SAFe is everywhere. It’s marketed as the leading agile framework for enterprises, used by over 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies. It’s structured, documented, and scalable, and that’s exactly where the problem begins.
Despite its agile branding, SAFe often behaves like a command-and-control framework wearing an agile t-shirt. In real-world implementations, it introduces layers of governance, fixed planning windows, and centralized decision-making that conflict with the principles of agility, continuous learning, and fast feedback.
Let’s break it down through a systems thinking lens, and contrast it with what real agility looks like on the ground.
The Illusion of Agility
SAFe borrows language from Scrum, Kanban, and XP, but structurally, it looks more like a gated waterfall process. The most obvious example? Program Increments (PIs).
PI Planning locks teams into 10 to 12 week cycles. It sets objectives, commits capacity, maps dependencies, and plans features, all upfront. In most implementations, this becomes the primary feedback loop, which means customer learning is delayed until the end of the PI. Continuous delivery, in theory, is supported. In practice, it’s gated by internal coordination and release approval layers.
In many ways, it echoes PRINCE2: stage gates, delivery milestones, governance boards, just now with user stories instead of work packages.
Change Is Welcome, Just Not Now
One of the more common defenses of SAFe is that it allows change at any time. While this is true in theory, the cost of change within a PI is often so high that teams avoid it. Dependencies must be renegotiated. Commitments get re-validated. Coordination overhead kicks in.
Compare this to modern, flow-based systems where change is expected and accommodated continuously. When you're deploying multiple times a day from trunk, reacting to a market shift doesn't require a replan, it just requires a decision.
The Coordination Bottleneck
SAFe's way of managing cross-team coordination is through Release Trains and ART Syncs. While this offers predictability, it centralizes coordination around fixed structures. In systems thinking terms, this creates a brittle system with low adaptability and delayed feedback loops.
We’ve seen better results by using Flight Levels to decouple coordination from delivery cadence. Teams stay aligned at the value stream level through visible coordination boards and shared OKRs, but they’re not all tied to the same planning drumbeat. The result? Teams move faster, with less overhead, and adapt in real time.
Governance Without Delay
In regulated environments, SAFe’s stage-based governance is often seen as necessary. But as Jez Humble argues, governance isn’t about process, it’s about confidence. And confidence comes from automated testing, continuous integration, and traceability, not manual approvals.
We’ve implemented systems where test automation serves as the governance layer. Every commit triggers unit, integration, and compliance tests. Delivery teams are accountable not to stage gates, but to the system’s observable quality. This approach reduces delay, improves safety, and supports true continuous delivery.
Engineering Practices Matter
SAFe tends to be delivery-agnostic when it comes to engineering practices. That’s a missed opportunity. Real agility is only possible when teams have technical maturity:
- Trunk-based development
- Feature flags and decoupled deployments
- Automated compliance and monitoring
Without these, planning is forced to compensate for delivery uncertainty. When you build a system with short feedback loops, lightweight governance, and continuous flow, large-scale planning becomes less necessary.
Strategic Alignment Without Planning Theater
In some SAFe implementations, PI Planning becomes a quarterly ritual that looks more like a production. A better approach? Strategic OKRs reviewed quarterly at Flight Level 3. Teams align on outcomes, not output. Coordination happens continuously. Teams adjust course as needed, and the system flows around them.
This isn’t theory. We’ve done this in production. We had strategic OKRs, value stream coordination, and team-level autonomy, without locking every team into a shared calendar.
Conclusion
SAFe may offer structure and predictability, but often at the cost of agility and speed. It’s not that SAFe is inherently bad, it’s that its default implementation reinforces patterns many organizations are trying to escape.
If your delivery system needs centralized planning, role-heavy coordination, and permissioned releases, you don’t need agile branding, you need a new architecture.
Agility isn’t a framework. It’s a property of the system. And systems that adapt, learn, and flow, with the right technical foundation, don’t need PI Planning to keep them in motion.
