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Many leaders pride themselves on setting the high-level direction and staying out of the
details. But big picture, hands off leadership isn’t likely to work in a change situation,
“ because the hardest part of change—the paralyzing part—is in the details.

Any successful change requires a translation of ambiguous goals into concrete

behaviors. To make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.

—Dan and Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

SAFe Implementation Roadmap

This is the home page for the SAFe® Implementation Roadmap series, which consists of 12 articles.

The SAFe Implementation Roadmap consists of an overview graphic and a 12-article series that
describes a strategy and an ordered set of activities that have proven to be effective in successfully Getting Started with
implementing SAFe. Implementing SAFe:

Achieving business agility and the benefits of Lean-Agile development at scale is not a trivial effort, so
SAFe is not a trivial framework. Before realizing SAFe’s rewards, organizations must embrace a Lean-
Agile Mindset as well as understand and apply Lean-Agile principles. They must identify Value
Streams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs), implement a Lean-Agile portfolio, build quality in, and
establish the mechanisms for continuous value delivery and DevOps. And, of course, the culture must
evolve as well.

Based on proven organizational change management strategies, the SAFe Implementation Roadmap
graphic and article series describes the steps or “critical moves” an enterprise can take to implement
SAFe in an orderly, reliable, and successful fashion.

Details
In order to achieve the desired organizational change, leadership must “script the critical moves,” as described by Dan and Chip Heath [1]. When it
comes to identifying those critical moves for adopting SAFe, hundreds of the world’s largest enterprises have already gone down this path (see
Customer Stories), and successful adoption patterns have emerged. A fairly standard pattern is shown in Figure 1.

1
 Figure 1. SAFe Implementation Roadmap

While no two adoptions are identical and there is rarely a perfectly sequential step-by-step implementation in any enterprise, we know that businesses
getting the best results typically follow a path similar to that shown in the Implementation Roadmap. It 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 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

This article serves as a launching pad to explore these steps in detail and understand how to apply them to specific implementations.

Start with the first article: Reaching the Tipping Point.