In today’s fast-paced business world, it is more important than ever for organizations to quickly adapt to changing economic conditions, emerging technologies, and fleeting opportunities. This response often requires a coordinated effort across multiple portfolios and business units as the entire Enterprise aligns with the work to be done. With this in mind, we are delighted to announce an important update to the Enterprise article. The new Enterprise article now describes Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM), a strategic approach to managing multiple SAFe portfolios
Category: News
Organizing SAFe Portfolios Around Value
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
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.
New Community Contribution: Improving Portfolio Outcomes with Real Options
“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
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
The ‘Color of Money’ Problem: Additional Guidance on Participatory Budgeting
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
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 18-minute Video: Accelerating the Flow of Value with SAFe
SAFe 6.0 emphasizes increasing the Enterprise’s ability to provide a continuous flow of value delivery to its customers. This is accomplished, in part, through new articles on Portfolio , Solution Train, ART, and Team Flow. But the foundation of flow is a restructuring of SAFe Principle #6, which was recast to “Make Value Flow Without Interruptions’. This new principle describes the eight fundamental properties of a value flow system and how each unlocks an opportunity to improve flow through the