Staying SAFe with AI

By Steve Mayner

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 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 

By Rebecca Davis

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

By Rebecca Davis

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

By Cheryl Crupi

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.

SAFe Studio Integration

By Harry Koehnemann

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

Unleashing the Power of Solution Vision

By Cheryl Crupi

I am excited to tell you about the new Solution Vision article released today. Having a vision matters to me. I am motivated by a compelling picture of the future and by confidence that my work advances a purpose I believe in. Equally, I find an artfully expressed vision that lacks practical guidance frustrating and unactionable. As an executive and a coach, I found this true of all leaders and contributors in all environments. The art and practice of expressing

Coaching Flow: New Extended Guidance Article

Delivering a continuous flow of value to the customer is one of the defining characteristics of an effective SAFe enterprise. However, flow is not easy to achieve, and many impediments occur along the way. Success requires a knowledge of what flow is and how to achieve it. In turn, this requires people knowledgeable in flow who can coach individuals, teams, and trains—and even LPM—to achieve a higher flow of value. This responsibility can be fulfilled by any number of different

Decentralizing Control: The Secret to Enterprise Value Flow?

The recent release of SAFe 6.0 focused on several major themes. These included helping enterprises to address the new challenges of AI, Big Data, and Cloud; delivering better outcomes with Measure and Grow and OKRs; and extending SAFe across the business. These are pretty essential topics, and we hear how valuable this content is to the enterprise. But we also reflected deeply on the very essence of Agile development, and the heart of that is the Agile team. Indeed if

New updates to Solution and Solution Context

Relentless improvement is a critical tenet of Lean, Agile, and a SAFe Core Value, and we strive to embody those values in the Framework. With this in mind, we are excited to announce updates to the Solution and Solution Context articles. In SAFe, Solutions deliver the Portfolio’s value. Therefore, understanding solutions and their properties is critical to accelerating value delivery. It’s the central thing that delivers value, and most of our work revolves around it. Figure 1 below shows how

Page 1 Page 2