dean-leffingwell's precursor to the Scaled Agile Framework (safe-scaled-agile-framework), published in 2007. The book addresses a genuine problem in Agile adoption: the lightweight methods designed for small, co-located teams (XP for teams of 2-12, Crystal Clear for up to 8, early Scrum for a single team) did not prescribe how to coordinate multiple teams on large products.
Content
The book examines how to apply Agile principles at the program and portfolio levels — above the single-team level where Scrum and XP operate. dean-leffingwell draws on his experience with large software development organizations and on the existing literature of Agile methods, lean, and systems engineering.
Key themes:
These themes became the core of SAFe 1.0 when dean-leffingwell released it four years later.
Historical significance
This book documents the intellectual development behind safe-scaled-agile-framework before that framework was named and packaged as a product. It shows the genuine problem that SAFe was intended to solve — coordinating many teams — while also reflecting the trade-offs dean-leffingwell was willing to make: introducing significant process overhead, management layers, and prescriptive structures that critics argued reintroduced the heavyweight methodology bureaucracy that Agile had sought to escape.
Reception
The book was well-received in enterprise Agile circles and poorly received among practitioners who viewed it as the beginning of what would become the agile-industrial-complex. The concern was that making Agile palatable for large enterprises required so much adaptation that the resulting process shared little with the original agile-manifesto values.
See also: safe-launch-2011 for the subsequent formalization as a framework.