Scaling agile: implementing SAFe®
Achieving enterprise agility
Welcome to the software age – an interconnected, real-time world in which every industry depends on technology and every organization is a software company (at least in part). To remain competitive, enterprises 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 led to significant improvements in many organizations. However, agile development on its own is not enough. What began in software development must now be expanded 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 with 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.
“Welcome to the age of software – an era where business agility will decide the winners and losers in the digital economy.”
Time to Market
Quality
Productivity
Engagement
Why SAFe® (Scaled Agile Framework®)?
SAFe can help your enterprise improve business outcomes by accelerating productivity, time to market, quality, employee engagement, and more. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is an online knowledge base of proven, integrated principles, practices, and competencies for implementing Lean, Agile, and DevOps at scale.
Results of enterprise agility
All of the below segments are dependent on the ability to deliver innovative business solutions faster and more efficiently than ever before. Each one needs 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. Organizations that master these competencies will conquer the digital age.
Lean-Agile businesses create greater profits, grow their market share, increase employee engagement, and better satisfy customer needs.
Lean-Agile nonprofit organizations create resilience, sustainability, and alignment to better fulfill their mission.
Lean-Agile government agencies deliver solutions that better assure the economy as well as the safety and welfare of the general public.
Scaling agile by implementing SAFe®
The SAFe 5 overview (see the figure below) 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 the SAFe 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 to evaluate portfolio progress based on the competencies and how to determine the next steps for improvement.
Implementation Roadmap
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 describes the steps or “critical moves” an enterprise can take to implement SAFe in an orderly, reliable, and successful fashion.
Why Quint?
Quint is an international consultancy, training and technology company. We support organizations in designing and implementing their digital transformation. To this end, we accelerate and embed transformations by connecting people, processes, technology and leadership to one another.
Consulting
Quint supports organizations with starting and professionalizing the transition to SAFe.
Training & Coaching
Our training and coaching programs facilitate teams in their transformation to achieve enterprise agility.
Business Simulations
Professional Business Simulations, or serious games, support organizational learning and change at all layers of the organization.
Technology
Quint provides the technological products and support necessary to achieve success with SAFe.
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Contact Quint
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