What are Scaled Agile Tools?
Scaled agile is a way for large organizations to plan, coordinate, and track work on large and complex projects. A successful implementation of scaled agile uses a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches, requiring significant investment in tools and people.
As organizations adopt agile methodologies at scale, managing multiple teams, coordinating complex workflows, and ensuring alignment with business objectives become increasingly challenging. This is why scaled agile tools are so important. These are software solutions designed to support the implementation and management of scaled agile frameworks, providing the necessary infrastructure to handle the complexities of agile practices at large enterprises.
These tools typically offer a variety of functionalities — but at their core, they provide strong project management capabilities so teams can plan, track, and visualize work across multiple levels. Beyond this, the best scaled agile tools include features like:
- Portfolio Management: Can manage portfolios of initiatives or projects so all efforts are aligned with the organization’s strategic goals. They help prioritize work based on value, track budgets, and manage resources across the entire portfolio.
- Program Planning: Can oversee large-scale programs including managing dependencies, coordinating releases across multiple teams, and aligning work with strategic objectives.
- Resource/Capacity Management: Evaluate resource allocation and capacity planning, confirming that teams have the necessary resources to meet their objectives.
- Release Planning: Facilitate the coordination of multiple teams' deliverables into cohesive releases.
- Real-Time Reporting: Advanced automated reporting capabilities, like real-time insights into project status, team performance, and overall progress. This may also include customizable dashboards with visual representations of KPIs (such as velocity, burn-down rates, and cycle times).
- Cross-Team Collaboration: Promote communication and coordination between teams, via shared backlogs, integrated workflows, and dashboards that keep everyone aligned.
- Framework Support: Support distinct scaled agile frameworks like SAFe or S@S, offering templates and workflows that align with the specifics of each.
- APIs and Extensions: Include APIs and extension capabilities so organizations can build custom integrations and automate workflows specific to their needs.
In a scaled agile environment where dozens or even hundreds of teams might be working together on a project, manual coordination becomes nearly impossible. Scaled agile tools act as the central nervous system so information flows smoothly, bottlenecks are identified quickly, and project objectives are on track. In a world where miscommunication can lead to costly delays and failures, having a centralized platform where all stakeholders can access up-to-date information is invaluable.
Best SAFe Agile Tools of 2024
There are a limited number of tools on the market that enable the above-mentioned SAFe fundamentals and ideal functionalities. These tools range from lightweight to highly feature-rich and can be cloud-hosted or on-premise. Here’s our list of the top scaled agile tools in 2024:
#1. SpiraPlan
SpiraPlan is Inflectra’s agile portfolio and risk management platform that is great for any scaled agile software development methodology – including SAFe, Nexus, Scrum of Scrums, and LeSS. SpiraPlan provides robust support for SAFe with its rich library of artifacts and hierarchies that map to both the product and team levels. Each agile release train is managed as a specific SpiraPlan product that is long-lived and contains multiple agile teams, team backlogs, and release trains.
SpiraPlan offers visualization and mind-mapping features that show how release trains link to product releases and team iterations. Its extensive program and portfolio management module enables you to manage the solution trains, programs, and solution backlogs. The platform also helps deliver increments of functionality based on the features, epics, and enablers in each constituent product. SpiraPlan integrates with many third-party defect-management systems, source code management systems, and DevOps pipeline tools.
#2. ServiceNow
ServiceNow is a platform for managing digital workflows for enterprise operations. ServiceNow is SAFe-complaint and combines scrum program boards that offer visibility into dependencies, sprint capacity, and overload and preconfigured agile dashboards to see trends, statuses, and details of your scrum and SAFe teams’ work. The tool has a unified backlog to help manage all agile work in a single system of record. Agile/scrum planning boards allow product owners and scrum masters to plan scrum work with epic information and manage user stories and all types of tasks. Project portfolio management integration and performance analytics assist project managers in building project plans and running complex projects.
#3. Rally Software
Rally Software is an enterprise-level platform designed to scale any company’s agile development practices. The system connects teams, increases collaboration, leverages data, and maximizes productivity by expanding agile practices and aligning processes to critical business objectives. Rally serves as a central hub for teams to collaboratively plan, prioritize, and track work that can be visualized in the form of lists, boards, or timeline views. The tool provides roll-ups of progress, dependencies, alignment, and plans so teams can make decisions and stay focused on delivering value.
#4. TargetProcess
Targetprocess is an Enterprise visual platform that connects portfolio, products, and teams. The tool can help organizations adopt and scale agile across the enterprise. It comes with pre-built templates for SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, and other frameworks. Targetprocess solution is customizable to support your own project management approach and organization structure. It also has a modern user interface and offers visibility into multi-level portfolios and company strategic goals.
#5. Planview
Planview enables organizations to scale agile by providing a solution to plan, coordinate, and collaborate together. It helps the agile team deliver on their strategic objectives through improved workflows and faster release cycles. Planview’s features visualize, plan, coordinate, and deliver on projects and the Lean Portfolio Management solution can help update planning and funding cadences to reflect market and/or customer changes.
#6. Digital.ai
Agility (formerly VersionOne/CollabNet) by Digital.ai provides a centralized environment that simplifies the adoption and implementation of the Scaled Agile Framework. Agility supports the key constructs, practices, and metrics defined by SAFe, including Communities of Practice and DevOps. The tool has capabilities for aligning strategy to execution and for group epics by strategic theme that can be visualized in various contexts to determine if your plans are consistent with your business strategy. The tool’s flexible hierarchy makes it easy to use any mix of configurations, from Essential to Full SAFe.
#7 Atlassian (Confluence, Jira Software, Easy Agile for Jira, Jira Align, BigPicture, and Roadmaps)
Atlassian offers a combination of tools to allow companies to scale their agile delivery — but it requires multiple integrations and additional tools to enable full scaled agile functionality. Confluence is used for collaboration on requirements, documentation, decisions, risks, and more. Jira Software is used for scaling agile with configurations for workflows, fields, and reports. Easy Agile Programs for Jira enables cross-team planning, viewing, and management of cross-team dependencies while keeping a focus on larger goals. BigPicture adds capability for roadmapping, visualization, and resource and risk management. Jira Align brings together very large teams and enables teams to roll stories up to the top-level mission, vision, and goals. The built-in dashboards, reports, assessments, and retrospective modules allow for greater flexibility in large organizations. Advanced Roadmaps can be used for long-term planning, creation of roadmaps, and keeping stakeholders informed of progress. This combination of tools will most likely successfully manage your scaled agile transformation — if you have the time, resources, and proficiency to configure the individual apps.
Learn more about the best Jira alternatives here
#8. TaskTop (now Planview)
Although Tasktop has been acquired by Planview, we felt it was worth a separate spot on the list due to its previous track record and differentiation. Tasktop is a value stream management platform that helps companies accelerate their software delivery. Its bi-directional data integration between different platforms makes it easy to synchronize data. Tasktop Viz (now Planview Viz) has a set of dashboards that provide value stream insight and visibility at a glance, enabling users to uncover areas of waste and create plans that target improvement. It includes features for “what-if” predictive analytics to enable planners and leaders to experiment with different models.
#9. SwiftEASe
SwiftEASe is a configurable visual planning, execution, and collaboration tool for teams that are using lean/agile software development. This tool focuses on visual management, lean execution, and ease of use. It links your organization’s strategic themes to the business and architectural epics and helps track the delivery of both high-level epics and team-level tasks. SwiftEASe has built-in dashboards and provides SAFe metrics to support IT governance and continuous improvement. It also allows business owners and company leaders to track their high-level goals and objectives alongside their ground-level implementation. Lastly, SwiftEASe allows you to track the risks and how they have been addressed.
#10. Clarizen (now Planview)
Similar to Tasktop, Clarizen has also since been acquired by Planview and turned into yet another product (AdaptiveWork). It is a cloud-based collaborative work management solution. Enterprises can turn ideas into strategies, plans, and actions to respond to changing market conditions. Your teams can work the way they want and you'll have real-time visibility into all your workstreams. AdaptiveWork helps keep everyone engaged and focused so results are delivered faster and company goals & customer expectations are exceeded. Note: This product is best suited for companies of 50+ employees.
Additional Scaled Agile Tools
Beyond the software that made our top 10 list, some honorable mentions for tools that support the Scaled Agile Framework include:
- Kendis
- Monday
- Miro
- ClickUp
- Agilefant
- Agile Hive
- Lucidspark
- Wrike
Industry-Leading Scaled Agile Tool: SpiraPlan
While companies like Atlassian and Planview have increasingly bought existing tools to fragment functionality and upsell customers on larger suites of products that they don’t need, Inflectra has stayed focused on delivering the best customer experience via industry-leading products. SpiraPlan is exactly that, with the powerful features you need to enable scaled agile transformation within your organization and amazing customer service to make sure that any questions or concerns you might have are answered. Offering capabilities from project management, document collaboration, and portfolio management to AI functionality, IDE integrations, and automated testing, it truly is the industry-leading solution for scaled agile tools. Even better, you can customize reporting dashboards to focus on what you need to know.
Learn more about SpiraPlan at the links below: