Case Studies
So far all the SAFe case studies that allow for some form of verification or third-party observations all show that SAFe does not make the organisation more agile, it worsened the shortcomings that are typical of the pre-Agile approaches, and overall makes things worse.
It is also known that SAFe isn’t used by any leading software commercial organisations such as Facebook, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, and the like.
This overall picture is congruent with the growing number of anecdotal evidence emerging from Sr leaders and employees sharing stories about their previous companies where SAFe was adopted.
1 - U.S. Air Force
In December 2019, Nicolas M. Chaillan then Chief Software Officer at the U.S. Air Force, issued a memorandum as part of the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Initiative.
The memorandum concluded by strongly discouraging the use of rigid, prescriptive frameworks such as SAFe.
In a highly publicised move, Scaled Agile Inc offered free consulting to address the concerns from the memorandum. Later the USAF CSO confirmed the conclusions from the memorandum were still standing, and SAFe was still strongly discouraged and will not be used in any form in their DevSecOps Initiative.
References:
2 - ThoughtWorks
ThoughtWorks is a global technology company that has pioneered Lean and Agile.
After observing, between 2015 and 2021, several clients that had adopted SAFe, ThoughtWorks advised against adopting SAFe.
These are some of the things they observed from the clients that had adopted SAFe: SAFe created friction in the organisational structure and its operating model, promoted silos, hindered tech from creating business capabilities, generated waste in the value stream and discouraged creativity, it limited autonomy and experimentation.
References:
3 - BlueDolphin
BlueDolphin consultant Wolfram Müller together with a hub of other consultants including Steve Tendon has worked in recent years helping several organisations to deal with issues after they adopted SAFe.
They recently analysed the performance of teams from a company department of 200 software developers that have been working with Essential SAFe for 1.5 years. The result highlights the same problems typical of the traditional pre-Agile approaches.
There are no signs that Essential SAFe helped them increase their agility and improve.
References:
4 - Volvo Cars
Volvo Cars was founded in 1927. It is headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden. It has around 40,000 employees and produces around 700,000 cars per year.
In software development, it employs about 10,000 people with about 150 million lines of code per car. Nowadays cars are steadily becoming “computers on wheels”.
Between 2017 and the end of 2019 Volvo Cars went through a 2 years and a half Agile transformation phase to scale Agile with SAFe.
In a 2020 interview with the Head of Continuous Improvement & Change at Product Creation, there is evidence of a lack of focus on technical excellence as instead suggested by the Agile principles. The interview also reveals a focus on processes and a hierarchical top-down approach, but no focus on the Agile mindset.
Two academic case studies by the Chalmers University Of Technology also confirm the lack of focus on the Agile mindset and the lack of alignment with Lean and Agile principles, a hierarchical approach with an org-chart made deeper by additional levels. One of the papers also notes the inflexibility of SAFe and its disadvantages.
Three years later, Volvo Cars is still using SAFe in several parts of the organisation.
In September 2022, an internal source confirmed that a whole department in Volvo dropped SAFe after it became obvious to them it wasn’t adding value.
Since then the teams were functioning in a fairly Agile way in spite of the SAFe limitations: the PI planning was becoming mostly for show and the real organisation of the work and the collaboration was happening much more fluidly; the program board was adding very little value in the face of the significant effort spent for it.
This change involved 11 teams and just over 100 people including Product Owners, Software Developers, UX designers, graphic designers, subject matter experts, etc.
They wanted to honour how the teams want to continuously plan and not just how they want to work, empowering teams to apply pressure upwards through the organisation in order to continuously improve.
References:
5 - ANZ Bank
ANZ, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited is an Australian multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in Melbourne, Victoria.
In 2017, CEO Shayne Elliott wanted to reshape the bank’s staid culture to give ANZ customers more and faster by introducing Agile. Shayne Elliott was taking inspiration from what technology companies from Amazon to Microsoft did and what some banks such as ING and ABN Amro had been doing although with mixed results.
To do that Shayne Elliott focused on processes by rolling out SAFe across its Australian division, and on tools: by an enterprise agreement with Atlassian for the use of Jira and Confluence.
Five years later the bank’s home loan approval systems have become one of the slowest in Australia, and as a result, ANZ lost a substantial share of the $2 trillion mortgage market, its share price is down 17 per cent since Elliott became CEO seven years ago. And its technology systems lag behind its biggest competitors.
Martin North, the founder of DFA Analytics, says “I don’t rate ANZ as an agile organisation. In fact, I would say that they’re quite sluggish in terms of some of the things that they’re doing.”
References:
6 - FitBit
Fitbit is one of the success stories promoted by Scaled Agile Inc.
Fitbit Inc. is an American company founded in 2007 with its headquarters in San Francisco. It now has about 15 offices around the world. In 2019 Fitbit was reported to have sold more than 100 million devices and have 28 million users. Between 2015 and 2016 FitBit adopted SAFe.
Damian Brown, Sr. Director of Program Management Office, describes the success of SAFe citing criteria, such as processes and teams’ Velocity, that are irrelevant for Agile teams and show a lack of paradigm shift or an Agile mindset. He continues commenting on the company’s growth and the commercial success of the new products released. But the financial data, reports from financial analysts and other publicly available data contradict that.
A person working at FitBit confirmed the lack of autonomy of the teams. And added that later FitBit had abandoned SAFe, and the person that had persuaded the company to try it had left the company as well. The FitBit case study is still listed on the SAFe website as a success story. This story seems far from being a success.
References:
7 - Conclusions
So far all the SAFe case studies that allow for some form of verification or third-party observations all show that SAFe does not make the organisation more agile, it worsened the shortcomings that are typical of the pre-Agile approaches, and overall makes things worse.
It is also known that SAFe isn’t used by any leading software commercial organisations such as Facebook, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, and the like.
This overall picture is congruent with the growing number of anecdotal evidence emerging from Sr leaders and employees sharing stories about their previous companies where SAFe was adopted.