New Guidance for People Managers in SAFe

In this new article, Mikael reflects on his experiences observing people managers as they adapted to the changes in their role as their organizations transitioned to SAFe. The new responsibility wheel for people managers reflects how Mikael has guided these leaders to see their value as they perform the vital role of finding, developing, and unleashing the amazing talent Agile Teams and ARTs need to build the innovative products needed to compete and win in the marketplace.

New Community Contribution Article on Enterprise Strategy Rooms

In SAFe, we describe Enterprise Portfolio Management as a group of people and a set of practices that ensures alignment between a related set of portfolios and the overall enterprise vision and strategy. An effective EPM team enables the highest priority work to have a clear path from strategy and investment planning to execution. This decentralized decision-making enables portfolios to respond to quickly changing customer needs and market environments.

Organizing Teams on the ART with the Team Formation Workshop

In SAFe, we discuss the importance of organizing around value and provide guidance on identifying value streams that span the organization’s functional domains. In fact, running the Value Stream and ART Identification Workshop is a critical first step to ensuring ARTs can build the products their customers desire with minimal dependencies. And that future members of the ART will have all the skills and authority necessary to deliver valuable products continuously. But what’s next? How do we organize an ART

New! Getting Tactical with Organizational Agility: Techniques for Visualizing and Improving Flow

When adopting SAFe, many organizations begin by applying the Implementation Roadmap. They identify a value stream in one part of the organization and launch one or more Agile Release Trains (ARTs) to support it. This typically generates quick wins, leading to more ART launches and ultimately scaling agility across the enterprise. But all too often, critical parts of the organization are not included in this initial rollout. Some departments may be missed when identifying all the skills and authority required

New Community Contribution Article: Building the Change and Communications Competency for Effective ARTs

By Marc Rix

Let’s face it. We’re in the change business, and change is difficult. We transform organizations so that they can win in an age of unprecedented competition, and to transform is to bring about systemic change. We change organizational culture by changing mindsets, values, principles, and behaviors. The result is a new way of working—a new operating system—that enables business agility. But is changing the way of working enough? Perhaps we also need to change the way of changing. In his

New Community Contribution: Improving Portfolio Outcomes with Real Options

By Rebecca Davis

“Never test the depth of the river with both feet.” This saying reminds us of the power of approaching uncertainty through smaller steps of progress, discovery, and adjustments. This idea is integral to SAFe and can be a key tactic to seize opportunities for innovation and growth while decreasing investment risks. Advancing Business Agility requires engagement from all business segments, including HR, Finance, Marketing, etc. Emerging capabilities are needed in finance to enable financing Value Streams and pivot or preserve

The ‘Color of Money’ Problem: Additional Guidance on Participatory Budgeting

By Dean Leffingwell

SAFe Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a powerful tool that Lean Portfolio leaders use to allocate portfolio budgets to value streams. Since its addition to the Framework in SAFe 5.0, PB has helped enterprises make better decisions on billions of dollars in portfolio investments. One of the common assumptions of PB is that the money being used to fund value streams and Epics is free of any constraints in how this money is allocated and that the portfolio team can reallocate