[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":794},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/best-practices-to-set-up-organizational-hierarchies-that-scale":3,"navigation-en-us":38,"banner-en-us":438,"footer-en-us":448,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Amanda Rueda":689,"blog-related-posts-en-us-best-practices-to-set-up-organizational-hierarchies-that-scale":703,"assessment-promotions-en-us":745,"next-steps-en-us":784},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":26,"isFeatured":12,"meta":27,"navigation":28,"path":29,"publishedDate":20,"seo":30,"stem":34,"tagSlugs":35,"__hash__":37},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/best-practices-to-set-up-organizational-hierarchies-that-scale.yml","Best Practices To Set Up Organizational Hierarchies That Scale",[7],"amanda-rueda",null,"agile-planning",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"best-practices-to-set-up-organizational-hierarchies-that-scale",false,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9,"tags":22},"Best practices to set up organizational hierarchies that scale","Learn how to model organizational hierarchy in GitLab. Create structures with clear lines of communication, strategic alignment, and more, while following Agile principles.",[18],"Amanda Rueda","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750098165/Blog/Hero%20Images/Blog/Hero%20Images/agile_agile.png_1750098164666.png","2024-07-22","Maximizing the benefits of your GitLab subscription begins with an effective organizational setup. Here’s a straightforward guide to configuring your group, subgroup, and project structure to enhance your GitLab experience.\n\n## Understanding the structure: Groups, subgroups, and projects\n\nGroups and projects allow you to model your organizational hierarchy, enabling advanced permissions management and “team of teams” planning. Use groups and subgroups for strategic planning and configuration management that cascades into subgroups and projects lower in the hierarchy.\n\nBeyond this, you can also model your value streams, enhancing project management and collaboration across your organization.\n\n- **Project level (team level)**\n    - Nested within groups or subgroups, projects are where your actual work happens. This is where repositories live, and settings specific to the project are managed. Zoom into day-to-day activities and detailed project tracking at this level.\n    - Effective project configuration helps maintain clean, organized data, which is essential for accurate reporting and analysis.\n\n- **Subgroup level (team of teams)**\n    - Subgroups provide granular permissions management and can be tailored to specific team or project needs, ensuring consistent workflows across your organization.\n    - Subgroups function as clusters of related projects, similar to how a \"team of teams\" operates in Agile.\n    - This level is ideal for managing several teams working towards a common product or service. It facilitates cross-project visibility and integration, which supports synchronization between teams to align on interdependencies and shared objectives.\n\n- **Group level (team of team of teams)**\n    - Think of groups as your organizational pillars within GitLab where broad permissions and access are managed.\n    - At the highest level, groups encompass multiple subgroups and represent the strategic tier of project management, akin to the \"team of team of teams\" in Agile.\n    - This level sets the overarching goals and strategies, defining settings and allocating resources across projects and subgroups to ensure alignment with the company's broad business objectives.\n\nBy structuring your organization with GitLab, you parallel your chosen Agile methodology, which can help you apply Agile principles more naturally across your projects. This structure promotes clear lines of communication, efficient resource management, and strategic alignment, all while maintaining the flexibility and responsiveness inherent to Agile methodologies.\n\n> Keep up with news and insights about [GitLab Agile planning](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/categories/agile-planning/).\n\n## Leveraging the GitLab inheritance model\n\nOne of GitLab's powerful features is its [inheritance model](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/tutorials/scrum_events/index.html#understanding-the-inheritance-model-in-gitlab), which allows settings, permissions, and configurations made at higher levels to automatically apply to lower levels within the hierarchy. Conversely, data at lower levels is instinctively available at higher levels in the structure. With the inheritance model, you gain visibility across your entire portfolio from within higher-level groups while providing distinct locations lower in the hierarchy for individual teams to manage their work.\n\nExamples:\n- **Create milestones and labels in your higher-level groups** to cascade down to all subgroups and projects promoting consistency and adherence to organizational standards.\n- **Issues and epics** in lower level projects and subgroups roll up your value stream hierarchy for ease of reference by program management and the executive layer.\n- **Manage user permissions at the group level or top-level subgroup** to optimize permissions and access control. This can simplify access control management and ensure that the right people have the right access across multiple projects without the need for repeated configuration.\n\nThese tips not only streamline administrative overhead but also reinforce security and compliance by ensuring that changes at the higher level consistently propagate downwards.\n\n![Organizational hierarchy diagram](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750098179/Blog/Content%20Images/Blog/Content%20Images/image2_aHR0cHM6_1750098179305.png)\n\n## Best practices for GitLab setup\n\nWhen setting up your GitLab organizational hierarchy, we recommend the following options depending on your organization's needs. Self-managed customers have the option to omit the \"Company Name\" root group layer, as this extra level of organization is not necessary for self-managed deployments. This flexibility ensures that your GitLab setup is tailored to your specific organizational structure and deployment preferences.\n\n### Option 1: Permissions and access are granted at the organizational subgroup level\n\nThis option is ideal for complex permission structures or large organizations needing efficient project sharing across numerous users.\n\n#### Example structure\n\n- Organizational Group\n    - Handles broad permissions typically through integrations with corporate provisioning systems.\n    - Users are added to subgroups, which will serve as the foundation for sharing the entire group with another [group](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/manage.html#share-a-group-with-another-group) or a [project](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/members/share_project_with_groups.html) to minimize the overhead of direct user management.\n    - When creating user groups, you can utilize [group mentions](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/discussions/index.html#mentions) throughout GitLab to mention large groups of users at a time.\n\n- Development Group\n    - Provides executive-level and program-management-level visibility across all development projects at the highest development group level.\n    - Features are created at the subgroup level for access across multiple repos.\n    - Projects are created to hold development repos; this is the level for Team visibility.\n\n![organizational chart for subgroup level](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750098179/Blog/Content%20Images/Blog/Content%20Images/Image_1_aHR0cHM6_1750098179306.png)\n\n### Option 2: Permissions and access are granted at any level\nThis option is best for smaller organizations with less complex access requirements. Users are added individually to the divisional groups, subgroups, or projects as access is required. This provides direct control over project management and operational visibility.\n\n#### Highlights\n- Users can be added to a group at the top of the hierarchy or to the lower-level subgroup/project depending on the granularity of access needs. Each member would need to be individually added rather than a single task of sharing a group.\n- Executive-level and program-management-level visibility across all development projects at the highest development group level.\n- Features are created at the subgroup level for access across multiple repos.\n- Projects are created to hold development repos; this is the level for Team visibility.\n\n![Permissions granted at any level](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750098179/Blog/Content%20Images/Blog/Content%20Images/Image_2_aHR0cHM6_1750098179307.png)\n\n### Additional configuration considerations\n\n- Milestones and iterations\n    - Create group-level milestones for broad visibility or when milestones need to be shared across groups.\n    - Create milestones at the project level when the milestone is specific to a single project.\n    - For teams working across different groups, setting iterations at the parent group level is beneficial for unified tracking.\n\n- Data management\n    - Leverage GitLab's roadmaps, boards, and listing pages to pull data that reflects your organizational setup. This helps you visualize progress and plan effectively across different levels of your structure.\n    - GitLab makes data available in higher-level groups even when the data is created in lower levels.\n    - Create your views at higher levels when you want to view data across groups and projects, and at lower levels when you want to hone in on a specific group or project’s data.\n\n- Template creation\n    - Create higher-level templates to ensure they cascade to all subsequent subgroups and projects, mixing general guidelines with project-specific requirements.\n    - Templates are created within their own repository within the applicable group ([related documentation](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/description_templates.html)).\n\n- Labels\n    - Create higher-level labels to ensure they cascade to all subsequent subgroups and projects, mixing org labels with project-specific labels.\n    - Use scoped labels to define organizational structures like teams and workflow status.\n\n![Issue board with labels](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750098179/Blog/Content%20Images/Blog/Content%20Images/image3_aHR0cHM6_1750098179310.png)\n\n## Leveraging GitLab’s features for optimal performance\n\nImplementing the right structure in GitLab not only streamlines the management of your software projects but also enhances the visibility across different levels of your organization, ensuring that everyone from the top management to individual contributors has the information they need to make informed decisions.\n\n> Get started modeling organizational hierarchy with [a free trial of GitLab Ultimate](https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_source=about.gitlab.com/blog&glm_content=default-saas-trial).\n",[23,24,25],"agile","features","DevSecOps 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your planning without the context-switching","Learn how GitLab Duo Planner Agent simplifies tasks and saves time by helping product and engineering managers focus on the work that matters most.\n\n","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750098354/Blog/Hero%20Images/Blog/Hero%20Images/blog-image-template-1800x945%20%281%29_5XrohmuWBNuqL89BxVUzWm_1750098354056.png","2025-10-28","Software development teams face a challenging balancing act: dozens of tasks, limited time, and constant pressure to pick the right thing to work on next. \n\nThe planning overhead of structuring requirements, managing backlogs, tracking delivery, and writing status updates steals hours from strategic thinking. \n\nThe result? Less time for the high-value decisions that actually drive products forward.\n\nThat’s why we developed [GitLab Duo Planner](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/duo_agent_platform/agents/foundational_agents/planner/), an AI agent built on [GitLab Duo Agent Platform](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-duo-agent-platform/) to support product managers directly within GitLab.\n\nGitLab Duo Planner isn't another generic AI assistant. GitLab's product and engineering teams, who live these challenges daily like many of our customers, purpose-built GitLab Duo Planner to orchestrate planning workflows and reduce overhead while improving alignment and predictability.\n\n## Your new planning teammate\n\nToday’s planning workflows face three major problems:\n\n1. Prone to drift -  Unplanned and orphaned work reduce trust in the plan.  \n2. Disruptive to developers - Constant interruptions for status updates break flow.  \n3. Opaque - Hidden risks surface too late to course-correct.\n\nTransforming the way teams work, GitLab Duo Planner turns manual overhead like vague ideas into structured requirements in minutes. Surface hidden backlog problems before they derail sprints. Apply RICE and MoSCoW frameworks instantly to make confident prioritization decisions. With awareness of GitLab context across the platform, every interaction with GitLab Duo Planner saves time and improves decision quality. This is possible because of the foundational agent architecture, bringing deep domain expertise and context awareness specific to GitLab.\n\n## Built for teams\n\nGitLab Duo Planner leverages work items (epics, issues, tasks) and understands the nuances of work breakdown structures, dependency analysis, and effort estimation, making it well positioned to improve visibility, alignment, and confidence in delivery.\n\n* Platform approach - Unlike point solutions, Duo Planner orchestrates across your entire GitLab platform, from planning through development and testing, driving visibility across teams and workflows. \n\n* Embedded in the flow - No more context-switching between tools or diving deep into GitLab to retrieve information. Duo Planner enables contributions, collaboration, and transparency from users across the software development lifecycle. \n\n* Saves time and effort - Use Duo Planner to free your teams from repetitive coordination work, improving delivery predictability, reducing missed commitments while bringing in focus on what actually moves the needle.\n\n## From chaos to clarity\n\nGitLab Duo Planner can help at different stages of software planning and delivery while operating within the planning scope, providing a safe, bounded environment with project visibility.\n\nThe agent can help with six flows:\n\n* Prioritization - Apply frameworks like RICE, MoSCoW, or WSJF to rank work items intelligently\n\n* Work breakdown - Decompose initiatives into epics, features, and user stories to structure requirements\n\n* Dependency analysis - Identify blocked work and understand relationships between items to maintain velocity\n\n* Planning -  Organize sprints, milestones, or quarterly planning \n\n* Status reporting -  Generate summaries of project progress, risks, and blockers to track delivery\n\n* Backlog management -  Identify stale issues, duplicates, or items needing refinement to improve data hygiene\n\n\nHere is an example how GitLab Duo Planner can check the status of an initiative:\n\n\u003Cdiv>\u003Ciframe src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/video/1131065078?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" title=\"GitLab Duo Planner Agent\">\u003C/iframe>\u003C/div>\u003Cscript src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js\">\u003C/script>\n\n\u003Cp>\u003C/p>\n\nDuo Planner is available as a custom agent in the Duo Chat side panel, with the current page context.\n\n\u003Cp>\u003C/p>\n\n![Duo Planner as a custom agent in the Duo Chat side panel](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1761323689/ener1mkyj9shg6zvtp4f.png)\n\n\u003Cp>\u003C/p>\n\nLet’s ask Duo Planner about the status of an initiative by providing the epic link:\n\n![Asking Duo Planner about the status of an initiative by providing the epic link](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1761323689/gzv2xudegtjhtesz1oaz.png)\n\n\u003Cp>\u003C/p>\n\nWe receive a structured summary with an overview, current status of milestones, in-progress items, dependencies, and blockers, along with actionable recommendations.\n\n![Structured summary](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1761323690/guoyqe1b9bstmbjzunez.png)\n\n\u003Cp>\u003C/p>\n\nNext, let’s ask for an executive summary to share with stakeholders:\nGitLab Duo Planner eliminates hours of manual analysis and reporting effort, helping to make decisions faster and keep all stakeholders updated.\n\n![Ask for executive summary](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1761323689/xs9zxawqrytfu54ejx2b.png)\n\n\n\u003Cp>\u003C/p>\n\n![Output of executive summary](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1761323690/bsbpvjaqnymobzg4knhu.png)\n\n\u003Cp>\u003C/p>\n\nHere are a few more prompts you can try with GitLab Duo Planner:\n\n* “Which of the bugs with a “boards” label should we fix first, considering user impact?”  \n* “Rank these epics by strategic value for Q1.”  \n* “Help me prioritize technical debt against new features.”  \n* “What tasks are needed to implement this user story?”  \n* “Suggest a phased approach for this project: (insert URL).”\n\n## What's next\n\nGitLab Duo Planner focuses intentionally on product managers and engineering managers working in Agile environments. Why? Because specificity drives performance. By training Duo Planner deeply on GitLab's planning workflows and Agile frameworks, we deliver reliable, actionable insights rather than generic suggestions.\n\nAs we evolve the platform, we envision a family of specialized agents, each optimized for specific workflows while contributing to a unified intelligence layer. Today's planner for software teams is just the beginning of how AI will transform work prioritization across all teams.\n\n> If you’re an existing GitLab customer and would like to try GitLab Duo Planner with a prompt of your own, visit our [documentation](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/duo_agent_platform/agents/foundational_agents/planner/) where we cover prerequisites, use cases, and more.",[712,23,24,713],"AI/ML","product",[715,18],"Aathira Nair",{"featured":28,"template":13,"slug":717},"ace-your-planning-without-the-context-switching",{"content":719,"config":731},{"title":720,"description":721,"authors":722,"date":726,"body":727,"category":9,"tags":728,"heroImage":730},"Embedded views: The future of work tracking in GitLab","Learn how embedded views, powered by GitLab Query Language, help GitLab teams work more efficiently, make data-driven decisions, and maintain visibility across complex workflows.",[723,724,725],"Matthew Macfarlane","Himanshu Kapoor","Alex Fracazo","2025-08-21","Ever find yourself switching between tabs in GitLab just to keep track of what’s happening in your project? Maybe you’re checking on an issue, then jumping to a merge request, then over to an epic to see how everything connects. Before you know it, you’ve got a browser full of tabs and you’ve lost your train of thought.\n\nIf that sounds familiar, you’re definitely not alone. So many teams waste time and energy flipping through various items in their project management software, just trying to get a handle on their work.\n\nThat's why we created [embedded views](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/glql/#embedded-views), powered by [GitLab Query Language (GLQL)](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/glql/). With embedded views, [available in 18.3](https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2025/08/21/gitlab-18-3-released/), you get live, relevant information right where you’re already working in GitLab. No more endless context switching. No more outdated reports. Just the info you need, right when you need it.\n## Why embedded views matter\nEmbedded views are more than just a new feature, they're a fundamental shift in how teams understand and track their work within GitLab. With embedded views, teams can maintain context while accessing real-time information, creating shared understanding, and improving collaboration without ever leaving their current workflow. It’s about making work tracking feel natural and effortless, so you can focus on what matters.\n## How it works: Real-time data right where you need it the most\nEmbedded views let you insert live GLQL queries in Markdown code blocks throughout wiki pages, epics, issues, and merge requests. Here's what makes them so useful:\n### Always up to date\nGLQL queries are dynamic, pulling fresh data each time the page loads, so your embedded views always reflect the current state of your work, not the state when you embedded the view. When changes happen to issues, merge requests, or milestones, a page refresh will show those updates in your embedded view.\n### Contextual awareness\nUse functions like `currentUser()` and `today()` to make queries context-specific. Your embedded views automatically adapt to show relevant information for whoever is viewing them, creating personalized experiences without manual configuration.\n### Powerful filtering\nFilter by fields like assignee, author, label, milestone, health status, creation date, and more. Use logical expressions to get exactly the data you want. We support more than 30 fields as of 18.3.\n### Customizable display\nYou can display your data as a table, a list, or a numbered list. Choose which fields to show, set a limit on the number of items, and specify the sort order to keep your view focused and actionable.\n### Availability\nYou can use embedded views in group and project wikis, epic and issue descriptions, merge requests, and comments. GLQL is available across all GitLab tiers: Free, Premium, and Ultimate, on GitLab.com, GitLab Self-Managed, and GitLab Dedicated. Certain functionality, such as displaying epics, status, custom fields, iterations, and weights, is available in the Premium and Ultimate tiers. Displaying health status is available only in Ultimate.\n## See embedded views in action\nThe syntax of an embedded view's source is a superset of YAML that consists of:\n- The `query` parameter: Expressions joined together with a logical operator, such as `and`.\n- Parameters related to the presentation layer, like `display`, `limit`, or `fields`, `title`, and `description`\n  represented as YAML.\n\nA view is defined in Markdown as a code block, similar to other code blocks like Mermaid.\nFor example:\n- Display a table of first 5 open issues assigned to the authenticated user in `gitlab-org/gitlab`.\n- Display columns `title`, `state`, `health`, `description`, `epic`, `milestone`, `weight`, and `updated`.\n````markdown\n```glql\ndisplay: table\ntitle: GLQL table 🎉\ndescription: This view lists my open issues\nfields: title, state, health, epic, milestone, weight, updated\nlimit: 5\nquery: project = \"gitlab-org/gitlab\" AND assignee = currentUser() AND state = opened\n```\n````\nThis source should render a table like the one below:\n![](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1755193172/ibzfopvpztpglnccwrjj.png)\n\nAn easy way to create your first embedded view is to navigate to the **More options** dropdown in the rich text editor toolbar. Once in this toolbar, select **Embedded view**, which populates the following query in a Markdown code block:\n````markdown\n```glql\nquery: assignee = currentUser()\nfields: title, createdAt, milestone, assignee\ntitle: Issues assigned to current user\n```\n````\nSave your changes to the comment or description where the code block appears, and you're done! You've successfully created your first embedded view!\n## How GitLab uses embedded views\nWhether tracking merge requests targeting security releases, triaging bugs to improve backlog hygiene, or managing team onboarding and milestone planning, we rely on embedded views for mission-critical processes every day. This isn't just a feature we built, it's a tool we depend on to run our business effectively. When you adopt embedded views, you're getting a tested solution that's already helping GitLab teams work more efficiently, make data-driven decisions, and maintain visibility across complex workflows. Simply stated, embedded views can transform how your team accesses and analyzes the work that matters most to your success.\n\nTo learn and see more about how GitLab is using embedded views internally, check out [How GitLab measures Red Team impact: The adoption rate metric](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/how-gitlab-measures-red-team-impact-the-adoption-rate-metric/), and Global Search Release Planning issues for the [18.1](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/search-team/team-tasks/-/issues/239), [18.2](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/search-team/team-tasks/-/issues/241), and [18.3](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/search-team/team-tasks/-/issues/245) milestones.\n## What's next\nEmbedded views are just the start of [Knowledge Group's](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/plan/knowledge/) vision for work tracking. Learn more about what we're focusing on next in the [embedded views post-GA epic](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/15249). As embedded views evolve we're committed to making them even more powerful and [accessible](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/548722).\n## Share your experience\nShare your feedback in the [embedded views GA feedback issue](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/509792) or via the [embedded views GA survey](https://gitlab.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6PFhgZMBA06kr7E). Whether you've discovered innovative use cases, encountered challenges, or have ideas for improvements, we want to hear from you.\n",[23,25,729],"workflow","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750099072/Blog/Hero%20Images/Blog/Hero%20Images/agile_agile.png_1750099072322.png",{"featured":12,"template":13,"slug":732},"embedded-views-the-future-of-work-tracking-in-gitlab",{"content":734,"config":743},{"title":735,"description":736,"authors":737,"heroImage":738,"date":739,"body":740,"category":9,"tags":741},"SAFe without silos in GitLab","Learn how to map the Scaled Agile Framework to the native capabilities of the DevSecOps platform and the advantages that come from doing so.",[18],"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750097569/Blog/Hero%20Images/Blog/Hero%20Images/blog-image-template-1800x945%20%2811%29_2hcwWx49wQ7CHfvhhkVH6S_1750097569126.png","2025-04-08","Let's talk about what happens when your organization adopts the Scaled Agile\nFramework (SAFe) to scale to enterprise levels. You've got multiple teams working on complex products, and you need a way to coordinate all that work.\nBut here's a common headache: Your planning happens in one tool, while your actual development work lives somewhere else entirely.\n\nThis divide creates real problems day-to-day. Developers jump between systems constantly. Product managers struggle to get an accurate picture of progress. And everyone wastes time manually copying information from one place to another. It's precisely the kind of disjointed experience that SAFe was designed to eliminate.\n\nWhile your development teams might already be using GitLab for source code management, CI/CD, and security, you may wonder whether GitLab can also support your planning needs within the SAFe framework. The good news is that\nGitLab's Agile project management capabilities offer strong support for\nSAFe, in this article, you'll learn how GitLab maps to SAFe concepts and ceremonies, all within the same DevSecOps platform your software developers already know and love.\n\n## What is SAFe?\n\nSAFe, or the Scaled Agile Framework, is a way to bring Agile principles to large organizations without losing speed, alignment, or customer focus. It takes the iterative and flexible teamwork model of small teams and applies its principles across big organizations that have multiple teams, roadmaps, and stakeholders. This brings the organization into alignment, all planning and executing in the same direction. For product managers, SAFe helps connect strategy to execution so you’re not just shipping fast, you’re shipping the right things, backed by clear priorities and cross-team alignment.\n\nSAFe reduces silos, encourages collaboration, and helps teams rally around customer outcomes, not just tasks. When integrated in GitLab, the magic really happens: visibility, traceability, and delivery all live in one place.\n\n## SAFe terminology in GitLab\n\nFirst, let's establish how SAFe concepts map to GitLab:\n\n| SAFe | GitLab |\n| :---- | :---- |\n| Epic | Top-level Epic |\n| Capability | Sub-epic (Level 1) |\n| Feature | Sub-epic (Level 2) |\n| User Story | Issue |\n| Task | Task |\n| Team | Custom Field / Scoped Label |\n| Sprint | Iteration |\n| Program Increment (PI) | Milestone |\n| Value Stream | Top-level Group |\n| Agile Release Train (ART) | Top-level Group |\n\n\u003Cbr>\u003C/br>\n\nWith this mapping as your guide, you can set up GitLab to mirror your SAFe implementation. The group structure lets you organize around your value streams and ARTs, while the work item hierarchy (with up to seven levels of nested epics!) gives you all the depth you need for complex product portfolios. Whether you're working at the portfolio level (with top-level groups), program level (with subgroups), or team level (with projects),\nGitLab's organizational structure aligns perfectly with SAFe's hierarchy.\n\n## Supporting SAFe ceremonies in GitLab\n\nNow for the fun part - how do you actually run your SAFe ceremonies in\nGitLab? Let's walk through each one.\n\n### PI planning\n\nTo facilitate the cross-team alignment and dependency management that makes\nPI planning successful, GitLab offers several capabilities:\n\n* Use the [Roadmap](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/group/roadmap/) view to\nvisualize features across teams and time periods\n\n* Assign features to the PI\n[milestone](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/milestones/)\n\n* Document and visualize cross-team\n[dependencies](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/issues/related_issues/#blocking-issues)\nas they're identified\n\nGitLab gives you flexibility for PI planning through both the Epic boards (which can be configured to show team assignments) and the Roadmap view (which shows features over time like a Gantt chart). You can switch between these views during your planning session depending on whether you're focusing on the timeline or team organization.\n\n![Roadmap view and epic board](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750097577/Blog/Content%20Images/Blog/Content%20Images/image3_aHR0cHM6_1750097576746.gif)\n\n\u003Cbr>\u003C/br>\n\n![Roadmap view with Gantt chart](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750097577/Blog/Content%20Images/Blog/Content%20Images/image5_aHR0cHM6_1750097576747.png)\n\n### Refinement\n\nAs a product manager, running effective refinement sessions means having clear visibility into your feature backlog. You can run your refinement session right inside GitLab. No more updating one tool during the meeting and then having to update another tool afterward.\n\nGitLab powers refinement sessions with:\n\n* [Epic boards](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/group/epics/epic_boards/) that\ngroup features based on status\n\n* The ability to view story points directly in the\n[overview](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/group/epics/epic_boards/#view-count-of-issues-weight-and-progress-of-an-epic)\n\n* Comprehensive [drawer\nviews](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/group/epics/manage_epics/#open-epics-in-a-drawer)\nthat let you interact with work items without losing context\n\n* The ability to create and link [child\nissues](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/group/epics/manage_epics/#add-an-issue-to-an-epic)\ndirectly from epics\n\n![SAFe - image 3](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750097577/Blog/Content%20Images/Blog/Content%20Images/image2_aHR0cHM6_1750097576749.gif)\n\n### Sprint planning\n\nWhen it's time to figure out what your team can tackle in the next sprint,\nGitLab gives you:\n\n* [Issue boards](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/issue_board/) that\nprovide a comprehensive view of your backlog\n\n* [Total\nweight](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/issue_board/#sum-of-issue-weights)\nof user stories displayed directly on boards\n\n* The ability to easily move issues between iterations\n\n* A collapsible view that simplifies moving stories between sprints\n\nThis means you can keep everything in one place and spend your planning meetings actually planning instead of jumping between tools.\n\n![Sprint planning with\nGitLab](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750097577/Blog/Content%20Images/Blog/Content%20Images/image4_aHR0cHM6_1750097576751.gif)\n\n*💡 Check out [this tutorial on using GitLab to facilitate\nScrum](https://docs.gitlab.com/tutorials/scrum_events/) for a detailed glimpse into the power of GitLab in Agile planning and sprint tracking.*\n\n### Daily stand-ups\n\nYour team can gather around the board during daily stand-ups and actually see what everyone's working on, what's stuck, and what's ready for review – all in one view. For your dev team's daily stand-ups, GitLab lets you:\n\n* Create\n[iteration-scoped](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/issue_board/#iteration-lists)\nboards that show the current sprint's work\n\n* Display story points/weights directly on cards\n\n* Use the [drawer\nview](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/issues/managing_issues/#open-issues-in-a-drawer)\nto access details without leaving the context\n\n* Highlight tasks at risk through [health\nstatus](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/issues/managing_issues/#health-status)\n\n![Daily stand-up board](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750097577/Blog/Content%20Images/Blog/Content%20Images/image6_aHR0cHM6_1750097576755.png)\n\n### Sprint review\n\nWant to know how your team is doing over time? GitLab provides comprehensive metrics with:\n\n* [Burndown and burnup\ncharts](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/group/iterations/#iteration-burndown-and-burnup-charts)\nfor iterations\n\n* Velocity tracking\n\n* [Lead and cycle\ntime](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/group/value_stream_analytics/#lifecycle-metrics)\nmetrics\n\n* Dashboards that can be scoped to teams\n\nThese metrics help you understand if your team is getting faster, where they're getting stuck, and what you might want to talk about in your next retrospective.\n\n![Burndown and burnup charts](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750097577/Blog/Content%20Images/Blog/Content%20Images/image1_aHR0cHM6_1750097576758.png)\n\n## 5 reasons a unified platform provides an advantage\n\nI know there are plenty of planning tools that can handle SAFe ceremonies.\nBut there are game-changing reasons why I genuinely believe GitLab is different:\n\n1. **No more context switching** - Your planning, coding, testing, and\nsecurity all happen in one place.\n\n2. **Everything's connected** - You can trace work from the big epic down to\nthe code and deployment.\n\n3. **Everyone's on the same page** - Developers, product folks, and security\nteams all work together in the same tool.\n\n4. **Total visibility** - Stakeholders have one place to check for\nupdates.\n\n5. **The full picture** - You see planning and development metrics together,\nso you know what's really going on.\n\nIf your dev teams already love GitLab, why make them jump to another tool for planning or create some complex, cobbled-together integrations? Bringing your SAFe planning into GitLab creates a much smoother experience for everyone.\n\n## Implementation principles\n\nI've worked with teams transitioning from traditional SAFe tools to GitLab, and here's what I've learned: Focus on **what each ceremony is trying to accomplish**, not on recreating exact replicas of your old tools.\n\nThe teams that get the most out of GitLab are the ones who embrace its native capabilities instead of fighting against them. Yes, it takes some initial work to figure out how to map your SAFe concepts and set up your workflows. But once you do, you'll find your processes actually get simpler rather than more complex.\n\nThe key is defining conventions that everyone follows. Which labels mean what? How will you track teams? What goes in an epic versus an issue? With a little upfront investment in these decisions, you'll end up with an intuitive system that eliminates all that cross-tool coordination overhead.\n\n## Getting started\n\nReady to give this a shot? Here's how to start implementing SAFe in GitLab:\n\n1. **Set up your structure** - Create groups and subgroups that [match your\norganization](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/best-practices-to-set-up-organizational-hierarchies-that-scale/).\n\n2. **Define your work breakdown** - Decide how you'll use\n[epics](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/unlocking-agile-excellence-gitlab-epics-for-seamless-portfolio-management/), [issues](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/issues/managing_issues/), and [tasks](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/tasks/).\n\n3. **Create your iterations** - Set up your [sprint\nschedule](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/group/iterations/#create-an-iteration-cadence).\n\n4. **Add your milestones** -\n[Milestones](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/milestones/#create-a-milestone)\nwill represent your Program Increments in GitLab.\n\n5. **Build your boards** - Create different views for different\nceremonies.\n\n6. **Agree on conventions** - Document how you'll use labels and custom\nfields.\n\nTaking time to think through these decisions upfront will save you many headaches later. And remember, you don't have to perfect it on day one - you can always adjust as you learn.\n\n## Bringing it all together\n\nGitLab gives you a solid foundation for running SAFe, especially if your dev teams are already GitLab fans. When you bring planning and development into the same tool, you eliminate those painful handoffs, make collaboration way easier, and get everything moving faster.\n\nThe beauty of GitLab's planning tools is that they're flexible enough to adapt to your specific flavor of SAFe. You're not locked into rigid workflows - you can evolve your approach as your teams mature and your needs change.\n\n> Ready to see how much better life is without those planning silos? [Start\nyour free trial today](https://about.gitlab.com/free-trial/) and experience firsthand how GitLab can transform your SAFe implementation.\n\n*💡 If you liked this topic check out this related post - [GitLab for Agile\nSoftware\nDevelopment](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-for-agile-software-development/)*\n",[23,25,24,713,742],"tutorial",{"slug":744,"featured":28,"template":13},"safe-without-silos-in-gitlab",{"promotions":746},[747,761,772],{"id":748,"categories":749,"header":751,"text":752,"button":753,"image":758},"ai-modernization",[750],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":754,"config":755},"Get your AI maturity score",{"href":756,"dataGaName":757,"dataGaLocation":242},"/assessments/ai-modernization-assessment/","modernization assessment",{"config":759},{"src":760},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/qix0m7kwnd8x2fh1zq49.png",{"id":762,"categories":763,"header":764,"text":752,"button":765,"image":769},"devops-modernization",[713,557],"Are you just managing tools or shipping innovation?",{"text":766,"config":767},"Get your DevOps maturity score",{"href":768,"dataGaName":757,"dataGaLocation":242},"/assessments/devops-modernization-assessment/",{"config":770},{"src":771},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138785/eg818fmakweyuznttgid.png",{"id":773,"categories":774,"header":776,"text":752,"button":777,"image":781},"security-modernization",[775],"security","Are you trading speed for security?",{"text":778,"config":779},"Get your security maturity score",{"href":780,"dataGaName":757,"dataGaLocation":242},"/assessments/security-modernization-assessment/",{"config":782},{"src":783},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/p4pbqd9nnjejg5ds6mdk.png",{"header":785,"blurb":786,"button":787,"secondaryButton":792},"Start building faster today","See what your team can do with the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps.\n",{"text":788,"config":789},"Get your free trial",{"href":790,"dataGaName":49,"dataGaLocation":791},"https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_content=default-saas-trial&glm_source=about.gitlab.com/","feature",{"text":494,"config":793},{"href":53,"dataGaName":54,"dataGaLocation":791},1772652062810]