An Executive Overview of SAFe

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With almost a decade’s experience of talking to executives about Agile, I have learned what motivates Agile enthusiasts does not motivate executives. Executives want maximum delivery in the shortest amount of time. Agile should be about incremental business delivery, not team iterations. This talk presents the Scaled Agile Framework from an executive’s point of view. However, it will interest directors and line managers as well both to enable them to better speak to their stakeholders and to understand how to deliver value quickly.

The first half is not SAFe specific but discusses the challenge of Agile at scale. It explains why our current hierarchical management system does not lend itself to our true goal of delivering business value quickly. It then presents the concept of the value stream and why removing delays in our workflow and for feedback are so essential. It then describes why starting at the team level is fraught with danger, even though it will usually start with success.

After this background, the talk goes into SAFe itself, starting by presenting the house of Lean on which SAFe is built. It then discusses the portfolio, program and team layers of SAFe and how the SAFe framework can create a context for successful Scrum teams to be successful at creating bottom-line value across the enterprise.