Preface
When the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was introduced to the public in 2011, we passionately believed that it had the potential to change the way the largest enterprises in the world would develop software and systems that deliver value.
Today, we can say unequivocally that SAFe has lived up to its promise. Hundreds of the world’s largest brands now depend on SAFe to stay competitive in an everdisruptive marketplace. More than 300 business partners, large and small, deliver SAFe training and services worldwide. As of early 2020, more than 600,000 individuals have gained personal knowledge and enhanced their careers by training and certifying in SAFe practices. That’s a big responsibility, and we take it very seriously.
As the demand for SAFe continues to grow, so do our efforts to support it. Through Scaled Agile, Inc.—the company behind SAFe—we are continually creating, refining, and delivering tools, resources, and learning events to help enterprises achieve the best possible results with SAFe.
The SAFe website. A freely available knowledge base of proven, integrated principles and practices for Lean, Agile, and DevOps. For more information, go to: scaledagileframework.com.
Learning and certification. A comprehensive role-based curriculum for successfully implementing SAFe, which now includes 13 courses and certifications (scaledagile.com/learning).
SAFe community platform. Continuous learning, tools, and connections for SAFe professionals with Communities of Practice for each role, as well as e-learning, videos, toolkits, collaboration forums, assessments, and resources for professional development (scaledagile.com/community).
Scaled Agile partner network. Worldwide SAFe expertise and support through more than 300 partners (scaledagile.com/find-a-partner).
Global and regional SAFe summits. In 2020, summit events will be held in the United States and Europe (safesummit.com). The latter event will be held virtually due to COVID-19.
The success of SAFe is a direct result of practicing what we preach. We run our entire business—not just product development—with SAFe. That includes sales, marketing, IT, framework development, learning and certification, community platform, accounting, finance, and more.
Our walls are plastered with Kanban boards, sticky notes, objectives, and backlogs, and we plan, iterate, and deliver as we prescribe in SAFe. But most importantly, we have made business agility a part of our company’s DNA with an intense focus on a continuous learning culture. We never assume that we have all the answers, and we do our best to listen to our detractors as much as our enthusiasts; indeed, we find motivations in both!
Development of SAFe was and is driven by fast feedback and a relentless pursuit of the best possible framework along with the highest-quality training, certification, and customer experience available on the market. And of course, future versions of the framework are always in development.
We’re grateful to the thousands of forward-thinking individuals who have been instrumental in proving and realizing SAFe’s potential: the enterprise adopters and practitioners who are doing the heavy lifting in applying SAFe in enterprises, as well as the partners, consultants, and trainers who support them.
It’s a wonderful thing we’ve all built together, and we are inspired to continuously evolve SAFe to provide value to the industry—better systems, better business outcomes, and better daily lives for the people who build and use the world’s most important systems.
Why SAFe?
Welcome to the age of software and digital—an interconnected, real-time world in which every industry depends on technology and every organization is (at least in part) a software company. To remain competitive, enterprises need to digitally transform their operations, business solutions, and customer experience.
But the challenge many enterprises face is that their current business models, organizational hierarchy, and technology infrastructure can’t keep pace with the rapid change required. While Agile development has provided significant improvements to many organizations, by itself it is not enough. What began in software development must now be scaled and 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 around the right work, business agility permits companies to capitalize on emerging opportunities. Achieving this level of agility requires mastering not one but two business operating systems.
The first system is traditionally hierarchical and is common to most enterprises. It provides the necessary efficiency, stability, governance, people operations, and other scalable aspects needed to survive in the marketplace and deliver the current mission.
The second system is a customer-centric, value stream network, which is able to quickly deliver innovative business solutions to a faster-moving marketplace.
SAFe helps you implement this second operating system, enabling your enterprise to do the following:
Quickly adapt and respond to emerging competitive threats
Efficiently identify and deliver incremental customer value
Maintain quality in an evolving and innovative product and solution portfolio
Moreover, you will be able to optimally organize teams around value and reorganize quickly in response to changing business needs. The result is that your company will achieve the business agility needed to survive and thrive in the digital age.
A growing number of Global 2000 enterprises have found the answer in SAFe. The framework integrates the iterative development practices of Agile and the culture, tools, and practices of DevSecOps with the mindset of Lean and flow, which focuses on minimizing waste and delays while maximizing customer value. With SAFe, organizations can better link strategy with execution, innovate faster and deliver high-quality solutions to the market more quickly. This has proven to be a powerful advantage that enables businesses to leverage digital disruption to their advantage.
As case studies on the SAFe website (scaledagileframework.com) show, many enterprises—large and small—are getting extraordinary business results from adopting SAFe.
These results typically include the following:
10–50 percent happier, more-motivated employees
30–75 percent faster time-to-market
25–75 percent defect reduction
20–50 percent increase in productivity
As you can imagine, with results like those, SAFe is spreading rapidly around the world. Leading surveys and research organizations cite SAFe as the preferred method for scaling Agile. SAFe is by far the most commonly considered and adopted scaling framework.
About This Book
“SAFe® Distilled is the book we’ve all been waiting for. It breaks down the complexity of the framework into easily digestible explanations and actionable guidance. A must-have resource for beginners as well as seasoned practitioners.”
— Lee Cunningham, senior director, Enterprise Agile Strategy at CollabNet VersionOne
The SAFe knowledge base at scaledagileframework.com is an invaluable resource for people who build software and systems and business solutions; however, navigating the guidance can be daunting for the uninitiated. SAFe is a robust framework supported by hundreds of web pages. Where do you start? In what order should you read the articles? What information is really important to you and when?
We get it. There’s a Wikipedia aspect to the SAFe body of knowledge that can be difficult to navigate. It doesn’t really tell its own story, and that’s why we wrote SAFe® 5.0 Distilled: Achieving Business Agility with the Scaled Agile Framework.
The book is divided into three parts.
Part I: Competing in the Age of Software introduces business agility and why businesses need SAFe. It describes how SAFe leverages four main bodies of knowledge—Agile, DevOps, Lean product development, and systems thinking—to achieve better business outcomes. This part also introduces SAFe to help you understand the basics of the framework and to serve as a foundation for your learning journey.
Part II: The Seven Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise describes the competencies needed to achieve business agility. Each competency is a set of related knowledge, skills, and behaviors that enable enterprises of all sizes to thrive and survive in the age of software and digital. There is a chapter for each competency, and each integrates knowledge from many different SAFe articles to provide a complete but concise story.
Part III: Implementing SAFe, Measure and Grow describes how to implement the framework’s principles, practices, and activities. Here you will learn a step-by-step approach for adopting SAFe and how to measure, grow, and accelerate the benefits of your Lean-Agile implementation to achieve business agility.
We also believe that building the world’s most important systems should be fun, too! Perhaps that’s the real reason we wrote this book.
—Richard Knaster and Dean Leffingwell
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