugins. As your organization begins or continues its SAFe digital transformation, Favro will continuously adapt and scale to fit your unique implementation. It’s the ideal choice to ensure the end goal: enterprise-wide business agility.

This video walks you through all four SAFe configurations in Favro.