Achieving Business

Agility with SAFe® 5

A Scaled Agile, Inc. White Paper
February 2021

scaledagileframework.com | scaledagile.com
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Table of Contents

Introduction........................................................................................................ 1

Overview............................................................................................................ 3

Lean-Agile Leadership...................................................................................... 5

Leading by Example ....................................................................................................5

Mindset and Principles.................................................................................................6

Leading Change ...........................................................................................................8

Team and Technical Agility............................................................................ 11

Agile Teams ................................................................................................................ 11

Team of Agile Teams................................................................................................. 12

Built-in Quality............................................................................................................ 12

Agile Product Delivery.................................................................................... 13

Customer Centricity and Design Thinking............................................................. 13

Develop on Cadence, Release on Demand........................................................... 14

DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline..................................................... 14

Enterprise Solution Delivery.......................................................................... 15

Lean Systems and Solution Engineering ............................................................... 15

Coordinating Trains and Suppliers ......................................................................... 16

Continually Evolve Live Systems ............................................................................. 16

Lean Portfolio Management.......................................................................... 17

Strategy and Investment Funding ........................................................................... 18

Agile Portfolio Operations........................................................................................ 18

Lean Governance ...................................................................................................... 18

Organizational Agility..................................................................................... 19

Lean-Thinking People and Agile Teams.................................................................. 19

Lean Business Operations........................................................................................ 20

Strategy Agility........................................................................................................... 20

Continuous Learning Culture......................................................................... 21

Learning Organization.............................................................................................. 21

Innovation Culture..................................................................................................... 22

Relentless Improvement........................................................................................... 22

Measure and Grow.......................................................................................... 23

Configure SAFe ............................................................................................... 24

Summary........................................................................................................... 25

Next Steps........................................................................................................ 26
Introduction
Welcome to the software age—an interconnected, real-time world in which every industry
depends on technology and every organization (at least in part) is a software company. To remain
competitive, enterprises will need to digitally transform their operations, business solutions, and
customer experience. The larger challenge in many enterprises is that their current business models,
organizational hierarchy, and technology infrastructure can’t keep pace with the rapid change required.

Agile development has provided significant improvements to many organizations. By itself, however,
even Agile development is not enough. What began in software development must now expand to
encompass the entire enterprise, changing how people work and how every aspect of the business
operates. Put simply, enterprises need business agility, the determining factor that will decide the
winners and losers in the digital economy.

By empowering people to make quick decisions, including allocating resources and aligning the
right people around the right work, business agility permits companies to capitalize on emerging
opportunities. However, achieving this level of agility requires mastering not one but two business
operating systems (Figure 1).

Figure 1. A dual operating system offers efficiency and stability with the speed of innovation

• The first system is chiefly hierarchical and is common to most enterprises. It provides the
necessary efficiency, stability, and other scalable aspects needed to deliver the current
mission (e.g., people operations, financial and business services, and compliance).

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 • The second system is a customer-centric network, which is vital to quickly delivering
innovative solutions to a faster-moving marketplace.

With guidance from SAFe® 5, you can implement this second operating system and enable your
enterprise to:

• Quickly adapt and respond to emerging competitive threats

• Efficiently identify and deliver incremental customer value

• Maintain quality in an evolving product and solution portfolio

Moreover, you will be able to optimally organize teams to create value and mobilize quickly in
response to changing business needs. The result: Your company will achieve the business agility
needed to survive and thrive in the digital age.

SAFe can help your enterprise improve business outcomes by accelerating productivity, time-to-market,
quality, employee engagement, and more. The results can be extraordinary, as illustrated in the
benefits from customer stories summarized in Figure 2.

SAFe Customer Stories

Typical results

T TIME
30% Increased Employee EN -TO 50% Faster
Engagement EM - Time-to-Market
AG

M
AR
ENG

KET

BUSINESS
RESULTS
PRO

TY
DU

35% Increase in TI A
LI

50% Improvements
VIT QU
C

Productivity in Quality
Y

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 2. The business benefits of SAFe

This white paper provides an overview of SAFe, the Big Picture graphic, the core competencies, and
the values, mindset, principles, and practices that help your enterprise achieve true business agility.

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 Overview
The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe) is an online knowledge base of proven, integrated principles,
practices, and competencies to implement Lean, Agile, and DevOps at scale.

The Big Picture graphic (Figure 3) on scaledagileframework.com offers direct access to SAFe’s
extensive library of content. Each icon on this graphic links to a supporting article and related
resources. The SAFe website also includes a variety of additional advanced-topic articles, downloads,
presentations, videos, and a glossary translated into many languages.

Measure
Business Agility & Grow
Operational Value Streams
Organizational Enterprise Government
PORTFOLIO
Agility Kanban
Epic
NFRs Epic
Enabler
Portfolio Backlog

Epic Enterprise Strategic Portfolio PB Lean Budgets Coordination KPIs

Lean Portfolio Owners Architect Themes Vision Vision
Management Guardrails
Development Value Streams Solutions

Solution LARGE
Demo Roadmap
SOLUTION
Enabler
Kanban

Compliance
Solution Solution

Post

Post
Variable

Pre

Pre
Enterprise Arch/Eng Mgmt Fixed MBSE Capability
Milestones
Solution Set-Based NFRs
Delivery S O LU T I O N
Solution Backlog
STE TRAIN Supplier

Shared
Services
Customer Centricity Continuous Delivery Pipeline
ESSENTIAL
Business
Agile Owners
Kanban

Solution
Product AG I L E R E L E A S E T R A I N CoP
Delivery
NFRs

Program Backlog Continuous Continuous Continuous

Solution
System Product Exploration Integration Deployment
Design Thinking Context System
Arch/Eng Mgmt Release on Demand Team

Team and
RTE
XP System Demos System Demos
Technical • Plan Sec
• Execute CD Enabler CD Feature
Agility Lean UX
• Review
IP Iteration

IP Iteration

DevOps
PI Planning

PI Planning

PI Planning

Agile Teams • Retro NFRs Feature Enabler

Scrum CI CI
Team Backlogs
Story Story

CE Enabler CE Story Metrics

Product
Owner Goals
Iterations
Goals
Iterations
Built-In
Continuous PI PI Quality
Learning Scrum Kanban PI Objectives
Master
Culture Architectural Runway Leffingwell, et al. © Scaled Agile, Inc.

Core Lean-Agile SAFe N Implementation

Business | Technology
Values Mindset Principles Roadmap
SPC 5.1

Lean-Agile Leadership
© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 3. Full SAFe configuration

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The SAFe 5 overview (Figure 4) introduces the seven core competencies required for business
agility. Each competency has three dimensions and is a set of related knowledge, skills, and
behaviors. By mastering SAFe’s competencies, enterprises can achieve business agility to quickly
respond to volatile market conditions, changing customer needs, and emerging technologies.
Measure and Grow, at the top right, explains how portfolios evaluate their progress on the
competencies and determine next steps to improve.

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 4. SAFe overview of the seven core competencies required for business agility

Each competency is described in the following sections.

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Lean-Agile Leadership
An organization’s managers, executives, and other leaders provide the foundation for the
adoption and success of Lean-Agile development and mastery of the competencies that lead
to business agility. Only leaders have the authority to change and continuously improve the
systems that govern the performance of work. Only leaders can create an environment that
fosters high-performing Agile teams. By helping leaders develop along the three dimensions
illustrated in Figure 5, organizations can establish the core competency of Lean-Agile Leadership.

Mindset & Principles

Fixed Growth
Mindset Mindset

Core Values Lean-Agile Mindset SAFe Principles

Leading by Example Leading Change

Change Vision
Authenticity
Change Leadership
Emotional Intelligence
Coalition for Change
Lifelong Learning
Psychological Safety
Growing Others
Training
Decentralized Decision-Making

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 5. Three dimensions of Lean-Agile Leadership

Leading by Example 
By internalizing and modeling leaner ways of thinking and operating, leaders can help people learn
from their example, coaching, and encouragement. Ways leaders can accomplish this include:

• Authenticity. Leaders exhibit professional and ethical behaviors, acting with honesty,
integrity, and transparency. Such leaders are true to themselves and their beliefs.

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 • Emotional intelligence. Leaders identify and manage their emotions and those of others
through self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.

• Lifelong learning. Self-motivated leaders engage in the ongoing pursuit of knowledge

and growth and encourage and support others to do the same.

• Growing others. Leaders offer their guidance and resources to help individuals assume
increasing levels of responsibility and decision-making.

• Decentralized decision-making. Decision-making authority moves to the people closest

to the information. Achieving this autonomy requires investing in technical competence
and by providing organizational clarity via a simple, decision-making framework.

Mindset and Principles

Cultivating a growth mindset (Figure 6) influences leaders’ ability to grow, enabling them to believe
and demonstrate that people can learn new behaviors. By embracing the Lean-Agile mindset and
applying the SAFe principles in their decisions and actions, leaders consistently model the new
norms throughout the organization.

Figure 6. Growth versus fixed mindsets

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Lean-Agile Mindset
The SAFe Lean-Agile mindset (Figure 7) combines the beliefs, assumptions, and actions of leaders
and practitioners who embrace the concepts in the SAFe House of Lean and the Agile Manifesto’s
4 values and 12 principles.

Figure 7. The SAFe House of Lean and the Agile Manifesto

SAFe Core Values

The four core values that define SAFe’s essential ideals and beliefs play a critical role in leaders’
behavior and communication. Here are some ways leaders can reinforce these values:

1. Alignment. Leaders communicate the mission by establishing and expressing the

portfolio strategy and solution vision, determining business value during planning, and
guiding the adjustment of scope to ensure that demand matches capacity.

2. Built-in quality. Leaders change the system and demonstrate commitment by creating

an environment where built-in quality becomes the standard.

3. Transparency. Leaders foster the visualization of all relevant work and create an
environment where “… the facts are always friendly, every bit of evidence one can
acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true.”1

4. Program execution. Leaders participate as Business Owners in PI planning and

execution, celebrating high-quality PIs while aggressively removing impediments
and demotivators.

1 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/carl_rogers_147475

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SAFe Principles
In addition to the Lean-Agile mindset, SAFe is based on 10 immutable, underlying principles (Figure
8) that guide and inform the roles and practices of SAFe, influencing leadership behaviors and
decision-making.

#1 Take an economic view

#2 Apply systems thinking

#3 Assume variability; preserve options

#4 Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles

#5 Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems

#6 Visualize and limit WIP, reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths

#7 Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning

#8 Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers

#9 Decentralize decision-making

#10 Organize around value

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 8. The 10 SAFe principles

Leading Change
As Lean-thinking manager-teachers, leaders have the thought processes and practical tools to start
building the Lean enterprise and achieving business agility. This new way of working represents
a significant shift in culture and practices and requires a substantial organizational change effort.

• Change vision happens when leaders communicate why change is needed and do so in
ways that inspire, motivate, and engage people.

• Change leadership reflects the leader’s own personal advocacy and drive in positively
influencing and motivating others to engage in organizational change.

• A powerful coalition for change forms when individuals from multiple levels and across
silos are empowered and have the influence to effectively lead the change.

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 • Psychological safety occurs when leaders create an environment for risk-taking that
supports change without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status, or career.

• Training in the new way of working involves teaching the values, principles, and
practices of Agile and Lean; leaders set an example by attending training too.

The SAFe Implementation Roadmap

Our 12-article series describes the SAFe Implementation Roadmap (Figure 9) and how it aligns with
John Kotter’s 8-step model for implementing successful change. As leaders strive for successful
SAFe ®
Implementation
change, this roadmap helps them Roadmap
‘know the way.’ Business results
30 – 75%

e-to-Marke
Tim t

Leading SAFe® for

gagement
SAFe® Government

Quality
(Reach the tipping point) 10 – 50% 25 – 75%
Lean Portfolio Measure
Implementing SAFe® Leading SAFe® Management & Grow

En
Pro
d u ct i v it y

Go 20 – 50%
Waterfall/ Train Lean-Agile Train Executives, Identify Value
Ad hoc Agile SAFe Change Agents Managers, and Leaders Streams and ARTs Cre
at

e
Lean-Agile Center of Excellence

the
Implementat
Agile Product SAFe® for SAFe® for SAFe® Scrum SAFe® Product Owner/ Leading SAFe®
Management Teams Architects Master Product Manager (for ART stakeholders)

ion
Pla
PI Planning

n
Train Teams and
Prepare for ART Launch
Launch ART
n
io
A RT Ex e c ut

SAFe®
DevOps
Implementing SAFe® Lean Portfolio SAFe® Release SAFe® Advanced
(more SPCs) Management Train Engineer Scrum Master
Agile Software
Engineering
ch a
Co

Launch More ARTs Extend to the

Accelerate
and Value Streams Portfolio

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 9. The SAFe Implementation Roadmap

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While no two SAFe adoptions are identical, and they rarely follow a perfectly sequential step-by-step
process, businesses typically get the best results when they follow a path similar to that shown in
the Implementation Roadmap, which includes the following 12 steps:

1. Reaching the tipping point

2. Train Lean-Agile change agents
3. Train executives, managers, and leaders
4. Create a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence
5. Identify value streams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs)
6. Create the implementation plan
7. Prepare for ART launch
8. Train teams and launch the ART
9. Coach ART execution
10. Launch more ARTs and value streams
11. Extend to the portfolio
12. Accelerate

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Team and Technical Agility
Agile teams are the cornerstone of business agility. The Team and Technical Agility competency,
which describes the Lean-Agile skills, principles, and practices that high-performing Agile teams
use to create high-quality solutions for their customers, consists of three dimensions, as illustrated
in Figure 10.

Agile Teams Built-In Quality

Product
Owner

Scrum
Master Establish Pairing and Collective Automation Definition
Flow Peer Review Ownership of Done
and Standards

Teams of Agile Teams

Business Product Mgmt. Hardware Software Quality Testing Compliance Operations Security

AG I L E R E L E A S E T R A I N

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 10. The three dimensions of Team and Technical Agility

Agile Teams 
High-performing, cross-functional teams anchor the competency by applying effective Agile principles
and practices. Agile teams have all the skills necessary to define, build, test, and deploy value in
short iterations. They are empowered, collaborative, and focused on shared goals. To deliver and
sustain value to customers, they can be software teams, hardware teams, business teams, operations
teams, support teams, or a cross-cutting team of multiple disciplines.

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Teams of Agile Teams
Building enterprise-class solutions typically requires more scope and breadth of skills than a single
Agile team can provide. It typically needs a broad range of specialty skills that cannot be contained
within a single Agile team. Therefore, multiple Agile teams must collaborate. SAFe’s Agile Release
Train (ART) is a long-lived team-of-Agile-teams (Figure 11), which—along with other stakeholders—
incrementally develops, delivers, and where applicable, operates one or more solutions.

Business Product Hardware Software Quality Testing Compliance Operations Security

Mgmt.

AG I L E R E L E A S E T R A I N ( A R T )

Cross-functional
Agile Teams

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 11. Agile Release Trains are fully cross-functional

Built-in Quality
Built-in quality powers the Lean goal of delivering value in the shortest sustainable lead time, allowing
enterprises to continually respond to market changes. Agile teams adhere to quality standards
and processes to support ‘collective ownership’ of artifacts, code, and other content. They also
continuously improve their product quality through refactoring and by reducing technical debt.

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Agile Product Delivery
Agile Product Delivery is a customer-centric approach to defining, building, and releasing a continuous
flow of valuable products and services to customers and users. These capabilities are mutually
supportive and create opportunities for sustained market and service leadership. There are three
dimensions to Agile Product Delivery, as illustrated in Figure 12.

Develop on Cadence, Release on Demand

Customer Centricity
Release on Demand

Customer
Centric

Design Thinking Development

Centric
Develop on Cadence

DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

AGILE RELEASE TRAIN

Sec
Continuous Continuous Continuous
DevOps Exploration Integration Deployment
Release on Demand

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 12. Three dimensions of Agile Product Delivery

Customer Centricity and Design Thinking

Customer centricity is a mindset that places the customer at the heart of every decision. Using design
thinking, organizations can confirm that the solution is desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable.
This motivates us to:

• Focus on the customer

• Understand the customer’s needs
• Think and feel like the customer
• Build whole-product solutions
• Know customer lifetime value

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Develop on Cadence, Release on Demand
Developing solutions in SAFe is done on a fixed cadence. Cadence assures that important events,
such as PI Planning, System  and  Solution Demos, and Inspect & Adapt, happen on a regular,
predictable schedule.

Customer-centric enterprises seek to create a continuous flow of value to their customers.

Decoupling the release of value from the development schedule allows customers to get what
they need, when they need it. The timing of these releases is determined by market and customer
needs, and the enterprise’s own motivation to provide value.

DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

DevOps and the continuous delivery pipeline enable enterprises to release value on demand and are
significant elements of Agile Product Delivery. DevOps is a mindset, a culture, and a set of technical
practices. It provides communication, integration, automation, and the close cooperation needed
to plan, develop, test, deploy, release, and maintain a solution.

The continuous delivery pipeline represents the workflows, activities, and automation needed to
shepherd a new piece of functionality from ideation to the release of value. It consists of four aspects:
continuous exploration, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and release on demand.
Each ART builds and maintains a pipeline to deliver solution value as independently as possible.

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Enterprise Solution Delivery
Building and evolving large, cyber-physical systems and enterprise-class software solutions
is a significant undertaking. Many such systems require hundreds or thousands of engineers,
demanding sophisticated, rigorous practices for engineering, operations, and support. That calls
for continuously delivering new capabilities, along with technology upgrades, security patches,
and other enhancements.

The Enterprise Solution Delivery competency describes how to apply Lean-Agile principles and

practices to specify, develop, deploy, operate, and evolve the world’s largest and most sophisticated
software applications, networks, and cyber-physical systems. This competency consists of three
dimensions (Figure 13).

Lean System and Solution Engineering Coordinating Trains and Suppliers

Solution Train
Variable
Fixed

Supplier

Continually Evolve Live Systems

AGILE RELEASE TRAIN

Continuous Delivery Pipeline Evolve Deployed Systems

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 13. Three dimensions of Enterprise Solution Delivery

Lean Systems and Solution Engineering 

Lean systems and solution engineering applies Lean-Agile practices to align and
coordinate all the activities necessary to specify, architect, design, implement, test, deploy,
evolve, and ultimately decommission these systems. Aspects of this dimension include
continually refining the fixed/variable solution intent; applying multiple planning horizons;
architecting for scale, modularity, releasability, and serviceability; and continuously addressing
compliance concerns.

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Coordinating Trains and Suppliers 
Coordinating trains and suppliers aligns and directs the extended set of value streams to a shared
business and technology mission. This element includes the coordinated vision, backlogs, and
roadmaps with common PIs and synchronization points.

Continually Evolve Live Systems 

A fast, economical continuous delivery pipeline means a minimum viable system can be released early
and evolve after release into the field. This allows enterprises to learn much earlier with less investment
and possibly even begin generating revenue sooner. The goal is to get into the operational environment
quickly to learn, gain feedback, deliver value, and get to market before the competition. These systems
must therefore be architected to support continuous deployment and release on demand.

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Lean Portfolio Management
The three previously mentioned competencies provide the technical practices to build and deploy
significant business solutions. But none of them address the larger issue of what solutions should
be built and why. For that, we need to address portfolio concerns. However, traditional approaches
to portfolio management were not designed to handle the impact of a global economy or digital
disruption. These factors put pressure on enterprises to work under a higher degree of uncertainty
and yet deliver innovative solutions much faster. Accordingly, portfolio management approaches
must be modernized to support the new, Lean-Agile way of working.

The Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) competency aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean,
Agile, and systems thinking. As Figure 14 illustrates, accomplishing this requires three collaborations—
strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and Lean governance.

Strategy
& Investment
Funding

Enterprise
Executives

Business Enterprise
Owners Architect

Agile
Lean Portfolio
Governance Operations

APMO

Enterprise Business RTE and

Architect Owners APMO/LACE SM CoP

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 14. Lean Portfolio Management responsibilities

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Strategy and Investment Funding 
Strategy and investment funding ensures that the entire portfolio is aligned and funded to create
and maintain the solutions needed to meet business targets. After all, only by allocating the ‘right
investments’ to building the ‘right things’ can an enterprise accomplish its ultimate business objectives.
However, portfolio strategy is much more than prioritization and selection of the best investments.
The portfolio team must understand its role in achieving the enterprise strategy. Therefore, leaders
should apply LPM to understand the portfolio’s current state and develop a purposeful plan to
continuously evolve to a better, differentiated future state.

Agile Portfolio Operations

Agile portfolio operations coordinates and supports decentralized program execution, enabling
operational excellence. Success requires the cooperation of the Agile Program Management Office
(APMO) or a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) and Communities of Practice for Release Train
Engineers, Scrum Masters, and evolving technical disciplines.

SAFe principles and the Lean-Agile mindset foster the decentralization of strategy execution to
empowered ARTs and Solution Trains. Even then, however, systems thinking must be applied to
ensure that ARTs and Solution Trains are aligned and operate within the broader enterprise context.

Lean Governance 
Lean governance provides oversight of spending, audit and compliance, expense forecasting, and
measurement. Governance of a portfolio requires collaboration among the APMO/LACE, Business
Owners, and Enterprise Architects to forecast and budget dynamically, coordinate continuous
compliance, and measure portfolio performance using Lean metrics.

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Organizational Agility
In addition to mastering the previously described competencies, enterprises must be able to respond
quickly to handle the challenges and opportunities that today’s rapidly changing markets present.
This new reality demands more flexibility and adaptability than traditional hierarchical operating
systems can provide. Again, the second and more flexible operating system comes to the rescue.
SAFe helps businesses address these challenges with Organizational Agility, expressed in three
dimensions (Figure 15).

Lean-Thinking People and Agile Teams Strategy Agility

House of Lean SAFe Principles Agile Manifesto

Lean Business Operations

!
Process Time Delay Time Process Time

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 15. Three dimensions of Organizational Agility

Lean-Thinking People and Agile Teams

Everyone involved in business solution delivery must be trained in both Lean and Agile methods,
and embrace the values, principles, and practices. This includes business and technology leaders,
development, operations, legal, marketing, finance, support, security, and others. Once the business
side of the organization is trained in Lean-Agile principles, they recognize the benefits of the new
way of working and typically start creating cross-functional Agile teams within their domain.

Moreover, these business teams participate in delivering and supporting innovative business solutions
using Lean-Agile principles and practices. In turn, this new operating model requires ‘Agile HR’ to
bring the Agile mindset, values, and principles to hiring, engaging, and retaining people.

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Lean Business Operations
Teams apply Lean principles to understand, map, and continuously improve business processes
that support the company’s products and services. Educating everyone in Lean-Agile provides
the enterprise with the mindset, principles, and thinking tools individuals and teams need to
relentlessly improve business processes. One such thinking tool is the construct of ‘value streams.’
It is a fundamental concept in Lean thinking and a cornerstone of Organizational Agility in SAFe.
Once identified, value stream mapping is applied to analyze and improve the flow of work and
business operations (Figure 16).

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 16. Value stream mapping showing processing time, total lead time, and time efficiency of a process

Strategy Agility
Strategy Agility occurs when the enterprise can continuously probe and sense market changes and
quickly adapt its strategy. As strategy changes, strategy agility allows the enterprise to reorganize
Agile teams and ARTs to better address new opportunities. The traditional hierarchy is no longer
the hindrance.

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Continuous Learning Culture
Even after mastering all the other competencies, principles and practices, enterprises will likely
experience volatility as the norm. Startup companies are continuing to challenge the status quo,
while tech giants like Amazon and Google are entering entirely new markets such as banking and
healthcare. The expectations of next-generation workers, customers, and society as a whole challenges
companies to think and act beyond balance sheets and quarterly earnings reports.

To address the demand for continuous learning, personal growth, and process improvement,
the  Continuous Learning Culture  competency describes values and practices that encourage
individuals—and the entire enterprise—to continually increase knowledge, competence, performance,
and innovation. This is expressed in three dimensions, as shown in Figure 17.

Learning Organization Relentless Improvement

Constant Sense of Danger

Shared Vision Systems Thinking
Optimize the Whole
Personal Mastery Problem Solving Culture Plan
Mental Models
Reflect at Key Milestones

Adjust
Team Learning

Do
Fact-Based Improvement
Check

Innovation Culture

IP
Innovative Time & Space Go See Experimentation Pivot Without Innovation
People & Feedback Mercy or Guilt Riptides

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 17. The three dimensions of a continuous learning culture

Learning Organization
For the organization to transform and adapt to an ever-changing world, employees at every level
must keep learning and growing. Learning organizations invest in and facilitate the ongoing growth of

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their employees. When everyone in the organization is continuously learning, it fuels the enterprise’s
ability to dynamically transform itself as needed to anticipate and exploit opportunities that create
a competitive advantage.

Learning organizations are proficient in creating, obtaining, and sharing knowledge, while evolving
practices to include the new insights. Such organizations understand and unlock the intrinsic motivation
of people to learn and gain mastery for the benefit of the enterprise.

Innovation Culture
Innovation is one of the four pillars of the SAFe House of Lean. But the kind of change needed to
compete in the digital age requires an innovation culture, where leaders create an environment that
supports creative thinking, curiosity, and challenging the status quo. When an organization has an
innovation culture, employees are encouraged and enabled to explore ideas for enhancements to
existing products, experiment with ideas for new products, pursue fixes to chronic defects, create
process improvements to reduce waste, and remove impediments to productivity.

Relentless Improvement
To remain competitive, every part of the enterprise must focus on relentlessly improving its solutions,
products, and processes. The Lean model for continuous improvement is based on a series of small,
iterative, and incremental improvements and experiments that enable the organization to learn its
way to the most promising answer to a problem. There are five key aspects of relentless improvement:

• Constant sense of competitive danger. Continually anticipating competitive threats

drives the company to aggressively pursue improvement opportunities.

• Optimize the whole. Optimizing the whole suggests that improvements should be
designed to increase the effectiveness of the entire system that produces the sustainable
flow of value, as opposed to local optimizations.

• Problem-solving culture. Iterative Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA) cycles provide the

process for iterative problem solving by making small adjustments as well as breakthrough
innovations.

• Reflect at key milestones. Improvement activities are often deferred in favor of more-
urgent work such as new feature development and fixing defects. Relentless improvement
requires a disciplined structure to avoid neglecting this critical activity. 

• Fact-based improvement. Fact-based improvement leads to changes guided by the data

surrounding the problem and informed solutions, not by opinions and conjecture.

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Measure and Grow
The road to business agility is a journey, not a destination. Using the SAFe assessments, enterprises
can understand where they are on their journey, identify next steps, and remember to celebrate
successes along the way. The Business Agility assessment (Figure 18) provides a high-level summary
and measures the enterprise’s achievements around the seven core competencies. More detailed core
competency assessments go one step deeper and identify areas of opportunity and concern along
each of the three dimensions of that specific competency . Periodically applying these assessments,
contemplating the results, and following the recommendations will help ensure the best possible
business outcomes

Business Agility Assessment

Team and Technical Agility (TTA)
5

Continuous Learning Culture (CLC) Agile Product Delivery (APD)

Organizational Agility (OA) Enterprise Solution Delivery (ESD)

Lean-Agile Leadership (LAL) Lean Portfolio Management (LPM)

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 18. SAFe business agility assessment

There are six steps in the measure and grow process:

1. Conduct a business agility assessment

2. Analyze the results
3. Identify growth opportunities
4. Prioritize and take action
5. Integrate learning
6. Celebrate success

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© Scaled Agile, Inc.
Configure SAFe
Configurable and scalable, SAFe allows each organization to adapt the Framework to its own business
needs (Figure 19). With four, out-the-box configurations, SAFe supports the full spectrum of solutions,
from those requiring a small number of teams to those complex systems that require hundreds—and
even thousands—of people to build and deliver.

© Scaled Agile, Inc.

Figure 19. The SAFe configurations

• Essential SAFe is the building block for all the other configurations and is the simplest
starting point for implementation. Essential SAFe delivers the core competencies of Lean-
Agile Leadership, Team and Technical Agility, and Agile Product Delivery to the enterprise.

• Large Solution SAFe brings the Enterprise Solution Delivery competency to organizations
building the largest and most complex solutions. This configuration offers increased focus
on coordinating multiple ARTs and suppliers, and meeting compliance and regulatory
standards.

• Portfolio SAFe incorporates the Lean Portfolio Management competency to align

portfolio execution to enterprise strategy. This configuration also organizes development
around the flow of value through one or more value streams. Moreover, Portfolio SAFe is
the simplest configuration designed to help organizations achieve business agility.

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

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© Scaled Agile, Inc.
Summary
Welcome to the age of software—an era where business agility will decide the winners and losers
of the new economy.

• Lean-Agile commercial businesses will create greater profits, grow market share, increase

employee engagement, and better satisfy customer needs.

• Lean-Agile nonprofits will create resilience, sustainability, and alignment to better fulfill

their mission.

• Lean-Agile government agencies will deliver solutions that better assure the safety,

economy, and welfare of the general public.

All of these segments depend on the ability to deliver innovative business solutions faster and more
efficiently than ever before. Each will need to employ a dual operating system: an existing, more
hierarchical model intended for efficiency and scale, and a second, customer-centric network operating
system that delivers innovative solutions. The seven core competencies of SAFe embody this critical
second operating system. Those who master these competencies will conquer the digital age.

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© Scaled Agile, Inc.
Next Steps
This white paper provided an overview of the Scaled Agile Framework 5, the seven core competencies
to achieve business agility, and the values, mindset, principles, and practices that guide teams to
build more effective business solutions.

The core competencies are the primary lens for understanding and succeeding with SAFe and
how to approach its adoption. The SAFe website at scaledagileframework.com provides additional
information on all the topics covered here (and more). To extend your knowledge of SAFe beyond
this white paper, we suggest that you:

• Read about real-world implementations at scaledagile.com/customer-stories

• Browse the Framework at scaledagileframework.com

• Find role-based SAFe training and certification at scaledagile.com/learning

• View SAFe presentations and videos at

scaledagileframework.com/videos-and-presentations

• Explore the SAFe implementation roadmap at

scaledagileframework.com/implementation-roadmap

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© Scaled Agile, Inc.
About Scaled Agile, Inc.
Scaled Agile, Inc. is the provider of SAFe®, the world’s leading framework for business
agility. Through learning and certification, a global partner network, and a growing
community of over 700,000 trained professionals, Scaled Agile helps organizations build
agility into their culture so they can quickly identify and deliver customer value, capitalize
on emerging opportunities, and improve business outcomes. Scaled Agile is a contributing
member of the Pledge 1% corporate philanthropy and community service movement.
Learn more at scaledagile.com.

scaledagile.com

scaledagileframework.com | scaledagile.com

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© Scaled Agile, Inc.
 SAFe® curriculum
The extensive and evolving Scaled Agile curriculum is
a cornerstone for implementation success and a key
part of an overall transformation. Our full portfolio of
world-class courseware helps organizations unlock
business results, retain teams, and attract new talent.
And our in-demand certifications help individuals thrive
as key players within a SAFe organization and advance
throughout their career in practicing, consulting, or
training others in the Framework.

SAFe courses and certifications include:

• Implementing SAFe® • SAFe® DevOps

with SAFe® 5 Program Consultant certification with SAFe® 5 DevOps Practitioner certification

• Leading SAFe® • SAFe® for Government

with SAFe® 5 Agilist certification with SAFe® 5 Government Practitioner certification

• SAFe® for Teams • Agile Software Engineering

with SAFe® 5 Practitioner certification with SAFe® 5 Agile Software Engineer certification

• SAFe® Scrum Master • SAFe® for Architects

with SAFe® 5 Scrum Master certification with SAFe® 5 Architect certification

• SAFe® Advanced Scrum Master • Lean Portfolio Management

with SAFe® 5 Advanced Scrum Master certification with SAFe® 5 Lean Portfolio Manager certification

• SAFe® Release Train Engineer • Agile Product Management

with SAFe® 5 Release Train Engineer certification with SAFe® 5 Agile Product Manager certification

• SAFe® Product Owner/Product Manager

with SAFe® 5 Product Owner/Product Manager certification

START YOUR SAFe CAREER JOURNEY AT

scaledagile.com/learning
© Scaled Agile, Inc.

02/21