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SAFe for Lean Enterprises is a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles, practices and
competencies for Lean, Agile and DevOps

More than the sum of its parts, SAFe is a scalable and configurable framework that helps organizations
deliver new products, services, and solutions in the shortest sustainable lead time. It’s a system that
guides the roles, responsibilities, and activities necessary to achieve a sustained, competitive
technological advantage.

1.1 Recognize the problem to be solved

1.2 Five Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise

 Lean-Agile Leadership
 Technical and Team Agility
 DevOps and Release on Demand
 Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering
 Lean Portfolio Management

Why SAFe?

Combining the power of Agile with Lean product development, DevOps, and systems thinking, SAFe
synchronizes alignment, collaboration, and delivery for multiple Agile teams. SAFe dramatically improves
business agility by accelerating productivity, time-to-market, quality, employee engagement, and more.
The results can be dramatic, as the benefits from documented case studies summarized in Figure 1
demonstrate.
 10-50% happier, more motivated employees 30-75% faster time to market

20-50% increase in productivity 25-75% defect reduction

Presented to the user in the form of a website—scaledagileframework.com—SAFe features an

interactive ‘Big Picture’ graphic (Figure 2), which provides a visual overview of the Framework along with
organized and directed access to its extensive library of content. Each icon on this graphic is clickable
and links to a supporting article and related resources. The website also includes a variety of additional
advanced topic articles, downloads, presentations, videos, and a glossary that is translated in 10
languages.

SAFe Roots, Past, Present and Future

SAFe 1.0 | 2.0 | 3.0 | LSE| 4.0 | 4.5 | 4.6

SAFe 4.6 introduces the Five Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise—Lean-Agile Leadership, Team and
Technical Agility, DevOps and Release on Demand, Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering, and
Lean Portfolio Management. Each competency is a set of related knowledge, skills, and behaviors that
enable enterprises to achieve the best quality and value in the shortest sustainable lead time. Mastering
the core competencies enables enterprises to successfully respond to volatile market conditions, changing
customer needs, and emerging technologies. Viewing SAFe through the lens of these competencies helps
organizations understand how to approach SAFe adoption in a way that achieves the best possible
business outcomes. Each competency is described in the following sections.

SAFe 4.6 introduces the Five Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise
 Lean-Agile Leadership
 Team and Technical Agility
 DevOps and Release on demand
 Business Solutions and Lean System Engineering
 Lean Portfolio Management

Lean-Agile Leadership
The journey to becoming a Lean enterprise is not simple or easy. Leaders must learn how to teach and
coach, instead of direct and manage. Toyota calls this model of leadership Lean-thinking manager-
teachers—people who understand Lean at a deep level and teach it as part of their daily activities.1
Moreover, as leaders become Lean-thinking manager-teachers, they

 Exemplify the core values

 Embrace a Lean-Agile mindset
 Apply the SAFe principles
 Lead the transformation

The Lean-Agile Leadership competency describes how Lean-Agile leaders drive and sustain organizational
change and operational excellence by empowering individuals and teams to reach their greatest potential.
They do this by learning, exhibiting, teaching, and coaching SAFe’s Lean-Agile Mindset, values, principles,
and practices. Among the five core competencies, Lean-Agile Leadership is foundational. Only an
enterprise’s managers, leaders, and executives can change and continuously improve the systems that
govern how work is performed. Only its leaders can create the environment that encourages high-
performing Agile teams to flourish and produce value.

Figure 3 illustrates two primary aspects of Lean-Agile Leadership: Lean-thinking manager-teachers and
leading the transformation.
Exemplify the core values
SAFe’s four core values guide the transformation and operation of the Lean enterprise. Every leader’s
behavior plays a critical role in communicating, exhibiting, and emphasizing these values.

1. Alignment - Communicate the mission by establishing and expressing the strategy and vision.
Provide relevant briefings and participate in Program Increment (PI) planning and backlog review
and preparation.
2. Built-in Quality - Demonstrate commitment to quality by refusing to accept or ship low-quality
work. Support investments in capacity planning to maintain and reduce technical debt.
3. Transparency - Visualize all relevant work. Take ownership and responsibility for errors and
mistakes. Admit missteps and support others who acknowledge and learn from theirs. Never
punish the messenger; instead, celebrate learning.
4. Program Execution - Many leaders participate specifically as Business Owners in prioritization, PI
execution, and reflection. All leaders help adjust scope to assure demand matches capacity. They
aggressively remove impediments and demotivators.

Embrace a Lean-Agile Mindset

The SAFe Lean-Agile mindset (Figure 4) is the combination of beliefs, assumptions, and actions of leaders
and practitioners who embrace the concepts in the Agile Manifesto and the SAFe House of Lean.

Thinking Lean - The SAFe House of Lean illustrates the various aspects of Lean thinking.

The roof represents the goal of delivering value, while the pillars embody respect for people and culture,
flow, innovation, and relentless improvement to support the goal. Lean-Agile leaders provide the
foundation on which everything else stands.
Embracing Agility - The Agile Manifesto provides a value system and set of 12 principles essential to
successful Agile development. SAFe is built on the Agile values, principles, and methods as embodied by
cross-functional Agile teams. Every leader must fully support and reinforce their intent and application.

SAFe House of Lean

VALUE
Achieve the shortest sustainable lead time with:
 Best quality and value to people and society
 High morale, safety, and customer delight

RESPECT FOR PEOPLE AND CULTURE

 People do all the work
 Your customer is whoever consumes your work
 Don’t overload them
 Don’t make them wait
 Don’t force them to do wasteful work
 Don’t impose wishful thinking
 Build long-term partnership based on trust
 Cultural change comes last, not first
 To change the culture, you have to change the organization

FLOW
 Optimize continuous and sustainable throughput of value
 Avoid start-stop-start project delays
 Build quality in; flow depends on it
 Understand, exploit, and manage variability
 Integrate frequently
 Informed decision making via fast feedback

INNOVATION
 Producers innovate; customers validate
 Get out of the office (Gemba*)
 No useful improvement was ever invented at a desk
 Provide time and space for creativity
 Apply innovation accounting
 Pivot without mercy or guilt
RELENTLESS IMPROVEMENT
 A constant sense of danger
 Optimize the whole
 Consider facts carefully, then act quickly
 Apply Lean tools to identify and address root causes
 Apply innovation accounting
 Reflect at key milestones; identify and address shortcomings

LEADERSHIP
 Lead the change
 Know the way; emphasize life-long learning
 Develop People
 Inspire and align with mission; minimize constraints
 Decentralize decision-making
 Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers

Apply the SAFe Lean-Agile Principles

In addition to the Lean-Agile mindset, SAFe is based on nine immutable, underlying Lean-Agile principles.
These tenets and economic concepts inspire and inform the roles and practices of SAFe, influencing
leadership behaviors and decision-making.

1. Take an economic view - An understanding of economics drives decisions. Economic variables such as
development cost, production cost, delivery lead time, and value directly inform decision-making.

2. Apply systems thinking - Everyone understands and commits to the common goals of the larger system.
The whole is optimized, instead of the parts.

3. Assume variability; preserve options - Decisions are delayed until the last responsible moment;
alternatives are constantly and aggressively explored.

4. Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles - Cadence-based learning cycles are used to
gain knowledge, evaluate alternatives and inform decision-making.

5. Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems - Progress is measured by objectives

measures, rather than traditional phase-gates.

6. Visualize and limit WIP, reduce batch sizes, and manage queue length - Small batches of work,
controlled Work in Progress (WIP), and small queues ensures fast flow of value and learning.

7. Apply cadence; synchronize with cross-domain planning - Regular synchronization continually aligns
all system builders and ensure all perspectives are understood and resolved.
8. Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers - Knowledge workers exhibit curiosity and have
fundamentally different motivations. Leaders are responsible for creating an environment in which these
workers can thrive.

9. Decentralize decision-making - Autonomy empowers individuals and enhances motivation. Leaders

support decentralized decision-making by equipping teams and individuals with the knowledge and
judgement needed to make good decisions.

Lead the Transformation

Lean-Agile leaders guide their organizations through the SAFe transformation, making it clear at each step
where they are, where they need to go next, and why it is important to keep going. The SAFe
Implementation Roadmap (Figure 5) is an essential part of the change vision. Leaders strategize about
how to move along this roadmap, calling on the advice of Certified SAFe® Program Consultants (SPCs).
SPCs are change agents who combine their training and technical knowledge of SAFe with the motivation
to improve the company’s software and systems development processes
Configuring SAFe
SAFe is scalable and configurable (Figure 6), which allows each organization to adapt the Framework to
its own business needs. With four out-the-box configurations, SAFe supports solutions requiring a small
number of practitioners, as well as complex systems that require hundreds—and even thousands—of
people to build and deliver.

Essential SAFe is the basic building block for all other SAFe configurations and is the simplest starting
point for implementation. It brings the core competencies of Lean-Agile Leadership, Team and Technical
Agility, and DevOps and Release on Demand to the enterprise.

Large Solution SAFe brings the Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering competency to those
building the largest and most complex solutions. This configuration supports multiple Agile Release Trains
(ARTs) and suppliers.

Portfolio SAFe applies the Lean Portfolio Management competency to align portfolio execution to the
enterprise strategy and organizes development around the flow of value through one or more value
streams.

Full SAFe is the most comprehensive version that integrates all five core competencies to support
enterprises that build and maintain a portfolio of large, integrated solutions.

The spanning palette, seen on the left side of each configuration in the Big Picture graphic, contains the
roles and artifacts that apply to any SAFe configuration.
Team and Technical Agility
“Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.” —Agile Manifesto

The Team and Technical Agility core competency describes the critical skills and Lean-Agile principles and
practices Agile teams need to be high-performing and create high-quality, well-designed technical
solutions that support current and future business needs.

Team Agility

Cross-functional, accountable, and committed to common goals, Agile teams have all the skills necessary
to define, build, test, and deploy value in short iterations. They succeed and fail together.

SAFe Agile teams typically:

 Use a blend of Agile methods, including Scrum and Kanban

 Base their work on short iterations, apply small user stories, plan work for the upcoming iteration,
and meet daily to coordinate their work toward iteration goals
 Demo the working system at the end of the iteration and retrospect on how to improve the
process
 Visualize and manage their flow of work in a Kanban system that helps identify bottlenecks and
controls work-in-process (WIP)
 Cross-functional, self-organizing teams that define, build, test and possibly deploy value
 Teams use Scrum and Kanban for team Agility
 Apply built-in Quality practices for Technical Agility

Agile teams work together in an organizational construct called the Agile Release Train (ART). These trains
bring together all the people needed to define, build, test, and deploy (and often operate) a solution. All
teams on an ART plan, integrate, demo, deploy, release, and learn together. Each team understands and
commits to achieving not only their objectives but the larger ART objectives as well.

Technical Agility

Technical Agility defines the Agile software engineering principles and practices teams use to deliver
solutions quickly and reliably. This includes the Lean-Agile values and principles, eXtreme Programming
(XP) practices, Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Agile modeling, built-in quality, proven approaches
and patterns for object-oriented software design, and more.

Teams share an understanding of an acceptable level of code quality, defect elimination, and other
important aspects of readiness and maintainability. They increase flow through the adoption of Agile
engineering techniques, and work to remove architectural and other impediments to flow.

Because fast flow depends on building quality into the system, Agile teams and ARTs apply a ‘test first’
mindset (Figure 7). Tests for features, stories, and code are often generated before the item is created.
BDD2 creates a framework for collaboration in which Product Owners, developers, and testers jointly
perform multiple levels of testing.
In addition, teams apply the five dimensions of built-in quality illustrated in Figure 8. The first, flow, speaks
to the fact that built-in quality is mandatory to achieve continuous value delivery. The other four describe
quality as it applies to the system itself.
DevOps and Release on demand
“Work is not done when Development completes the implementation of a feature—rather, it is only done when our
application is running successfully in production, delivering value to the customer.” —DevOps Handbook

The DevOps and Release on Demand competency describes how the principles and practices of DevOps
provide the enterprise with the capability to release value, in whole or in part, at any time necessary to
meet market and customer demand. Rapid and frequent delivery is also critical to learn and adjust quickly.

DevOps works to align development, operations, the business, information security, and other areas to
work together better by sharing responsibility for improving business results.3 Organizations with mature
DevOps capabilities substantially outperform others at both technical and business outcomes.4

Organizing Around Value

All the people needed to release value on demand, work together continuously to optimize the full flow
of value. As Figure 9 illustrates, the SAFe ART is a team of Agile teams along with critical program roles
including Product Management, System Architect/Engineering, and a Release Train Engineer (RTE).

 Not every organization needs continuous delivery, but they all need the ability to Release on
Demand
 DevOps provides the Culture, Automation, Lean-flow, Measurement and Recovery that enable
continuous delivery
 Agile Release Trains (ARTs) are teams of Agile teams
 ARTs are organized around the ability to Release on Demand through the Continuous Delivery
Pipeline

Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Continuous Exploration Continuous Integration  Continuous Deployment

Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering
 Solution Trains coordinate multiple ARTs and Suppliers
 Manage frequent integration
 Continuously address compliance concerns
 Architect for scale, modularity, release-ability and serviceability
  Build solution components and capabilities with ARTs
 Build and integrate the solution with a Solution Train
 Capture and refine systems specifications as fixed/variable solution intent
 Apply multiple planning horizons
 Manage the supply chain with systems of systems thinking
 Apply ‘continuish integtration’

Lean Portfolio Management

 Connects the portfolio to the Enterprise strategy
 Creates Lean Budgets and Investment guardrails
 Manages portfolio operations
 Provides Lean governance across Value Streams

 Strategy & Investment Funding

 Lean Governance
 Agile Portfolio Operations

SAFe Configurations
Four configurations provide the right solution for each enterprise

 Full Configuration
 Large Solution Configuration
 Portfolio Configuration
 Essential Configuration

1.3 Describe the SAFe Implementation Roadmap

Train Everyone Launch Trains

Navigate with the SAFe Implementation Roadmap