Introducing the SAFe Agile PMO

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the most popular Enterprise scale Agile model in the world. As of 2017 it was used by circa 45% of those firms using an Agile methodology at scale. For many years the SAFe model effectively advocated removing project management as a separate formal practice within Organizations as project Management literally had no place in its model as many (but not all) project management roles and responsibilities wree shifted into other roles such as Product Owners, Scrum masters etc. Due to issues in implementation recent iterations of the SAFe model (from Version 4.5 released mid 2017) SAFe have 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.