Each week in SAFe Connect, we share one practical tip from a member of the community to help you apply SAFe in more meaningful ways. This week’s tip comes from Randall Kasper, who shares a lesson he has learned from helping organizations build Agile Release Trains from the ground up.
💡 Tip of the Week: Start with SAFe Before Adding Your Own Flavor
One of the biggest lessons I've learned while applying SAFe is that organizations often try to customize the framework before they've fully experienced how it works as designed.
My advice is simple: start by following SAFe as closely as possible.
I've seen many organizations immediately inject their own flavor of SAFe or try to adapt it to fit existing ways of working. In nearly every case, those organizations struggled to achieve the results they were hoping for and often concluded that SAFe simply didn't work.
What I've found is that successful implementations tend to have a few things in common:
• They follow the framework consistently from the start
• They give the organization enough time to learn and adapt
• They commit to more than a single PI before judging results
• They focus on understanding the principles before changing the practices
One thing this experience has reinforced for me is that consistency matters. SAFe is designed as a system, and it takes time for people, teams, and leaders to fully understand how the pieces work together.
Sometimes the best way to improve outcomes is not by changing the framework right away. It is by giving it the opportunity to work as intended first.
