Top Scaled Agile (SAFe) Tools

In today’s fast-paced business environment, companies must embrace agility and lean processes to keep up with the competition. For software teams, this often means adopting agile methodologies like Scrum or Kanban.

But scaling agile practices across large enterprises presents unique challenges that require the right tools and systems for planning, tracking, and managing work. To enable business agility, many organizations are turning to purpose-built agile project management software.

These tools provide the visibility, automation, and analytics needed to successfully coordinate agile teams and deliver value incrementally.

In this article, we will explore the top 10 agile project management tools that allow businesses to respond to change, accelerate delivery, and delight customers in an uncertain market.

Whether you’re just starting out with agile or looking to scale practices across the enterprise, these best SAFe agile tools can provide the boost your teams need to ship faster and smarter.

Read on to learn how these agile enablers can transform the way your company develops products and delivers projects.

Introduction

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a widely adopted methodology for implementing agile practices at the enterprise level. It provides a structured approach to scaling agile, enabling organizations to deliver high-quality solutions quickly and efficiently. With the increasing demand for digital transformation, SAFe has become a crucial tool for businesses to stay competitive. In this article, we will explore the benefits of using SAFe tools, key features to look for, and provide guidance on choosing the right SAFe tool for your organization.

What is Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?

SAFe is a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles, practices, and competencies for attaining business agility. Developed by Dean Leffingwell and Drew Jemilo in 2011, SAFe helps organizations design better systems and software that meet customers’ changing needs. It is based on three primary bodies of knowledge: agile software development, lean product development, and systems thinking. By integrating these disciplines, SAFe provides a comprehensive framework that supports the alignment, collaboration, and delivery of complex solutions across multiple teams.

PlanView

PlanView is a portfolio management platform that provides visibility into strategic initiatives and enables organizations to adapt quickly to change. It supports agile planning and execution with interactive dashboards, customizable workflows and reports.

As an engineering leader, having visibility into projects, resources, and portfolio health is critical for making informed decisions and driving strategy. Understanding various scaled agile frameworks, their fundamental components, and the critical role of scaled agile tools in managing complex projects across multiple teams effectively is essential. PlanView is a leading work and resource management solution that provides this visibility along with powerful portfolio planning capabilities. In this review, I’ll provide a detailed look at PlanView from the perspective of an engineering leader.

Portfolio Planning and Portfolio Management

PlanView offers comprehensive business solutions that allow engineering leaders to actively manage their portfolio across the entire product lifecycle. Key features include:

• Strategic planning - Align projects and resources to business objectives by building multi-year roadmaps. Perform what-if analysis to optimize plans.
• Capacity planning - Ensure resources are appropriately allocated to projects based on availability and skill sets. Easily identify over and under allocation.
• Portfolio analytics - Gain visibility into portfolio health through real-time rollups, dashboards, and visual reports. Identify trends, risks, and opportunities.
• Budgeting - Forecast and manage financials at the portfolio level. Allocate budgets, estimate costs, and track expenses.

Project and Resource Management

PlanView provides real-time visibility into projects and resources. As an engineering leader, this enables me to:

• Manage projects end-to-end - Plan, execute, and track using flexible templates and workflows.
• Schedule resources - Assign resources based on availability and track allocation.
• Visualize cross-project dependencies - Identify dependencies and conflicts across projects.
• Track team capacity - Get visibility into team utilization at the role and individual level.

Demand Management

Managing incoming demands is critical for engineering leaders. PlanView makes this achievable by providing:

• Idea management - Collect ideas and feedback in a central portal. Engage stakeholders in ideation.
• Request intake - Intake requests using customizable forms and process workflow.
• Request triage - Prioritize and filter requests based on value, cost, and resources.
• Idea workflow - Manage the idea to project workflow with approval processes and gates.

Why PlanView is Valuable for Engineering Leaders

As an engineering leader, having PlanView as a strategic partner provides significant value:

• Enables data-driven decisions - Real-time analytics and visualization provide insights to drive strategic decision making.
• Improves team efficiency - Increased visibility into team capacity and project workload improves resource utilization.
• Manages changing priorities - Flexible planning capabilities allow shifting priorities and changes to be managed smoothly.
• Connects strategy to execution - Ties strategic portfolio plans directly to project execution for more predictable delivery.
• Promotes collaboration - Provides a system of record for all projects, resources, and requests that enhances enterprise collaboration.

PlanView offers engineering leaders an enterprise-scale solution for managing resources, projects, and strategic plans. Robust portfolio planning and analytics capabilities allow engineering leaders to actively manage their portfolio while ensuring it aligns with business objectives. Increased team visibility and demand management tools improve the agility and responsiveness of the engineering organization. With its comprehensive feature set, PlanView delivers significant value for engineering leaders seeking enhanced portfolio control and strategic decision support. I highly recommend adding PlanView as a key partner in managing and optimizing the engineering portfolio.

Rally Software

Rally is an enterprise agile lifecycle management tool that connects strategic initiatives to development teams’ output. As an enterprise visual platform, it provides customizable boards, reporting, traceability, and helps manage dependencies across large initiatives.

Targetprocess

Targetprocess is a feature-rich project management software that takes an agile approach to helping teams plan, track, and deliver projects effectively. At its core is a powerful Kanban-style board that provides visual representation of project tasks, allowing for easy monitoring of work in progress. Teams can customize workflows, columns, and cards to match their process.

One of Targetprocess's standout features is its robust roadmapping capability. Product roadmaps can be created at varying levels of detail, enabling both high-level strategic planning and granular task management tied to specific features or milestones. Dependencies and hierarchies are visually mapped out, ensuring alignment across teams. Roadmaps can be easily adjusted when priorities shift.

Reporting and analytics are another strong suit. Managers have access to real-time data on task status, team capacity, throughput, and cycle times. This makes it easy to identify bottlenecks, adjust workloads, and improve team productivity over time. Custom reports and metrics can also be defined.

For enterprise-level agile development, Targetprocess also offers advanced resource management options. Skills, availabilities, and capacities can be tracked across large, distributed teams. Demand prediction tools make it easy to forecast resourcing needs.

Integration with other systems is straightforward with Targetprocess's open API. It can sync with Git, JIRA, Trello, and other PM tools. It also integrates with Slack, Microsoft Office, and Outlook.

For teams that want an intuitive, highly flexible platform for agile project execution, Targetprocess is a top choice. The combination of usability, customizability, and analytics makes it suitable for a range of technology and development teams.

Digital.ai

Digital.ai enables organizations to scale agile methodology with value stream management software and services. It offers capabilities for release planning, delivery predictability, reporting, and collaboration.

Jira Align

Jira Align is an agile portfolio management tool designed to help enterprises scale agile practices across the organization. It integrates with Jira and provides key features for managing agile portfolios, guiding strategy execution, and measuring business value. It also supports the agile release train (ART) concept within the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), enabling the management of multiple agile teams working collaboratively towards a common goal.

Highlights

• Portfolio management - Organize initiatives into portfolios and epics. Map investments to strategy and business objectives.
• Roadmapping - Visually map out programs on roadmaps. Establish timelines and milestones.
• Alignment - Ensure alignment between strategy and execution from the executive to team levels.
• Insights - Built-in analytics provide real-time visibility into portfolio performance and status.
• Scaled agile - Supports scaled frameworks like SAFe with agile release trains and enterprise epics.
• Jira integration - Sync epics and initiatives with Jira. Roll up Jira data for portfolio-level insights.

Key Benefits

• Improved visibility into portfolio investments and status
• Increased strategy-execution alignment across programs
• Enterprise-scale agile management capabilities
• Data-driven investment and priority decisions
• Accelerated delivery of strategic objectives

Jira Align provides the visibility, traceability, and insights needed to successfully scale agile approaches across the enterprise. For organizations adopting SAFe or implementing agile portfolio operations, Jira Align is an excellent choice.

SpiraPlan

SpiraPlan is an integrated test management, release planning and agile project control system for managing and tracking multi-team agile software development. It provides test management, release scheduling, iteration planning and bug/issue tracking.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow offers robust tools to help IT teams implement agile software development and delivery practices. Its Agile Development module provides customizable Kanban boards that visually track work items through development sprints. Teams can break down projects into manageable pieces, collaborate across functional groups, and accelerate release cycles.

For coordinating agile releases, ServiceNow Release Management automates planning, scheduling, and monitoring of software releases. Teams can model release pipelines, set gating rules, and track KPIs like cycle times. This helps optimize the release process from build to deployment. Integrations with build automation tools like Jenkins add more control.

Agile Development

The Agile Development module provides customizable Kanban boards that visually track work items through development sprints. Teams can:

• Break down projects into manageable pieces
• Collaborate across functional groups
• Accelerate release cycles

Release Management

For coordinating agile releases, Release Management automates:

• Planning, scheduling, and monitoring of software releases for more than eight teams
• Modeling release pipelines
• Setting gating rules
• Tracking KPIs like cycle times

This optimizes the release process from build to deployment. Integrations with tools like Jenkins add more control.

ServiceNow’s IntegrationHub simplifies connecting agile development tools like Jira and VersionOne with broader IT workflows. Story points, tasks, and defects can be synced from agile tools into related incident, problem, change, and release records within ServiceNow. This single source of truth increases visibility and alignment.

With its Now Platform architecture, ServiceNow makes it easy to build custom agile apps that connect and automate processes across software delivery, IT operations, and business teams. Embedded performance analytics also give managers dashboards and reporting to continuously improve agile processes.

For IT organizations transitioning to agile, ServiceNow provides a full-service platform to scale agile methodologies, automate release pipelines, and take a DevOps approach across the technology value stream. Its flexibility makes it well-suited for mature agile teams as well as those just starting out.

SwiftKanban

SwiftKanban is a visual project and workflow management system for lean/agile development. It provides Kanban boards, Cumulative Flow Diagrams, Cycle Time graphs and other analytics to help optimize flow.

Clarizen

Clarizen is a work collaboration and project management solution with capabilities for agile task management, resource planning, reporting and more. It provides visibility into work execution for agile teams.

Hive

Hive is a project management and collaboration platform designed for agile teams. It offers boards, WIP limits, backlogs, sprint planning and task organization features to support agile methodologies.

Choosing the Right SAFe Tool

With numerous SAFe tools available in the market, choosing the right one can be overwhelming. Here are some factors to consider:

• Size and complexity of your organization: Look for tools that can scale to accommodate your organization’s size and complexity, ensuring they can handle the demands of large, distributed teams.
• Specific SAFe framework and practices: Ensure the tool supports the specific SAFe framework and practices you are implementing, such as Agile Release Trains and Program Increment planning.
• Integration with existing tools: Consider tools that integrate with your existing development and collaboration tools, providing a seamless workflow and reducing the need for manual data entry.
• Reporting and analytics: Look for tools that provide robust reporting and analytics capabilities to support data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement.
• User adoption and support: Choose tools with a user-friendly interface and robust support to ensure high user adoption and minimal disruption to your organization.

By considering these factors and key features, you can select the right SAFe tool to support your organization’s agile transformation and achieve business agility.