130. Master the uncertainty through SAFe 6.0
On 15th March, Scaled Agile Framework has launched its 6th version, this marks a major milestone for the world's most trusted system for business agility, born in boulder, back in 2010, based on Dean Leffingwell's book "Agile Software Requirements" .
During 2023 Masterclass, Chris has reminded us this amazing evolution, from 2010 to 2022, SAFe has evolved from 1.0 to 6.0, more than 1 million people are trained with 20.000 companies in over 100+ countries are practicing SAFe.
The pandemic, supply chain interruption and fierce competition on the market have reminder of how the world is changing at a speed that organizations are overwhelmed with.
Meeting the new realities of the marketplace requires SAFe to evolve continuously. While we’ll never lose sight of SAFe’s core benefits, the guidance continually improves to address new and emerging challenges.
Among hundreds of updates, here're few key takeaways. For further information pls. check:
1. Strengthening & simplify the Foundation for Business Agility
In the new version, SAFe has gone back to its roots, the "why", why do we exist as framework and what outcome do we want to achieve:
It's "Business Agility"
"the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative, digitally-enabled business solutions"
If we want to create shortest sustainable lead time with customer delight, then we must improve the entire value stream of business agility.
I very much liked the fact that the lean-agile mindset, values & principles, house of Lean have been consolidated and simplified, not only to make it easier to understand but also the linkage, it would be easier to teach as well.
2. Empowering Teams and Clarifying Responsibilities
Organizations that can guide talented people to play the SAFe roles effectively, tends to have clear ownership and better business impact.
In the past, when people navigate the roles and responsibilities, they are confronted with a long list of activities, and sometimes they are not clearly written, resulting in confusion and ambiguous understanding. In real world, roles and responsibilities impact everyone's working experience and career development, a sensitive yet critical topic to drive cross-functional collaboration.
By introducing the responsibility wheel and key interactions between key roles, it becomes much easier to understand, how different pieces are fitting together.
3. Accelerate Value Flow
ss 2023
The principle 6 of SAFe was used to be:
"Visualize and limit WIP, reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths", this was my favorite principle because it brilliantly summarized the key challenges why large programs are struggling to achieve fast time-to-market.
But this was not good enough from Dean's point of view, he would like to encourage us to think about what are the 8 property of any flow systems? And what we can do to accelerate them.
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The new flow article on Portfolio, ART and Team level, have given clear guidance on how we can apply them in real world.
Kanban articles are rewritten, Built-in Quality page has been extended to make it more context specific, Value stream management is an integrated part of the framework and APMO's responsibility is shifted as VMO (Value Management Office)
4. Enhancing Business Agility with SAFe across the business
Wouldn't it be great, if SAFe Lean-Agile values and principles can be applied across the organization beyond IT? What about executives? What about business? How about functional area such as operation or IT?
Through extensive analysis and customer's feedback, SAFe has identified the following patterns that can help organization to scale agile beyond IT:
5. Building the Future with AI, Big Data, and Cloud
AI (Artificial intelligence) – among 80+% organizations who are using AI, only less than 3% can really harvest the benefit of AI.
Big Data – SAFe addresses Big Data concerns at the portfolio level as it requires vision, investment, and governance at the highest levels in the organization. While ARTs create the data, the value comes from data aggregation at the portfolio and enterprise.
Cloud – The ever-expanding universe of cloud capabilities has fundamentally changed how digitally enabled solutions are built, deployed, and maintained. Cloud computing is the single most disruptive driver of delivery model change that enterprise IT has faced since its inception. Not surprisingly, the number one reason enterprises are moving to the cloud so quickly is to increase product development speed and agility.
6. Delivering Better Outcomes with Measure and Grow and OKRs
Where and how OKR can be used is a common challenge when implementing agile. In the new guidance, 3 use cases are explained how they could be used:
Pls. find the information here
7. Internationalization
For the first time, the "Leading SAFe" is translated in multiple languages that are launched simultaneously, including Portuguese, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish, in order to tailor the work to the need of local customers while using the langugage that is culturally digestable.
It’s always day 1: learn, understand, practice, inspect and adapt, repeat, to become a better version of ourselves. The goal was, is and will not be blindly following SAFe by the book, rather
- solve real business challenge
- elevate organizational capabilities through proven practices
- build Business Agility and Resilience
- accelerate flow of value
- unleash collective intelligence of people
base on Lean-Agile values and principles
Thanks to the hardwork of framework team and valuable feedbacks from the community. SAFe 6.0 is now a better version than ever.
Work differently and build the future.
Source: SAFe Website, SPCT Masterclass 2023, © Scaled Agile, Inc.