Leading SAFe Summary
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Business Agility: Ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market
changes and emerging opportunities with innovative business solutions. Goal of SAFe is to master the
core competencies to scale Business Agility.
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Agile: Iterative and incremental approach to performing product development work to accelerate
delivery and be more adaptable to changing priorities
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Core Competencies of a Lean Agile Enterprise (7):
o Lean Agile Leadership: Mindset & Principles, Lead by Example, Lead Change
o Continuous Learning Culture: Learning Organization, Relentless Improvement, Innovation
Culture
o Team and Technical Agility: Agile Teams, Built-In Quality, Team of Agile Teams
o Agile Product Delivery: Customer Centricity & Design Thinking, Develop on Cadence & Release
on Demand, DevOps & the Continuous Learning Pipeline
o Enterprise Solution Delivery: Lean System & Solution Engineering, Coordinating Trains &
Suppliers, Continually Evolving Live Systems
o Lean Portfolio Management: Strategy & Investment Funding, Lean Governance, Agile Portfolio
Operations
o Organizational Agility: Lean-Thinking People & Agile Teams, Strategy Agility, Lean Business
Operations
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SAFe Principles (10): https://www.scaledagileframework.com/safe-lean-agile-principles/
1. Take an Economic View: Deliver early and often, Deliver value incrementally
2. Apply Systems Thinking: Optimize the whole – improve flow through identifying delays
3. Assume Variability; Preserve Options: Flexible requirements & design, Cone of uncertainty
4. Build Incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles: PDCA (Plan Do Check Adjust), Integrate
5. Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems: Progress, Product & Process
6. Visualize & limit WIP, reduce batch size, & manage queue lengths: Throughput & Predictability
7. Apply Cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning: System needs to iterate, align with
cross domain planning – PI Planning
8. Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers: Provide Autonomy with Purpose,
Mission, and Minimum Possible Constraints
9. Decentralize decision making: Frequent, Time Critical and Local Information
10. Organize around value: Work as a network around value streams
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SAFE Core Values (4): Built-in Quality, Program Execution, Alignment, Transparency
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SAFe House of Lean: Deliver value with the shortest sustainable lead time and highest quality
o Foundation: Leadership
o Pillars: Respect for People & Culture, Innovation, Flow, Relentless Improvement
o Roof: Value
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Agile values (4):
o Individuals & interactions over processes & tools
o Working software over comprehensive documentation
o Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
o Responding to change over following a plan
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Agile Principles (12): https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
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Agile Teams: 5-11 members, self-organizing, cross functional, optimized for communication, able to
define, build, test and possibly deploy value
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ARTs: Team of Agile teams that are working on common mission (5-12 teams, 50-125 people)
Level
Team
Program/Release
Train
Agile Release Train
Features (Benefit
Hypothesis &
Acceptance
Criteria)
Release Train
Engineer
Product
Management
Solution *
Portfolio
Structure
Items in Backlog/
Kanban
Agile Team
User stories (As
a.. I need.. so
that..)
Solution Train
Capabilities
Value Stream
Epics
Coach/Facilitator/
Servant Leader
Owner
(Represents
customer)
Size
Architect
Scrum Master
Solution Train
Engineer
Solution
Management
NA
5-11 people
NA
5-12 teams
System Architect
Multiple Value Streams
Enterprise Architect
Backlog (BL)
Cadence
Team BL
Iteration (2-4w)
Program BL
Program
Increment (8-12w)
Events
Iteration
Planning,
Iteration Review,
Iteration Retro,
Daily Stand Up,
BL refinement
PI Planning,
System Demo,
Inspect & Adapt,
Pre PI Planning,
ART Sync (SoS &
PO Sync)
Multiple ARTs
Solution
Architect
Solution BL
Program
Increment (8-12
w)
Pre/Post PI
Planning
Product Owner
~
Enterprise/Government
Portfolio BL
NA
Portfolio Sync,
Strategic Review
* Out of scope
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Value Stream: Sequence of steps from trigger to providing value to the user; maps to a team/or an
ART/or a Solution train
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Types of Teams (Team Topologies)
o Stream-aligned team – organized around the flow of work and has the ability to deliver value
directly to the Customer or end user.
o Complicated subsystem team – organized around specific subsystems that require deep
specialty skills and expertise.
o Platform team – organized around the development and support of platforms that provide
services to other teams.
o Enabling team – organized to assist other teams with specialized capabilities and help them
become proficient in new technologies.
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Customer centricity (mindset) & Design thinking tools:
o User Personas, Empathy Mapping, Customer Journey Mapping and Story Maps
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WSJF: Weighted shortest job first (prioritize things with higher cost of delay, which take less time)
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Cost of delay: User business value, Time criticality, Risk reduction & opportunity enablement
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PI Planning session:
o Inputs: Vision, Top features
o Outputs: Objectives with assigned business value by Business Owners, Program Board (features
+ dependencies)
o Manage Risk: ROAM (Resolved, Owned, Accepted, Mitigated)
o Confidence vote: Fist of five – each member of the train gets a single vote
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Inspect & Adapt:
o PI System Demo: Led by PM, POs, System Team (vs. System Demo – every iteration)
o Quantitative & Qualitative Measurement: Program Predictability Measure
o Problem-Solving Workshop (6): Agree on Problem, Root Cause Analysis (5 whys), Pareto
Analysis, Restate Problem, Brainstorm Solutions, Identify Improvement Backlog Items
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IP Iteration: Innovation, Planning, Estimating guard band
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DevOps: Agile approach to bridge the gap between dev and ops to enable continuous delivery
o SAFe approach: Culture, Automation, Lean Flow, Measurement, Recovery
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Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP): Exploration, Integration, Deployment to enable Release on
Demand. Key is decoupling deployment from release to be able to release in alignment with business
needs. Enables continuous learning.
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Enterprise Strategy Formulation: Can be many possible inputs, but outputs are always the same –
Portfolio Budgets and Strategic Themes
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Strategic Themes: Specific, differentiating objectives connecting the portfolio to the enterprise
strategy
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Epic: Significant initiative that needs a business case, Epic Hypothesis Statement, Lean Startup Cycle
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Portfolio Kanban: Managed by Lean Portfolio Management. Epics flow through Portfolio Kanban.
o Funnel – All ideas welcome here – business opportunities, cost savings, etc
o Reviewing – Epics are pulled here when Epic owner is available – WIP limited
o Analyzing – Epics are pulled here when Epic owner has capacity – WIP limited
o Portfolio Backlog – Epics are pulled here when a “go” decision is made by LPM
o Implementing –
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MVP - Epics are pulled here when capacity and budget is available to build MVP
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Persevere – Epics are pulled here when MVP hypothesis is proven true
o Done – Epics are pulled here when LPM governance is no longer required
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Lean Budgets: Fund value streams, and dynamic budgets
o Focus: Align lean-agile development with business strategy
o Guardrails:
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Investment horizons – Allocating a % of budget to all 4 horizons
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Business Owner engagement – BO’s actively participate in PI Planning, Demos, etc
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Approve Epic initiatives – Set an epic threshold that business needs will be measured
against
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Capacity Allocation – Allocating a % of capacity to both business and enabler epics
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Leading by example: Modeling SAFe’s mindset, principles and values with Authenticity, Emotional
Intelligence, Lifelong learning, Growing others, Decentralized decision making
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Leading the change: Kotter’s 8 steps of change management
1. Establishing a sense of urgency
2. Creating the guiding coalition
3. Developing a vision and strategy
4. Communicating the change vision
5. Empowering employees for broad-based action
6. Generating short-term wins
7. Consolidating gains and producing more change
8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture
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Implementation Roadmap: Sequence of 12 steps that are proven to be effective in successfully
implementing SAFe that the LACE and organization would follow to implement SAFe:
https://www.scaledagileframework.com/implementation-roadmap/
1. Reaching the Tipping Point
2. Train Lean-Agile Change Agents
3. Train Executives, Managers, and Leaders
4. Create a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (may happen before/during the previous steps, as they
guide the implementation)
5. Identify Value Streams and ARTs
6. Create the Implementation Plan
7. Prepare for ART Launch
8. Train Teams and Launch the ART
9. Coach ART Execution
10. Launch More ARTs and Value Streams
11. Extend to the Portfolio
12. Accelerate