Introducing the SAFe Agile PMO

Traditionally Software development has utilized Project Managers and Project Management. But With the introduction of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) into development organizations from its release in 2011, the most popular Enterprise scale Agile model in the world effectively advocated removing Project Managers from development organizations. The SAFe models advocacy of a new organization with new roles that took traditional project manager responsibilities and moved them into the new SAFe's roles (such as Product Owners, Scrum Masters and RTE’s), led many organizations to "throw out the baby with the bathwater" by ignoring the value of those project, program and portfolio management practices that were not incorporated or clearly articulated in early versions of SAFe. This was rectified with the release of version 4,5 in mid 2017. But during the period 2011-2017 Project management as a separate formal practice within many software development Organizations literally had no place for those organizations that tried to fully deploy SAFe as prescribed. This is important because as of 2017 the SAFe methodology was used by circa 45% of those firms using an Agile methodology at scale. All of these firms have had to contend with a number of issues that this caused up until the re-introduction of Project management practices in the 2017 release of SAFe version 4,5. At this time SAFe added a new “Agile Project Management Office” (APMO) as a means to address many of the failings found in previous implementations. In this article we look at those failings and explore whether the new APMO solves these issues or not. The article is intended for practitioners who are working in or with organizations that have deployed early versions of SAFe as part of the support for establishing an APMO along the lines now advocated by SAFe.

Note: Due to the relatively new and evolving nature of SAFe there is limited empirical data around “Implementation issues in Large Scale Agile transformations”. As a consequence of the absence of formal research this article is more reliant more on Anecdotes, Personal Experience and other literature in this space.