Luca Minudel analyses various aspects of the framework and comments on their practical implications noting that:
- The 12-step SAFe Implementation Roadmap is like a 1-size-fits-all Waterfall programme
- SAFe Budgeting and Portfolio management don’t solve the problems of annual budgeting and planning due to the prescriptive, top-down, rigid nature of most SAFe implementations
- SAFe Requirements Model is a pre-Agile deliverable-oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work mirroring the hierarchy of the roles in SAFe, it reinforces a top-down approach
- SAFe Roles add more bureaucracy, disempower the teams, and make collaboration harder
- PI Planning hinders business-tech collaboration, accommodates dependencies instead of removing them, and perpetuates a top-down pre-Agile approach
- Release Trains is a very inefficient pre-Agile practice inferior to all the modern alternatives
- Overly complicated SAFe contradicts the Agile principle of simplicity and emergence Following his observations, he concludes that SAFe violates all four Agile values.
References: