With the new Agile Hive release, we have taken a big step towards enabling business teams and are introducing SAFe Kanban teams and report performance optimizations and important updates for the Team Backlog. At Agile Hive, we wanted to make it possible for companies that work according to SAFe to also integrate teams using Kanban because not only development teams are involved in the processes.
Kanban teams in SAFe
Team Kanban is a methodology that helps teams organize the flow of value by visualizing workflows, setting work-in-process (WIP) limits, and continuously improving their process. SAFe teams can use a variety of agile methods. Most teams, especially development teams, use Scrum, a lightweight and popular framework for task management.
However, some teams-particularly systems teams, business teams, maintenance teams, and support teams-often use Kanban as their primary method for managing work processes.
In these areas, the fast-paced nature of work, rapidly changing priorities, and the reduced value of planning activities for the next iteration, play overriding roles. Kanban systems are used at the Portfolio, Large-Solution, and Essential levels of SAFe, but for different reasons. In this article, we will discuss the Kanban systems used by Agile teams.
SAFe Kanban Teams in Jira
With the new release of Agile Hive, there is now the possibility to integrate Kanban Teams into the SAFe context. This ensures that teams that do not work according to Scrum can be included in PI Planning. This allows these teams to plan their tasks for iterations and identify dependencies to other teams.
Create a new Kanban Team
With the project templates in Agile Hive, it is possible to create new projects with one click. Now Kanban teams have been added here as well. When a new project is created in Jira, a SAFe Kanban team can now be created directly.
Basically, two boards are created here. A Scrum board that runs in the background and one that ensures that the Kanban teams can schedule their tasks on the breakout board in iterations and view the reports. And a Kanban Board, which the teams can use for their daily work.
PI Planning for Kanban Teams
With these new features, Kanban teams can now be integrated into the PI Planning process. To do this, the teams plan their tasks on the breakout board as part of PI Planning as usual. Here, features on the ART level can be used to schedule larger projects pending in this PI (Program Increment). As with the development teams, stories, tasks, or other issues can be scheduled here in the corresponding time periods (iterations).
In their daily work, the teams use the Kanban Board to visualize their progress. For this purpose, the Kanban board tickets are divided into "Planned" and "Unplanned" issues. The planned issues are tasks that are scheduled in PIs. Therefore, it is directly visible on the ticket in which PI this ticket is located, which iteration it belongs to, and which ART issue it was assigned. The unplanned issues are tasks that are either (still) unplanned or are processed independently of PIs.
How to transform a Scrum Team project into a Kanban Team project & vice versa
Reporting Performance
After we had to struggle with extremely long loading times of our reports for a long time, we have worked hard on the performance of our SAFe reports in addition to the release of the Kanban teams. In reports where more than 20,000 issues are loaded, it is now possible to limit the output issues and values with filters.
SAFe with Atlassian Tools: Get to know Agile Hive!
Would you like to know more about Agile Hive and the software-supported implementation of SAFe®? We would be happy to discuss your requirements for enterprise-wide agile product development and product management with you. Take a look at our Implementation Project documentation to see an overview of what an implementation would entail.
Get in touch with us today, and let us demonstrate how it works in a personal session.
Further Reading
Agile Hive Implementation Project
Scaled Agile: SAFe 5.0 changes and how Agile Hive maps them
SAFe with Atlassian tools: Agile Hive is a Scaled Agile Platform Partner
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