This regular evaluation provides the financial, technical, and fitness-for-purpose governance needed to ensure that a continuing investment will produce a commensurate return. With the value stream identified, an evolution to business architecture seeks to understand the capabilities of an organization. Simply put, knowing how each of the processes on the value stream map incrementally supports the delivery of value. Capabilities provide the organization with an as-is view of how the organization operates.
Establish a data sharing and collaboration platform to support the use of data by the Santa Monica Community. Pursue a cloud first strategy for infrastructure to achieve, greater agility, lower cost, and higher resiliency. Successful organizations take a more measured approach, focusing on building depth before breadth.
Atlassian’s new approach to Enterprise Strategy and Planning
Earlier versions of the framework emphasized practices and roles, while the current version places these competencies at the center of the model. An organization might excel in one or scaled agile business strategy integration two areas but still struggle with overall agility if the remaining competencies remain underdeveloped. We are pleased to announce the release of our first State of SAFe Report, which gathered insights from 1,200 global professionals. This report provides a summary and analysis of the feedback from the community gathered in last year’s State of SAFe Survey.
Gartner reports that 80% of organizations are either adopting or planning to adopt agile practices to enhance innovation and better respond to market dynamics. Integrating strategy with Agile development drives more than just efficiency—it fosters adaptability, cross-functional collaboration, and clarity of purpose. With strategic alignment, teams not only deliver faster but also ensure that their efforts reflect the organization’s most important objectives.
You can reinforce your map by fully identifying the people who work within the value stream, the systems that support the value stream, and the people who work on those systems—all as guided by the workshop. But to truly optimize the entire system, you’ll likely need to invest in value stream mapping through and by embracing business architecture practices. In the discipline of business architecture, architects are responsible for mapping an organization’s value streams from macro to micro. For example, a top-level value stream map for a shipping services provider may look something like this.
ARTs operate within a fixed timebox, called a Program Increment (PI), which typically lasts for 8-12 weeks. The information provided in this content is meant for general informational purposes only and should not be regarded as professional guidance for specific business scenarios. It is recommended to consult with a qualified industry expert before acting on this information. The coaches at Agile Velocity are available to address any inquiries you may have. Team up with colleagues, Agile Coaches, and business leaders for periodic discussions on whether efforts still mirror strategic plans. Backlogs, including the Product Backlog in Scrum, shouldn’t be treated as static lists.
The Framework for Business Agility
- Perhaps the most significant challenge organizations face involves leadership buy-in and alignment.
- Users gain up-to-date dashboards and progress indicators that combine data across the enterprise.
- However, even carefully designed strategies can falter when teams that adopt Agile practices operate without considering overarching business aims.
- The goal of SAFe is to synthesize this body of knowledge, along with the lessons learned from hundreds of deployments.
- SAFe incorporates Lean-Agile principles and promotes a strong focus on continuous delivery, integrating DevOps practices for faster, more reliable releases.
Public visualization of goals and tasks helps everyone see who’s doing what—and why it matters. Swap static, long-term forecasts for shorter cycles—monthly or quarterly—to keep strategy in sync with reality. This ensures you can respond promptly to fresh data and maintain a healthy balance between short-term pivots and large-scale targets. Genuine alignment between Agile methods and business aims triggers significant advantages throughout the organization.
Lean Portfolio Management for Strategic Decision-Making
Implementing SAFe requires experienced trainers and coaches, significant commitment, and cultural change. Organizations must be prepared for an initial investment in training and coaching to help teams transition to new ways of working. Additionally, maintaining alignment across a large organization with numerous teams can be challenging and requires strong leadership and coordination.
Path to Agility Navigator for Transformation Precision
- This is not meant to be a replacement framework for anything that currently exists, nor an evolution of those frameworks, but more of a way to bring your existing system of work to life.
- By linking day-to-day outputs to long-term goals, businesses improve collaboration, accelerate value delivery, and become more adept at navigating continuous changes.
- The Continuous Delivery Pipeline in SAFe enables organizations to automate testing, integration, and deployment, which results in reduced time-to-market and improved quality.
- Addressing this challenge requires thoughtful organizational design that balances functional excellence with value delivery.
- This aligns with SAFe’s core principles of “Apply fast, integrated learning cycles”.
One serves as the driver writing the code while the other as the navigator providing real-time review and feedback. The continuous use of data/information/knowledge/skills to support change/improvement/growth/innovation on individual and organization dimensions. Transform paper-based processes into digital workflows and delivery to achieve nimble solutions, greater efficiencies, and increased productivity. Create a culture and mindset for data analysis/application to enable insight and knowledge in support of improved services. Provide an outstanding user experience while striving to increase the speed, quality, and efficacy of services.
Implementing the competencies of SAFe requires a multi-faceted approach that addresses people, processes, and technology. Structured interviews with leaders, teams, and stakeholders to gather qualitative insights about current practices and pain points. Before embarking on any transformation journey, you need to know your starting point.
Capability modeling
Without constant, primarily automated testing, it’s challenging to implement a fast, Continuous Delivery Pipeline and achieve Release on Demand. Learn how executives are transforming agility from a buzzword into a business imperative. Embed agility across your enterprise to drive smarter decisions and real results. Explore expert insights, practical guides, and proven strategies to accelerate transformation and deliver value—faster. Regular assessment against the competency model provides another valuable tracking mechanism. Teams focused on completing predetermined scope rather than adapting to emerging needs, undermining the Organizational Agility competency.
Organizations typically encounter various obstacles that can slow progress or derail transformation efforts entirely. These conversations often reveal disconnects between what leaders think is happening and what teams experience daily. Organizations often struggle with the practical aspects of building these capabilities, particularly when faced with entrenched processes and resistance to change.
SAFe remains the most popular enterprise Agile framework in 2025, combining Agile, Lean, and DevOps principles. It emphasizes alignment, collaboration, and delivery across Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and portfolio layers, enabling organizations to coordinate strategy and execution. It’s also clear that all business and technology domains can benefit by adopting a SAFe Lean-Agile mindset, Core Values, and principles and practices. Each area can use these foundations to discover how this new Agile way of working (see Organizational Agility for more detail) can improve outcomes in every business area. While commonly used frameworks like Scrum and Kanban are typically effective at the team level, SAFe is specifically designed to scale Agile practices across the entire organization. It coordinates multiple Agile teams working on interdependent and interconnected features, which is often a significant challenge for larger organizations.
