What's new in SAFe 4.6?

Hello Everyone,

I’d like to talk to you today about how we can help you assess the health of your DevOps’s implementation. DevOps and the ability to Release on Demand is critical in today’s environment. But embracing DevOps and building a Continuous Delivery Pipeline is a significant journey for most enterprises. How do we know how well we are doing, where we are on this journey, and what the next step toward improvement should be?

In our latest class, SAFe DevOps, we’ve introduced a tool called the SAFe DevOps Health Radar. The health radar was built to help Agile Release Trains assess their ability to Release on Demand. Since the release of the class, we’ve had many requests from participants to help them continue to assess their companies progress outside of the classroom. We’ve worked hard with our partner, Agile Transformations, to improve the assessment, giving it the ability to drill down into the 16 sub-dimensions for DevOps. The result is the latest version shown below.

The maturity in each sub-dimension is scored as ‘Sit, Crawl, Walk, Run, or Fly.’ After the ART or solution train ascertains the problem areas based on its health radar; the next step is to improve the flow, and the assessment provides suggestion on what the next level of maturity entails. Since we’re taking a system’s view; it’s better to move from a ‘crawl’ across the radar to a ‘walk’ across the radar, than improve to ‘fly’ in one sub-dimension while leaving the rest at ‘crawl.’ This concept is important because the best approach is to improve the overall flow of value across the entire Continuous Delivery Pipeline, not just in one sub-dimension.

You can access the Health Radar through the Metrics article on the Framework Website, which contains an excel spreadsheet you can download, or you can go to the Agile Transformation’s website, and try out the SAFe DevOps online assessment at: https://agilityhealthradar.com/safe-devops-assessment.

In my upcoming talk on ‘Extending DevOps to the Full Value Stream’  at the 2018 Global SAFe Summit in Washington, DC, Oct. 1 – 5, attendees will be able to self-assess their ART using the Health Radar. If you haven’t registered for it yet, please join us in Washington, DC by registering here.

I hope this helps you progress on your DevOps journey,

-Inbar and the SAFe Team