In our last blog from December 2014, we announced the start of the SAFe® collaborators program with collaboration partners Scaled Agile, Inc. and Method Park. Today, we introduce you to the Applied SAFe Product:
Applied SAFe® is a fully fledged ALM tool agnostic implementation of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) as a process model, produced and owned by PEDCO AG. It serves as your own customizable instance of SAFe.
Applied SAFe is implemented as a comprehensive, executable process model. It includes all roles, activities, templates, guidelines, milestones and phases as defined by the SAFe methodology in order to bring the framework to life; including metrics and tailoring. Applied SAFe is a ‘ready to go with’ implementation and allows organizations to start using the framework immediately.
Applied SAFe is a stand-alone product from PEDCO and is fully based on and kept in synch with the actual SAFe version by Scaled Agile Inc. (SAI). Each release is also officially approved by SAI. As required, you can easily tailor all elements of the process model to your needs, simply by answering a series of out-of-the-box tailoring questions. It is also possible, to enhance and/or adapt the tailoring questions to create your own version. When moving to future versions of SAFe, Applied SAFe will automatically support you in the upgrade process and let you selectively decide whether to update your customized content to the latest “official” version or whether to keep your own. In short, Applied SAFe allows you to extend or modify all of its content in order to better reflect the specific requirements of your organisation.
Applied SAFe can further include and ensure compliance with various reference models like CMMI, AS9100, CTR-180 (FDA), ISO9000 or your own company specific references models. If you do not want to do this customization by yourself, we will help you to adapt the standard process implementation to your needs.
The process model is implemented in a way that you can instantiate independently on each level as on portfolio, program and team. This enables you for example to run multiple programs each with its own process instances (respectively variations thereof), whilst each program holds various instances on a team level with various tailored instances of life cycles. – Applied SAFe is implemented with the process management tool ‘Stages’ (by Method Park Software AG) ; this solution offers a great flexibility and efficiency while still maintaining control and compliance of portfolio, programs and teams.
“With PEDCO and SAI we have found exactly the right collaboration partners. The excellent process expertise of the PEDCO team combined with SAI’s market leading Scaled Agile Framework® gives our customers a way of integrating agile practices into their current process landscape and become more efficient without having to start from scratch.” says Erich Meier, Method Park’s CTO and creator of the Stages process management tool.
Applied SAFe is capable of making use of various life cycle models. As proposed by SAFe, teams can run with Scrum as an agile method; additionally it is possible to coexist with other life cycles and to synchronize via the Agile Release Train. Teams can choose their life cycle depending on their needs and their agile readiness. This solution has the advantage to let some teams smoothly adopt Agile, while other teams could choose other life cycles to work with; such as for example the V-Model, Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), iterative or waterfall.
The synchronization of the teams within one program is achieved through the Agile Release Train mechanisms as proposed by the framework’s creator, Dean Leffingwell.
Applied SAFe can be purchased either as a private cloud-based website or as a dedicated product on your own server.
Advantages for you
- Save! Rather than re-inventing the wheel over and over again use a widely accepted industry standard as defined by its key creators.
- Gain! Best practice from other companies’ expertise and experiences.
- Future Proof! Stay aligned and on track with future development in the industry.
- High class capabilities! Take advantage of the same capabilities as large scale organizations, for a much lower costs; without building up a process management team within your organization.
Read more… or get the brochure by writing a mail to appliedSAFe@pedco.eu
