We have updated the Portfolio guidance article! A SAFe Portfolio is a set of Development Value Streams that deliver a continuous flow of valuable solutions to customers. Enterprises with well-formed portfolios utilizing Lean Portfolio Management practices reap multiple benefits, including optimization of people’s focus, enhanced strategic alignment, value-aligned decision-making, and transparency in delivery. Additionally, the portfolio facilitates the decentralization of decision-making by providing essential funding, strategic intent, and the minimum necessary governance. It ensures that development value streams focus on building the
Category: SAFe Framework Updates
Gaining Competitive Advantage with Strategic Themes
We are excited to tell you about the new Strategic Themes article released today! For such a seemingly simple artifact, strategic themes play an absolutely critical role in SAFe. They help align strategy to execution and help ensure the portfolio’s value streams achieve the enterprise objectives. Strategic Themes are a set of short, pithy statements that summarize critical elements of enterprise strategy that are relevant to a specific SAFe portfolio. As such, they can be difficult to define and document.
SAFe Studio Integration
We are excited to announce a new integration between the SAFe Framework and SAFe Studio. This is the next step in providing you with a SAFe System to support your journey towards business agility. While the SAFe Framework is freely available, integrating the Framework with additional resources for learning, implementing, and practicing SAFe supports enterprises in putting SAFe to work. Updated Navigation This blog introduces the new SAFe Studio Navigation and how Framework users can leverage it to find the
Unleashing the Power of Solution Vision
I am excited to tell you about the new Solution Vision article released today. Having a vision matters to me. I am motivated by a compelling picture of the future and by confidence that my work advances a purpose I believe in. Equally, I find an artfully expressed vision that lacks practical guidance frustrating and unactionable. As an executive and a coach, I found this true of all leaders and contributors in all environments. The art and practice of expressing
Coaching Flow: New Extended Guidance Article
Delivering a continuous flow of value to the customer is one of the defining characteristics of an effective SAFe enterprise. However, flow is not easy to achieve, and many impediments occur along the way. Success requires a knowledge of what flow is and how to achieve it. In turn, this requires people knowledgeable in flow who can coach individuals, teams, and trains—and even LPM—to achieve a higher flow of value. This responsibility can be fulfilled by any number of different
Decentralizing Control: The Secret to Enterprise Value Flow?
The recent release of SAFe 6.0 focused on several major themes. These included helping enterprises to address the new challenges of AI, Big Data, and Cloud; delivering better outcomes with Measure and Grow and OKRs; and extending SAFe across the business. These are pretty essential topics, and we hear how valuable this content is to the enterprise. But we also reflected deeply on the very essence of Agile development, and the heart of that is the Agile team. Indeed if
New updates to Solution and Solution Context
Relentless improvement is a critical tenet of Lean, Agile, and a SAFe Core Value, and we strive to embody those values in the Framework. With this in mind, we are excited to announce updates to the Solution and Solution Context articles. In SAFe, Solutions deliver the Portfolio’s value. Therefore, understanding solutions and their properties is critical to accelerating value delivery. It’s the central thing that delivers value, and most of our work revolves around it. Figure 1 below shows how
Empowering the Knowledge Worker with Updated SAFe Principle 8
While leading the development of SAFe during the last few years, I’ve come to reflect more and more on the inherent nature of agility. While it might appear as “settled law” at this point, the fact is that agility does not seem to be a natural state—whether at the portfolio, large solution, ART, team—or even individual—level. While we generally make great strides forward, and we all receive the benefits of that, I’ve also witnessed new teams struggling to achieve the
Accelerating Value Flow with SAFe 6.0
With its roots in Lean, Agile, and DevOps, SAFe has always been a flow-based system. Empowered, cross-functional Agile teams pull work from an economically prioritized backlog and leverage modern tools to deliver the most value in the shortest time. But the goal of the enterprise isn’t to be Lean, Agile, or have a fully automated DevOps pipeline; the goal is to provide a continuous flow of value to the customer. That is the only way to thrive in the digital
Framework Promotions
Hi Folks, One of the coolest things about our mission at Scaled Agile is that the challenge of ‘helping people build the world’s most important systems’ lays ahead of us and not behind. As we look into the future, we see our customer needs—and the complexity of the systems they build—growing, putting even greater demands on SAFe. To meet these demands, we are evolving the Framework team. My teammates are some of the smartest and wisest people I know so