SAFE5
Dual Operating System
"'dual operating system' (Figure 5), restores the speed and innovation of the entrepreneurial network while leveraging the benefits and stability of the hierarchical system.
Agile Portfolio Operations
"Agile Portfolio Operations coordinates and supports decentralized program execution, enabling operational excellence. It requires the cooperation of the Agile Program Management Office/Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (APMO/LACE) and Communities of Practice (CoPs) for Release Train Engineers (RTEs) and Scrum Masters. Lean Governance manages spending, audit and compli
Agile Teams
"Agile Teams - High-performing, cross-functional teams anchor the competency by applying effective Agile principles and practices.
Lean System and Solution Engineering
"Applies lean agile practices to aling and coordinate alll activites necessary to specify architecht, design, implement, test , deploy, evolve and ultimately decmission these systems
Metrics
"Metrics - The primary measure in SAFe is the objective measurement of working solutions. Moreover, SAFe defines some additional intermediate and long-term measures as well, metrics that teams, programs, and portfolios can use to measure progress.
Milestones
"Milestones - A milestone is used to track progress toward a specific goal or event. SAFe describes fixed-date, Program Increment (PI) and learning milestones.
Enterprise Solution Delivery
"Building and evolving large, enterprise solutions is a monumental effort. Many such systems require hundreds or thousands of engineers. They demand sophisticated, rigorous practices for engineering, operations, and support. Moreover, over the decades that these systems are operational, their purpose and mission evolve. That calls for new capabilities, technology upgrades, security patches, and other enhancements. As true 'living systems,' the activities above are never really 'done.' Instead, they are released earlier and further developed over time. The Enterprise Solution Delivery competency describes how to apply Lean-Agile principles and practices to the specification, development, deployment, operation, and evolution of the world's largest and most sophisticated software applications, networks, and cyber-physical systems. It consists of three dimensions. (Figure 10).
Built in Quality
"Built-in Quality - All Agile teams apply defined Agile practices to create high-quality, well-designed solutions that support current and future business needs
Agile Product Delivery
"Business Agility demands that enterprises rapidly increase their ability to deliver innovative products and services. To be sure, the enterprise is creating the right solutions for the right customers at the right time; they must balance their execution focus with a customer focus. These capabilities are mutually supportive and create opportunities for sustained market and service leadership. Agile Product Delivery is a customer-centric approach to defining, building, and releasing a continuous flow of valuable products and services to customers and users. There are three dimensions to Agile Product Delivery, as illustrated in Figure 9.
Business Agility
"Business Agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative business solutions. Business Agility requires that everyone involved in delivering solutions—business and technology leaders, development, IT operations, legal, marketing, finance, support, compliance, security, and others—use Lean and Agile practices to continually deliver innovative, high-quality products and services faster than the competition.
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"By organizing the second operating system around value streams instead of departments, SAFe offers a way for enterprises to focus on customers, products, innovation, and growth (Figure 6).oreover, this operating system is flexible. It is built on time tested Lean, Agile, and SAFe practices, and it can organize and quickly reorganize without completely disrupting the existing hierarchy. That's what Business Agility demands.
Community of Practice (CoP)
"Community of Practice (CoP) - A community of practice is an informal group of team members and other experts, acting within the context of a program or enterprise, that has a mission of sharing practical knowledge in one or more relevant domains.
Continuous Learning Culture
"Continuous Learning Culture And even with mastery of the above, there can be no steady-state. Startup companies will continue to challenge the status quo. Juggernaut companies like Amazon and Google are entering entirely new markets such as banking and healthcare. Expectations from new generations of workers, customers, and society as a whole challenges companies to think and act beyond balance sheets and quarterly earnings reports. To address the demand for continuous learning, growth of its people, and improvement in processes, the Continuous Learning Culture competency describes a set of values and practices that encourage individuals—and the enterprise as a whole—
Coordinatng Training and suppliers
"Coordinates and aligns the extended set of value streasms to share business and technology mission. It uses the coordinated Vision, Backlogs , and Roadmaps with Common Program Increments (PI) and sychronization points.
Core Values
"Core Values - Four core values of Alignment, Built-In Quality, Transparency, and Program Execution define the belief and value system for SAFe.
Customer Centricity and Design Thinking
"Customer centricity puts the customer at the center of every decision and uses design thinking to ensure the solution is desirable, feasible, viable, and sustainable.
Dev Ops and Continuous delivery Pipeline
"DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline creates the foundation that enables enterprises to release value, in whole or in part, at any time it's needed.
Develop on Cadence ; Release on Demand
"Developing on cadence helps manage the variability inherent in product development. Decoupling the release of value from that cadence ensures customers can get what they need when they need it.
Essential SAFE the Essential SAFe Configuratoin
"Essential SAFe The Essential SAFe configuration is the basic building block for all SAFe configurations and is the simplest starting point for implementation. It is built on the principles and practices found in the Lean-Agile Leadership competency, the Team and Technical Agility competency, and the Agile Product Delivery competency. SAFe is anchored by an organizational structure called the Agile Release Train (ART), where Agile teams, key stakeholders, and other resources are dedicated to an important, ongoing solution mission. Essential SAFe includes the ART constructs, as shown in Figure 4
Full SAFe
"Full SAFe Full SAFe is the most comprehensive configuration, including all seven core competencies needed for business agility. It is used by the world's largest enterprises to maintain portfolios of large and complex solutions. In some cases, multiple instances of various SAFe configurations may be required.
Implementation Roadmap
"Implementation Roadmap - Implementing the changes necessary to become a Lean-Agile technology enterprise is a substantial change for most companies. SAFe provides an implementation roadmap to help guide organizations on this journey.
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"Organizational Agility Even with the competencies above, the enterprises must be able to change quickly to respond to the challenges and opportunities that today's rapidly evolving markets present. This requires more flexibility and adaptability than the hierarchical operating system is likely to be able to muster. Again, we turn to the second operating system for help. SAFe helps businesses address these challenges with Organizational Agility, which is expressed in three dimensions (Figure 12):
Improves System Development Outcomes
"Improves System Development Outcomes Created from over a decade of field experience, SAFe draws from four primary bodies of knowledge: Agile development, systems thinking, Lean product development, and DevOps. It helps enterprises answer the following types of questions: How do we align technology development to strategic business goals? How do we deliver new value on a predictable schedule so that the rest of the business can plan? How do we improve the quality of our solutions and delight our customers? How do we scale Agile practices from the team to the program and business unit, and across the enterprise, to deliver better results? How do we organize people around value so that our programs deliver effectively and avoid the delays inherent in a traditional, functional structure? How do we create an environment that fosters collaboration, innovation, and relentless improvement for our people? How can we change our culture so that it is safe to fail? How do we encourage people to take risks, to think creatively, and embrace continuous learning? How can we help our teams improve without getting in the way? By adopting SAFe—and applying its well-described set of values, principles, and practices—the enterprise can address these questions and realize greater business and individual benefits. SAFe 5.0 enables business agility and improving business outcomes for organizations of all sizes across the world. SAFe has produced dramatic improvements in time to market, employee engagement, higher quality, higher customer satisfaction, and overall improved economic outcomes. It also helps create cultures that are more productive, rewarding, and fun. Figure 1 highlights these benefits as derived directly from Case Studies written by SAFe customers. We had multiple waterfall efforts, third-party integration, and a hard, regulatory mandate that made coordination and execution exceptionally difficult. SAFe provided the agility, visibility, and transparency needed to ensure we could integrate with the numerous other efforts, get predictable in our delivery, and ensure timelines are met." — David McMunn, the Director of Fannie Mae's Agile Center of Excellence (COE)
Innovation Culture
"Innovation Culture - Employees are encouraged and empowered to explore and implement creative ideas that enable future value delivery.
Introduction to SAFE 5.0
"Introduction to SAFe 5.0 While the benefits are clear, before an enterprise can gain these substantial business benefits, it must transform itself into a Lean enterprise. This transformation requires developing 'enterprise competencies' that enable a new style of leadership, new ways of thinking and working, and a culture focused on value delivery and continuous improvement. SAFe is an extensive body of knowledge that describes the roles, responsibilities, artifacts, and activities necessary to implement enterprise-scale Lean-Agile development. SAFe synchronizes alignment, collaboration, and delivery for large numbers of business and technical Agile teams. Scalable and configurable, SAFe supports smaller-scale solutions employing 50-125 practitioners, as well as complex systems that require thousands of people. The SAFe Framework website features an interactive 'Big Picture' graphic with configuration selector tabs as shown in Figure 2.
Team and technical Agility
"It all starts with Agile development, the cornerstone of Business Agility. The Team and Technical Agility competency describe the critical skills and Lean-Agile principles and practices that high-performing Agile teams and Teams of Agile teams use to create high-quality solutions for their customers. It consists of three dimensions, as illustrated in Figure 8
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"It all starts with Agile development, the cornerstone of Business Agility. The Team and Technical Agility competency describe the critical skills and Lean-Agile principles and practices that high-performing Agile teams and Teams of Agile teams use to create high-quality solutions for their customers. It consists of three dimensions, as illustrated in Figure 8:
Large Solution SAFe
"Large Solution SAFe The Large Solution SAFe configuration introduces the Enterprise Solution Delivery competency, which supports those building the largest and most complex solutions that require multiple Agile Release Trains and Suppliers, but do not require portfolio level considerations. Such solution development is common for industries like aerospace and defense, automotive, and government, where the large solution—not portfolio governance—is the primary concern. The Solution Train organizational construct helps enterprises that face the biggest challenges—building large-scale, multidisciplinary software, hardware, cyber-physical, and complex IT systems. Developing these solutions requires additional roles, artifacts, events, and coordination, as Figure 5 illustrates
Lean Business Operations
"Lean Business Operations - Teams apply Lean principles to understand, map, and continuously improve the business processes that support the business's products and services.
Lean Governancy
"Lean Governance manages spending, audit and compliance, forecasting expenses, and measurement. It requires the engagement of the Agile PMO/LACE, Business Owners, and Enterprise Architects.
Lean User Experience (UX)
"Lean User Experience (UX) - Lean UX is the application of Lean principles to user experience design. It uses an iterative, hypothesis-driven approach to product development, through constant measurement and learning loops (build-measure-learn).
The Spanning Palette
"Lean-Agile Leaders - Management has the ultimate responsibility for business outcomes. Leaders are trained in SAFe, and in turn become trainers of, these leaner and agiler ways of thinking and operating. To this end, SAFe describes a new style of leadership exhibited by the enterprise's new 'lean-thinking manager-teachers'.
Lean-Agile Leadership
"Lean-Agile Leadership Finally, we recognize that an organization's managers, executives, and other leaders provide the foundation ultimately responsible for the adoption and success of Lean-Agile development and mastery of the competencies that lead to Business Agility. Only they have the authority to change and continuously improve the systems that govern how work is performed. Only they can create an environment that encourages high-performing Agile teams to flourish and produce value. Leaders, therefore, must internalize and model leaner ways of thinking and operating so that team members will learn from their example, coaching, and encouragement. By helping leaders develop along three dimensions, as illustrated in Figure 14, organizations can establish the core competency of Lean-Agile Leadership
Lean-Agile Mindset
"Lean-Agile Mindset - Lean-Agile Leaders are lifelong learners and teachers that understand, embrace and foster Lean and Agile principles and practices across the enterprise
Lean-Thinking People and Agile Teams
"Lean-Thinking People and Agile Teams - This state occurs when everyone involved in solution delivery is trained in Lean and Agile methods and embraces and embodies the values, principles, and practices.
Learning Organization
"Learning Organization - Employees at every level are learning and growing so that the organization can transform and adapt to an ever-changing world.
Portfolio Safe
"Portfolio SAFe The Portfolio SAFe configuration is the minimum set of competencies and practices that can fully enable business agility in the Lean enterprise, as indicated by the blue 'Business Agility' bar at the top. This bar also includes a link to Measure & Grow for guidance on conducting SAFe business agility assessments. Portfolio SAFe provides three additional competencies beyond the three core competencies of Essential SAFe. Lean Portfolio Management aligns portfolio execution to enterprise strategy and organizes development around the flow of value through one or more value streams. Organization Agility extends Lean thinking and practice throughout the enterprise and enables strategy agility. Continuous Learning Culture describes how everyone in the organization learns together, relentlessly improves together, and builds innovation into the culture. In addition to the competencies, Portfolio SAFe provides principles and practices for portfolio strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and Lean governance. In the large Enterprise, there may be multiple SAFe portfolios.
Relentless Improvement
"Relentless Improvement - Every part of the enterprise focuses on continuously improving its solutions, products, and processes.
Roadmap
"Roadmap - The roadmap communicates planned ART and value stream deliverables and milestones over a timeline.
SAFE 5.0
"SAFe 5.0 continues to expand guidance for Lean-Agile adoption in Government. Based on the foundation and principles of SAFe, the guidance emphasizes: Building on a solid foundation of Lean-Agile values, principles, and practice Creating high performing teams of government teams and contractor personnel Aligning technology investments with agency strategy Transitioning from projects to a Lean flow of epics Adopting Lean budgeting aligned to value streams Applying Lean estimating and forecasting on cadence Modifying acquisition practices to enable Lean-Agile development and operations Building in quality and compliance Adapting governance practices to support agility and Lean flow of value The government link is unique within the framework in that it not only provides access to a series of articles on SAFe adoption in the public sector, it also provides links to powerful resources, videos, and events specifically related to Agile adoption in government. Many of these resources are hard to find, and some are not available anywhere on the public internet other than through our government portal. This is a small way SAI gives back to the thousands of dedicated civil servants and their industry partners who are working tirelessly to bring agility to government.
SAFe 5.0 continues to expand guidance for Lean-Agile adoption in Government
"SAFe 5.0 continues to expand guidance for Lean-Agile adoption in Government. Based on the foundation and principles of SAFe, the guidance emphasizes: Building on a solid foundation of Lean-Agile values, principles, and practice Creating high performing teams of government teams and contractor personnel Aligning technology investments with agency strategy Transitioning from projects to a Lean flow of epics Adopting Lean budgeting aligned to value streams Applying Lean estimating and forecasting on cadence Modifying acquisition practices to enable Lean-Agile development and operations Building in quality and compliance Adapting governance practices to support agility and Lean flow of value The government link is unique within the framework in that it not only provides access to a series of articles on SAFe adoption in the public sector, it also provides links to powerful resources, videos, and events specifically related to Agile adoption in government. Many of these resources are hard to find, and some are not available anywhere on the public internet other than through our government portal. This is a small way SAI gives back to the thousands of dedicated civil servants and their industry partners who are working tirelessly to bring agility to government.
SAFe Principles
"SAFe Principles - SAFe practices are grounded in ten principles that synthesize Agile methods, Lean product development, DevOps, systems thinking, and decades of field experience.
SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs)
"SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs) - SPCs are change agents who combine their technical knowledge of SAFe with an intrinsic motivation to improve their company's software and systems development processes.
SAFe for Lean Enterprises 5.0
"SAFe® for Lean Enterprises 5.0 SAFe for Lean Enterprises is a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles, practices, and competencies for Lean, Agile, and DevOps. The goal of a Lean enterprise is to become a thriving digital age business that delivers competitive systems and solutions to its customers in the shortest sustainable lead time. The Scaled Agile Framework applies the power of Agile, along with the contemporary knowledge found in systems thinking and Lean product development to help businesses address the significant challenges of developing and delivering enterprise-class technology-based solutions with high quality and fast time-to-market. It is an online knowledge base of proven success patterns for achieving business agility.
Seven Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise
"Seven Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise SAFe 5.0 is built around the Seven Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise. These competencies include major re-writes to the original five competencies introduced in SAFe 4.6, along with two entirely new competencies (Organizational Agility and Continuous Learning Culture). The competencies are the primary lens for understanding and implementing SAFe, as illustrated in the Overview tab on the Big Picture. Each Lean Enterprise competency is a set of related knowledge, skills, and behaviors, which together enable enterprises to achieve business agility by delivering the best quality and value in shortest sustainable lead time. Each competency is summarized below.
Shared Services
"Shared Services - Represents the specialty roles that are necessary for the success of an ART or Solution Train, but that cannot be dedicated full time to any specific train.
Stategy Agility
"Strategy Agility - This state occurs when the enterprise shows the ability and adaptability needed to sense the market and quickly change strategy when necessary continuously.
System Team
"System Team - The system team is a special Agile team that provides assistance in building and using the continuous delivery pipeline, and where necessary, validating full end-to-end system performance.
Team of Agile Teams
"Team of Agile Teams - Agile teams operate within the context of a SAFe Agile Release Train (ART), a long-lived, team of Agile teams that provides a shared vision and direction and is ultimately responsible for delivering solution outcome
The Agile Product Delivery
"The Agile Product Delivery competency is a customer-centric approach to defining, building and releasing a continuous flow of valuable products and services to customers and users. This enables the organization to provide solutions that delight customers, lower development costs, reduce risk, and outmaneuver the competition.
The business Benefits of SAFe
"The Business Benefits of SAFe "With a proven framework, we can deliver solutions much faster and with less effort. SAFe defines the roles, teams, activities, and artifacts to apply Lean and Agile principles at enterprise scale, and provides outstanding training and coaching materials to increase our chance of success." —Peter Vollmer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Distinguished Technologist Enterprises must learn how to adapt quickly to changing technology and economic conditions or they will become extinct — no matter their size, strength, or how smart they are. Business agility isn't an option, it's imperative. Even businesses that don't consider themselves Information Technology (IT) or software companies—professional services, financial services, manufacturers, healthcare institutions, defense contractors, government agencies, and more—are now all highly dependent on their ability to rapidly produce new, high-quality, innovative technology-based products and services. It is the mission of Scaled Agile, Inc. (SAI) to assist these enterprises with the growth of their digital business through the development and publication of the SAFe knowledge base, as well as accompanying certification, training, courseware, community resources, and a global network of more than 280 tooling and service partners.
The Continuous Learning Culture
"The Continuous Learning Culture competency describes a set of values and practices that encourage individuals—and the enterprise as a whole—to continually increase knowledge, competence, performance, and innovation. This is achieved by becoming a learning organization, committing to relentless improvement, and promoting a culture of innovation.
The Entrerprise Solution Delivery
"The Enterprise Solution Delivery competency describes how to apply Lean-Agile principles and practices to the specification, development, deployment, operation, and evolution of the world's largest and most sophisticated software applications, networks, and cyber-physical systems.
The Spanning Palette
"The Foundation The Foundation contains the supporting principles, values, mindset, implementation guidance, and leadership roles needed to deliver value successfully at scale. Each foundation element, as shown in Figure 9, is briefly described below.
The Lean Portfolio Management
"The Lean Portfolio Management competency aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance. These collaborations give the enterprise the ability to align strategy to execution, to meet existing commitments reliably, and to better enable innovation
The Lean-Agile Leadership
"The Lean-Agile Leadership competency describes how Lean-Agile Leaders drive and sustain organizational change by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential. They do this through leading by example, adopting a Lean-Agile mindset, and leading the change to a new way of working. The result is more engaged employees, increased productivity and innovation, and successful organizational change.
The Organizational Agility
"The Organizational Agility competency describes how Lean-thinking people and Agile teams optimize their business processes, evolve strategy with clear and decisive new commitments, and quickly adapt the organization as needed to capitalize on new opportunities.
The Spanning Palette
"The Spanning Palette The Spanning Palette contains various roles and artifacts that may apply to a specific team, program, large solution, or portfolio context. An essential element of SAFe's flexibility and configurability, the spanning palette permits organizations to apply only the items needed for their configuration. Figure 8 illustrates two versions of the spanning palette. Figure 8. Spanning Palette The leftmost figure is used by the Essential SAFe configuration, while the rightmost one serves all other configurations. However, since SAFe is a framework, enterprises can apply any of the elements from the larger spanning palette to Essential SAFe.
The Team and Technical Agility
"The Team and Technical Agility competency describes the critical skills and Lean-Agile principles and practices that high-performing Agile teams and Teams of Agile teams use to create high-quality solutions for their customers. The result is increased productivity, better quality, faster time-to-market, and predictable delivery of value.
Lean Portfolion managgment
"The three competencies above provide the technical practices needed to build and deploy meaningful business solutions. But none of them directly address the more significant issue of why those solutions are required, how they are funded and governed, and what other solutions are necessary to deliver complete enterprise value. For that, we need to address portfolio concerns. However, traditional approaches to portfolio management were not designed for the impact of digital disruption. These factors put pressure on enterprises to work under a higher degree of uncertainty, and yet deliver innovative solutions much faster. Portfolio Management approaches must be modernized to support the new Lean-Agile way of working. The Lean Portfolio Management competency aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking. As Figure 11 illustrates, it accomplishes this through three collaborations for strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and Lean governance.
Strategy and investiment Funding
"ensures that the entire portfolio is aligned and funded to create and maintain the solutions needed to meet business targets. It requires the cooperation of Business Owners, portfolio stakeholders, technologists, and Enterprise Architects.
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Business Agility: Enterprise Solution/ Agile Product Delivery/Team and Technial Agility/ Lean Agile Leadership Meeasure & Grow: Lean Porfolio/Organizational Agility/ Continuuous Learning Culture
Continually evovle live systems
Ensures bot hthe development pipleine and large systems themselves support continuous delivery of value, both during and after, relesae int the field.
