SAFe Essentials - Applicability to smaller teams
Hi All
I am putting together an SDLC/ALM strategy for the development of a reasonably large product for a large mining client.
Product development will likely span 5 to 10 years and I'd expect their full development team size will vary from 10 to 25.
Given the characteristics of the product and other factors I believe a scaled framework such as SAFe, DSDM, LeSS etc is warranted.
SAFe's not my favourite methodology (and hence I'm low on knowledge) but there are factors that make this the path of least resistance and something's better than nothing (or pure waterfall).
Although I'd consider the product a reasonable size - in the grand scheme of SAFe this seems very small. There doesn't seem a lot of literature stating its applicability for development efforts smaller than around 50.
I can't see anything in the SAFe literature (at a higher level at least) that excludes using SAFe for teams of this size.
Does anyone think it's doable for for the above team size and give any insight into the pros/cons of implementing a framework such as this with smaller teams?
Thanks
Tim
What do the Scrum and Nexus Guides say about team size, and the point at which a scaling framework may become necessary?
Hi Tim,
I received my SAFe Agilist certification a little over a year ago and my last organization utilized a modification of the SAFe framework. I was on a team with around 12 development team members and we ran two scrum teams for the same product. I would say that there are definitely aspects of the SAFe framework that can work for smaller teams. Things like PI Planning Events and a scrum of scrums can all work well with multiple teams working across a single product. I would just be careful not to follow the framework to the letter for a smaller team since you can end up with a lot of overhead and unnecessary roles such as the Value Stream Engineer or Product Manager (which is a distinct role from Product Owner in the SAFe framework).
Hopefully, that's somewhat helpful.
Hello Tim,
I've had success with applying a combination of Scaled Scrum using the Nexus framework and a pinch of XP for the Product Management part and the DSDM framework for the Project and Programme Management part.
And while the Nexus guide advocates 3 to 9 teams before using the Nexus framework, I used it from the moment the original Dev Team was grown to warrant a split into two Dev Teams (2x5 pers), just up to the total growth of 9 teams (technically 8,5 teams because there were 78 persons ;-) ) and back down to 3 teams in the aftercare phase.
There wasn't too much overhead involved using this combo, I suspect that even SAFe Essentials will have more overhead to worry about.