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Essential SAFe 5.0 ®

Overview and Self-Diagnostic

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 Introducing the Essential SAFe configuration

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Essential SAFe offers three enterprise competencies

Lean-Agile Leadership describes how Lean-Agile Leaders drive and sustain

organizational change and operational excellence by empowering individuals and
teams to reach their highest potential.

Team and Technical Agility describes the critical skills and Lean-Agile principles and
practices that high-performing Agile teams and Teams of Agile teams use to create
high-quality solutions for their customers.

Agile Product Delivery competency is a customer-centric approach to defining,

building and releasing a continuous flow of valuable products and services to
customers and users. This enables the organization to provide solutions that delight
customers, lower development costs, reduce risk, and outmaneuver the competition.

Essential SAFe serves as the foundation for the Large Solution, Portfolio SAFe and Full SAFe
configurations

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 Why focus on the essentials?
... because skipping them greatly increases the risk of transformation failure
Customer findings
Successful rollout, but still struggling. Root
causes:
 Not doing Inspect & Adapt
 No Innovation & Planning iteration
 Individual Agile teams were not actually
cross-functional
 No routine System Demo
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Begin the Lean-Agile journey with Essential SAFe
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Customer quotes
 “SAFe is a flexible framework. We’ve adopted
what we liked, but we don’t use Agile Release
Trains.”
 “SAFe is flexible. We’re adopting it, but we’ve
decided not to affect the way the teams are
working. So we didn’t include the teams in
training.”
 “Our leaders don’t have time for training.”
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 Start by applying the ten critical success factors

1 SAFe Lean-Agile Principles 6 System Demo

2 Real Agile Teams and Trains 7 Inspect & Adapt

3 Cadence and Synchronization 8 IP Iteration

4 PI Planning 9 Architectural Runway

5 Customer Centricity, DevOps and 10 Lean-Agile Leadership

Release on Demand

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1 Anchor the transformation with Lean-Agile principles

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 Without a shared understanding of principles

☐ No systematic way to adapt practices to a

specific context

☐ Business outcomes do not significantly improve

☐ Practices and measures that were once

beneficial become problematic

☐ The Lean-Agile Mindset is unachievable

☐ Conflict and disagreement on processes and

practices are difficult to resolve

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2 Implement Real Agile Teams and Trains

Cross-functional Agile teams and trains work towards a common vision and
program backlog. They operate with architectural and Lean UX guidance.

Cross-functional Agile teams power the train and

apply Scrum, XP, Kanban, and Built-in Quality
practices to produce working system increments
every iteration.

Agile Release Trains (ARTs) apply systems thinking and build

a cross-functional organization optimized to facilitate the flow
of value from idea to release.

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 Critical Agile Team roles

Well defined roles empower teams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs)

Scrum Master is a servant leader and coach for an Agile Team. They help
remove impediments and foster an environment for high-performing team
dynamics, continuous flow, and relentless improvement

Product Owner is a member of the Agile Team responsible for defining stories
and prioritizing the team backlog to meet program priorities.

Agile team is a cross-functional group of individuals who define, build, test,

and deliver an increment of value in a short time box.

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Critical Agile Release Train roles

Release Train Engineer is a servant leader and coach for the Agile Release
Train (ART).

Product Management is responsible for defining and supporting the building of

desirable, feasible, viable, and sustainable products that meet customer needs
over the product-market lifecycle.

System Architect/Engineering System Architect/Engineering is responsible for

defining and communicating a shared technical and architectural vision for an ART

Customer consumes the work of an ART. They are the ultimate deciders of value

Business Owners are a small group of stakeholders who have the primary business
and technical responsibility for governance, compliance, and return on investment
(ROI) for a solution

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 Without Real Agile Teams and Trains

☐ Responsibilities are unclear, resulting in delayed

decision-making

☐ The lack of cross-functional skills causes over-

specialization and bottlenecks that inhibit flow.

☐ Teams locally optimize and can’t deliver end-to-end value

☐ No architectural and user experience integrity; solution

features and components evolve incompatibly

☐ Vision and requirements are not clear and prioritization is

extremely difficult

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3 Apply Cadence and Synchronization

 Transforms unpredictable events into

predictable events
 Makes wait times predictable
 Facilitates planning; provides more
efficient use of resources

 Synchronization causes multiple

events to happen at the same time

 Sync events facilitate cross-functional

tradeoffs of people and scope

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 Without Cadence and Synchronization

☐ No steady development rhythm

☐ Gradual decline into disorder and lack of predictability
☐ It’s hard to schedule planning, retrospectives, demos
and other key events

☐ Difficult to adjusting to changing priorities

☐ Teams are constantly overloaded

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4 Create alignment with PI Planning

No event is more powerful than PI planning. It’s the magic in SAFe—the

alignment and energy created in just two days saves months of delays.

► All stakeholders face-to-face, whenever possible

► Management sets the mission with minimum possible constraints

► Important stakeholder decisions are made immediately

► Requirements and design emerge

► Teams create and take responsibility for plans

See the short PI planning example video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZAtl7nAB1M
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 Without PI Planning

☐ Stakeholders, teams, and management are not

aligned

☐ Demand doesn't match capacity; no

predictability; excess Work in Process (WIP)

☐ Lack of trust between stakeholders and teams

☐ Late discovery of dependencies cause delays

☐ Low commitment, ownership, and employee

engagement

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5 Improve results with Customer Centricity, DevOps and Release on Demand

► Create a positive customer experience across all products and services.

► Adopt a DevOps mindset, culture, and applicable technical practices to enable more
frequent and higher-quality releases.

Customer Centricity DevOps and Release on Demand

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 Customer Centricity requires Design Thinking

Design thinking is a customer centric development process and the application

of specific tools.

Clear understanding of target market & problems it’s facing.

Epics &
Features

Journey
Gemba Walks
Maps Prototyping
Personas & Story
Empathy Maps Mapping

Problem & Solution Space (double diamond)

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DevOps requires Built-In Quality

“You can’t scale crappy code” (or hardware, or anything else).

► Built-In quality ensures that every increment of the

solution reflects quality standards
► It’s required for high, sustainable development
velocity
► Software quality practices (most inspired by XP)
include continuous integration, test-first, refactoring,
pair work, collective ownership, and more
► Hardware quality is supported by exploratory, early
iterations, frequent system-level integration, design
verification, model-based systems engineering, and
set-based design
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 Without Customer Centricity, DevOps and Release on Demand

☐ Lower customer satisfaction and bad customer experiences

☐ Reduced deployment quality and high production defects
☐ Value delivery is seriously delayed; more frequent releases
are not possible, increasing time to market

☐ Large batches of code are pushed to production, resulting in

production errors, and emergencies

☐ Friction between development and operations limits

collaboration, learning, and cultural change

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6 Get fast feedback with the System Demo

► Features are functionally complete or

‘toggled’ so as not to disrupt demonstrable
functionality
► New Features work together, and with
existing functionality
► Happens after the Iteration review (may lag
Full system
by as much as one Iteration, maximum)
► Demo from a staging environment which
System
team
resembles production as much as possible

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 Without the System Demo

☐ Teams are ‘sprinting,’ but the system is not

☐ Chronic lack of trust between stakeholders and

teams

☐ Lack of feedback to iterate to the right solution

☐ False progress and poor quality

☐ ‘Waterfalled PIs’—problems and risks are

discovered too late

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7 Relentlessly improve with Inspect & Adapt

Inspect & Adapt (I&A) supports systematic review of Program

Increment (PI) outcomes and continuous improvement.

1. 2. Quantitative and qualitative 3. Retrospective and Problem-Solving

The PI System Demo
measurement Workshop

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 Without the Inspect & Adapt

☐ No systemic improvement; problems persist Three parts of Inspect and Adapt:

☐ No means to measure or establish delivery 1. The PI System Demo

predictability Quantitative and qualitative

2.
measurement
☐ Improvement efforts address symptoms, not root Retrospective and
3.
causes Problem-Solving Workshop

☐ Leaders who could change the system are not Timebox: 3 - 4 hours per PI
Attendees: Teams and stakeholders
engaged

☐ Low morale

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8 Dedicate time for Innovation and Planning

The IP Iteration provides an estimating buffer for meeting PI objectives, and

dedicated time for innovation, education, PI planning and I&A events.

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 Without the IP Iteration

☐ Lack of estimating buffer and poor predictability

☐ ‘Tyranny of the urgent’ iteration inhibits innovation

☐ Technical debt grows uncontrollably

☐ Lots of overtime and people burn out

☐ No time for teams to plan together, demo together, and

improve together

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9 Enable fast feature delivery with Architectural Runway

Architectural runway provides ‘just enough’ technical infrastructure to keep

velocity high and avoid excessive redesign and delays.

Feature
Feature

Feature

Implemented now …
Enabler … to support
future features

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 Without Architectural Runway

☐ Architecture progressively decays under the ‘urgency of now’

☐ Velocity peaks for a while, then falls off

☐ Infrequent and irregular releases

☐ Solution robustness, maintainability, and quality decay

☐ Unsustainable development pace

Enabler
Enabler

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10 Lead with Lean-Agile Leadership

Successful transformations are based on educating leadership first. ‘Lean-thinking
manager-teachers’ lead, rather than passively follow the transformation.

It is not enough that management commit themselves to quality

and productivity, they must know what it is they must do.

Such a responsibility cannot be delegated.

…and if you can’t come, send no one

—W. Edwards Deming, adapted from Out of Crisis

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 Without Lean-Agile Leadership

☐ Teams cannot learn from their leaders

☐ The transformation is fatally impaired
☐ Agile development with traditional
governance results in ‘Agile in name
only’

☐ Lead time increases due to frequent

escalation of decisions

☐ People not allowed to experiment, fail,

innovate, and learn

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One more thing, without Lean-Agile Leadership

SAFe will not work!

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 Prepare Share

Essential SAFe Self-Diagnostic 7 3

► Step 1: Fill out the Essential SAFe Self-Diagnostic on the next page
► Step 2: Use the previous slides to identify the symptoms that exist in
your enterprise
► Step 3: Be prepared to share

Example
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Essential SAFe Self-Diagnostic

5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5
No. of Symptoms

4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Lean-Agile Real Agile Cadence & PI Customer Centricity, System Inspect & IP Architectural Lean-Agile
Principles Teams and Synchronization Planning DevOps and Demo Adapt Iteration Runway Leadership
Trains Release on Demand

Essential SAFe Elements

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 Questions?

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