SAFe Blog

SAFe Blog

Exciting new book on Industrial DevOps

The Digital Age has disrupted many industries. Streaming services from Netflix and Spotify have replaced traditional media organizations, and e-commerce from Amazon continues to disrupt most retail organizations. These innovative companies used digital technologies to create rapid delivery and feedback loops that enabled them to dominate their respective markets—and created new ways of working that allowed them to achieve substantial business outcomes. The digital age is now disrupting aerospace, defense, automotive, and other industries building large, complex cyber-physical systems.  While

Staying SAFe with AI

No matter where you turn today, everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Just a little more than a year ago, this was a topic reserved for science fiction enthusiasts and tech geeks. Now, whether you are checking your news feed or chatting with friends, AI will inevitably find its way into the conversation. Most of the credit for that shift goes to OpenAI and their decision to release ChatGPT to the world in November 2022. In the 14 months

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

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 Extended Guidance Article: Value Management Office (VMO)

In a historically project-based organization, a Project/Program Management Office (PMO) is often chartered to track and coordinate the delivery of projects, initiatives, and programs an organization may have in flight at any time. A different set of values, mindset, and practices are required when implementing SAFe, which requires the move from temporal projects to long-lived products and from a start-stop approach to flow-based value delivery. The label of Value Management Office (VMO) has been applied to create focus on this

Enterprise Portfolio Management: Strategic Alignment and Collaboration 

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

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