We see many organizations that don’t want to “admit” that they’re running SAFe, even though it’s exactly what they’re running. For some, it’s because they don’t feel like they’ve implemented SAFe properly, while others don’t want it to sound like they’ve taken a top-down decision to implement SAFe. 

If you really want to scale your agile practices, make sure to checkout the other scaling frameworks, as well (or get help in Strip 28 – Guide to Choosing the Right Agile Scaling Framework in our previous book or on our homepage)—combining elements from different frameworks could, potentially, be the right approach for your organization.

But before doing all that, have a long and hard think about why you want to scale, in the first place; if you have many dependencies, have a discussion on why that is, and why they can’t be removed—and f you want to align teams, figure out why aligning Product Owners regularly isn’t enough. When you’re certain that you cannot meet goals like these without scaling, then, it’s time to go look for a scaling framework, and not a second before.