Ask HN: Who uses SAFe? Do you find it useful?

I consulted at a SAFe shop for nearly 2 years. It was nearly unanimously hated by engineers. It was very process heavy. PI planning took 2 full days every two weeks.

Imagine the cost of 200 engineers and managers in a large room for 2 full days. Most of them are not paying attention. It was hilarious that we would spend 2 days every couple weeks talking about how we could be more productive.

For me SAFe is now a red flag that I look for when interviewing. SAFe is now in the same category as "we don't use source conrol" or "we are like a family".

In my experience, SAFe is an improvement over what has gone before. It provides a clear path for intake of new work, instead of having stuff dumped on you that suddenly has to be completed yesterday. It provides a clear method of identifying inter-team and intra-team dependencies, and then you can apply methods to address or at least monitor those issues while work proceeds. In PI planning sessions, I learned so much more about what all is going on in the other teams and elsewhere around the company, and that helped me do a better job for my part of the puzzle.

What I’ve seen is that the business types don’t like it. Marketing doesn’t like it. The bean counters don’t like it. Upper management doesn’t like it. It doesn’t fit into their neat quarterly buckets. They don’t like that PI planning takes so much time from so many people, despite the fact that history has proven over thousands of years that just leaping into things without a planning process is the surest path to disaster. They don’t like the fact that the more often PI planning is done, the more effective it is — because the more time spent between PI planning sessions is more time for things to go off the rails in ways that could be addressed in a PI planning session.

Personally I am not a fan of SAFe. If you see their process map it’s complete madness and an agile antithesis.

I think it resonates well with enterprises because every existing management layer or project manager may stay. They just get a new agile name.

For example, I used work for a large enterprise that was struggling to adopt agile and get management buy in. However when somebody pitched SAFe it went fast. Management was onboard, people were trained, and yes more importantly certified.

Indeed some teams became more productive, and could coordinate better with other teams. Management had some clue how this new way of working worked. Criticism I heard was that planning days were long and draining.. Either way one could say it was a success.

I would say give it a chance, it won’t hurt because people and teams will just be rebranded. Nothing bad will happen, nor anything super fantastic.

SAFe is the way that a $BigEnterprise can say that they are using and being Agile, which is not the case in my opinion.

SAFe has lots of processes, changes of names from the "real" Agile, planing like waterfall, ... So not really agile.