Editor’s Note: You’re facing unprecedented business challenges. You need more than theories—you need a blueprint. Welcome to a Leader’s Blueprint, your weekly guide to proven strategies that get results.
The CEO’s got a big, game-changing idea, and the product team has the numbers to back it up. All eyes in the strategy meeting turn to you, the technology leader. The question is simple: “How fast can we build it?”
On the outside, you project calm confidence. But on the inside, you’re mentally navigating a minefield of potential bottlenecks, excessive work in process (WIP), and the friction of too many handoffs. The honest answer isn’t a date; it’s a list of caveats. Your ambition as a leader is to say “yes,” but your current system is screaming “not so fast.”
The Hidden Costs of Technical Drag
When your delivery pipeline has too much friction, the consequences ripple through the entire technology organization, creating significant risks and liabilities.
The WIP Whirlpool & Bottleneck Backlog: Excessive Work in Process (WIP) and unaddressed bottlenecks create a vicious cycle. Teams are constantly context-switching, leading to slower completion times and a growing mountain of unfinished work. This grinds innovation to a halt, making every future change slower, more expensive, and more complex.
Developer Frustration & Attrition: Top engineering talent wants to solve complex problems and ship great code, not spend their days fighting a frustrating system. A slow, cumbersome process leads to burnout and the loss of your best people to competitors with modern tech stacks.
Increased System Risk: Every manual handoff and complex, rushed deployment is a potential failure point. As speed is prioritized over stability, the system becomes more fragile, leading to more bugs, unexpected downtime, and security vulnerabilities. This is exacerbated by legacy policies and procedures that are slowing down everything.
From Friction to Flow: A Glimpse of the Solution
The solution isn’t just about better code; it’s about building a better system for delivering that code. In SAFe®, this is the Accelerating Product Flow competency. For technology leaders, this means creating a streamlined, automated path from a developer’s keyboard to a live production environment.
This involves a relentless focus on accelerating flow. Starting with:
Identifying Bottlenecks: This means looking at your entire delivery pipeline—from build times to security scans to testing environments—and finding the single biggest source of delay. Is it a manual approval gate? A slow testing cycle? Addressing these constraints is the key to unlocking speed.
Minimizing Handoffs: Every time work is handed from requirements ideation through to approval for release, you introduce wait time and the potential for error. The goal is to create cross-functional teams and automated processes that reduce these handoffs, smoothing the path to production.
Your First Step
You can begin to diagnose your biggest point of friction this week. Ask one of your engineering teams a direct question:
“What is the most frustrating, time-consuming manual step between writing a line of code and seeing it live in production?”
The answer will immediately pinpoint what you need to resolve first.
Unlock the Full Blueprint
Identifying a bottleneck is the first step, but creating a high-velocity engineering organization requires a holistic approach. The Accelerating Product Flow competency provides a full blueprint for implementing eight flow accelerators, including optimizing time in the zone and getting faster feedback.
Stop letting technical drag be the brake on your company’s ambition.
Unlock the full Framework, competencies and guidance needed to build a fast, resilient, and innovative tech engine. Get complete access by purchasing your SAFe® Insider membership today.
Editor’s Note: You’re facing unprecedented business challenges. You need more than theories—you need a blueprint. Welcome to a Leader’s Blueprint, your weekly guide to proven strategies that get results.
Your team had a brilliant idea six months ago. The market was ready for it. But by the time you navigated the internal processes, approvals, and development cycles, a smaller, faster competitor launched a similar product. They captured the market’s attention while your “perfect” solution is still weeks from release.
You weren’t out-innovated; you were out-paced. In today’s market, the speed at which you deliver value is just as important as the value itself.
The Hidden Costs of Delay
A slow time-to-market is more than a single missed opportunity; it’s a symptom of a system that is bleeding resources and relevance.
Market Irrelevance: When your delivery cycles are longer than market cycles, your solutions are always a step behind what customers actually need.
Wasted Innovation: Great ideas die on the vine, stuck in a slow-moving process. Your organization doesn’t have a shortage of innovation, but a shortage of velocity.
Decreased Morale: Nothing is more frustrating for talented teams than to see their hard work beaten to the punch or become irrelevant before it even launches.
From Gridlock to Velocity: A Glimpse of the Solution
The solution isn’t to ask your teams to work harder—it’s to redesign your system for speed. In SAFe®, this is the Accelerating Product Flow competency. It’s aboutstreamlining the entire value stream, from idea to delivery, by systematically removing delays.
Limiting Work in Process (WIP): It’s like a highway—too many cars create a traffic jam where nothing moves. By limiting the number of new features being built right now, you clear the road, allowing high-priority work to move at maximum speed.
Eliminating Bottlenecks: A bottleneck is any part of your process—like code reviews or testing—where work piles up. By identifying and addressing these choke points, you ensure work moves smoothly through the system.
Your First Step
You can start identifying your biggest constraint this week with a single question. Ask some of your product teams:
“What is the one thing that, if we could fix it, would most speed up our ability to deliver value to the customer?”
Don’t try to solve it yet. Just listen. The answers will point directly to your most significant bottleneck.
Unlock the Full Blueprint
Identifying your bottleneck is the first step, but building a sustainable competitive advantage requires a system designed for speed. The Accelerating Product Flow competency is a complete guide to all eight flow accelerators, including how to get faster feedback and minimize handoffs.
Stop letting delays dictate your market position.
Unlock the full Framework, competencies, and guidance you need to build an organization that can outpace the competition. Get access by purchasing your SAFe® Insider membership today.
Editor’s Note: You’re facing unprecedented business challenges. You need more than theories—you need a blueprint. Welcome to a Leader’s Blueprint, your weekly guide to proven strategies that get results.
In your last product strategy meeting, how much time was spent looking forward versus looking back? It’s a common scene: we do the next item of work without considering if it’s the right thing, pointing to a line item on a twelve-month-old roadmap, a plan created in a different reality. You’re trying to drive the business forward, but your teams are navigating by looking in the rearview mirror.
A plan like this doesn’t illuminate the road ahead; it only reflects commitments made in the past. When your roadmap focuses only on where you’ve been, you’re guaranteed to miss the opportunities right in front of you.
The Hidden Costs of a Static Plan
An inflexible roadmap isn’t just an administrative headache; it’s a direct threat to your business agility and a quiet killer of innovation.
Paralysis by Plan: Teams are forced to choose between following an irrelevant plan or going rogue, creating friction and misalignment.
Wasted Opportunity: By locking in features months in advance, you lose the ability to react to new market insights or customer feedback, effectively ceding ground to more nimble competitors.
Broken Trust: When roadmaps consistently fail to reflect reality, they undermine trust between leadership, product teams, and stakeholders, making true alignment impossible.
From Fixed Plans to Living Guides: A Glimpse of the Solution
The solution is to transform your roadmap from a rigid, feature-based timeline into a dynamic, outcome-focused guide. In SAFe®, this is the Creating Responsive Roadmaps competency.
This approach reframes a roadmap as a strategic communication tool, not an unbreakable promise. It’s a living document that adapts to new information. One of the key tools SAFe uses to prioritize items on this flexible roadmap is Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF). Instead of prioritizing based on emotion or seniority, WSJF provides an economic framework to determine which features will deliver the most value in the shortest time, ensuring you’re always working on the most important thing.
Your First Step
You can start making your roadmap more responsive today with a simple change in language. This week, pick one high-level initiative on your current roadmap and reframe it with this question:
“For every item currently listed on our roadmap, can we clearly articulate the specific desired outcome and the measurable impact it is expected to have?”
This question helps foster a shared understanding of success criteria and forces everyone to step back from the feature list to ensure the work is tied to the overarching business goals. If a feature cannot be tied to any expected outcome, reconsider its place on the roadmap.
Unlock the Full Blueprint
Shifting your language is the first step, but building a truly responsive planning process requires a complete system. The Creating Responsive Roadmaps competency provides a full blueprint for connecting strategy to execution, using milestones effectively, and facilitating collaborative planning events.
Stop letting outdated plans dictate your future.
Unlock the full Framework, competencies, and guidance you need to build roadmaps that adapt and lead your organization to success. Get complete access by purchasing your SAFe® Insider membership today.
Editor’s Note: You’re facing unprecedented business challenges. You need more than theories—you need a blueprint. Welcome to a Leader’s Blueprint, your weekly guide to proven strategies that get results.
You’re in the quarterly strategy meeting. The stakes are high, and a critical decision must be made: which major initiative gets the funding? The debate is passionate, but it’s driven by compelling arguments and seniority, not data. You have dashboards, but they’re filled with vanity metrics. No one can definitively answer the most important question: “Which of these options will actually move the needle on our business goals?”
When the loudest voice in the room becomes your primary decision-making tool, you’re not strategizing; you’re gambling.
The Hidden Costs of an Opinion-Driven Culture
Operating without clear, consistent product metrics is like flying a plane without an instrument panel. The risks are immense and go far beyond inefficient meetings:
Strategic Drift: Teams work hard on features that feel important but fail to deliver any measurable value, slowly pulling the product off course.
Wasted Investment: Precious capital and talent are allocated to initiatives that don’t impact business outcomes, customer satisfaction, or user engagement.
Inability to Learn: Without measuring the impact of your changes, you can’t know what works. Every launch is a shot in the dark, and you never improve your aim.
From Guesswork to Guidance: A Glimpse of the Solution
The antidote to this uncertainty is building a culture of data-driven decision-making. In SAFe®, this is guided by the Measuring Product Performance competency. This framework provides clarity by viewing your product through four essential lenses: Business Outcomes, User Engagement, Customer Satisfaction, and Technical Performance.
This holistic view is powered by combining two types of metrics:
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): These are your instruments, providing a continuous pulse-check on the operational health of your product.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results): This is your destination, aligning everyone toward ambitious, strategic goals.
Using both, you always know your current health and where you’re headed.
Your First Step
You can begin this shift with a single question. This week, pick one significant feature on your upcoming roadmap and ask the team:
“If this feature is wildly successful, which single, measurable metric will change, and in what direction?”
If there isn’t a clear answer, the feature’s purpose—and its value—is a mystery.
Unlock the Full Blueprint
Answering that one question brings immediate clarity. But creating a true data-driven engine requires a complete system. The Measuring Product Performance competency provides a full blueprint for defining meaningful metrics across all four lenses and integrating them into powerful OKRs and KPIs. Stop flying blind. Unlock the full framework, competencies, and guidance you need to make every product decision with confidence. Get access by purchasing your SAFe® Insider membership today.
Stop building in the dark.
Embrace the full power of the SAFe Framework, with the competencies and guidance that will empower you to become truly customer-centric and unlock your organization’s full potential. Get complete access by purchasing your SAFe Insider membership today.
This post is the second in a series about success patterns for large solutions. Read the first post here.
Backlog refinement is integral to the Scrum process because it prevents surprises and maintains flow in iterative development. Regular backlog review ensures the backlog is ready for iteration planning. An Agile team understands how much they still need to refine the backlog items before the next iteration planning and beyond.
When applying SAFe®to large, complex, cyber-physical systems, you must expand backlog refinement to include more viewpoints. The complexity of a large solution is rarely fully comprehended by one or a few individuals, and the size of the large solution exacerbates the impact of risks that can escape into large solution planning.
So how do we find the balance between overpreparation, which limits ownership and innovation by the solution builders, and under-refinement, which can undermine the solution and the flow of value delivery?
To answer these questions, we adapted the following success patterns for large solution backlog refinement.
Use the Dispatcher Clause
The dispatcher principle guides large solution refinement by preventing the premature dispatch of requirements to Agile Release Trains (ARTs), solution areas, or Agile teams. Premature dispatching can cause risks like:
• Misalignment in the development of different solution components • Missed opportunities for economies of scale across organizational constructs • Sub-optimization of lower priority solution features
In contrast, making the right trade-off decisions at the right level drives holistic and innovative solutions.
Key stakeholder viewpoints that are often overlooked include marketing, compliance, customer support, and finance. Ensuring these voices are heard during refinement work can prevent issues that might remain undetected until late in the solution roadmap.
For complex solutions, we discovered that a planning conference is more effective than pre-and post-PI Planning events alone. This event mimics a PI Planning event and is intended to align upcoming PI work across ARTs and solution areas. To keep the conference focused and productive, it should only include representatives from the participating ARTs. We will cover specific planning conference details in a later blog post.
The goal of the planning conference is to provide a boundary for the large solution refinement work. Preparation for key decisions that can be made in the planning conference should be part of the refinement work. But making key decisions is part of the planning conference. However, key stakeholder inputs that cannot be reasonably gathered during the planning conference should be included in the refinement work.
For example, in Figure one, a review of the key behavior-driven development (BDD) demo and testing scenarios by a customer advisory board is valuable input in refinement. The customer advisory board will not attend the two-day planning conference, so their advance input provides guardrails on the backlog work that’s considered.
Agree on the Definition of Ready
The definition of the readiness (DoR) criteria for a large solution backlog is often multidimensional. Consider, for example, the architectural dimension of the solution. The architecture defines the high-level solution components and how they interact to provide value. The choice of components is relevant to system architects in the contributing ARTs and stakeholders in at least these areas:
• User experience • Compliance • Internal audit and standards • Corporate reuse • Finance
Advancing the backlog item—a Capability or an Epic—through the stages of readiness often requires review and refinement from the various stakeholders.
Figure one is an example Definition of Ready Maturity Model. It shows the solution dimensions that must be refined in preparation for the solution backlog. Levels zero to five show how readiness can advance within each dimension. The horizontal contour lines show that progression to the intermediate stages of readiness is often a combination of different levels in each dimension.
Figure 1. Definition of Ready Maturity Model example
This delineation is helpful when monitoring the progression of a backlog item to intermediate readiness stages on a Kanban board.
The key to balancing over-preparation and under-refinement is to distinguish between work that an ART or solution area can complete independently without a high risk of rework. For example, final costs could be prohibitively high without a Lean business case to scope the solution. Another common high-risk impact of under-refinement is unacceptable usability caused by the siloed implementation of Features by the ARTs.
The Priority BDD and Test Scenarios in Figure one represent how features are used harmoniously. These scenarios provide guardrails to help ARTs prioritize and demonstrate parts of the overall solution without significant rework of a PI.
Identifying the dimensions, levels, and progression of readiness is a powerful organizational skill for building a large solution.
Leverage Refinement Crews
Regular large solution refinement is necessary to ensure readiness. The complexity of a large solution warrants greater effort and participation than Solution Management can cover. And the number of key decisions grows in direct proportion to the size of a solution.
Our experience shows that roughly 10 percent of those who participate in large solution development should participate in a regular refinement cadence. If the total participation is 450 people, then 45 representatives from across ARTs or solution areas should set aside time for weekly refinement iterations.
Backlog refinement for a large solution requires more capacity than a typical backlog refinement session. The refinement crews determine a cadence of planning, executing, and demonstrating the refinement work. One-week iterations, for example, help drive focus on refinement to ensure readiness.
We also discovered that refinement crews of six to eight people should swarm refinement work within iterations. These groups are usually created based on individual skills and their representation within stakeholder groups. Alignment with crews and dimensions or skillsets is determined during the planning of refinement iterations. The goal is always to move the funnel item to the next refinement maturity level in the next iteration.
Our experience says that each refinement crew requires at least three to four core participants. The other crew members can come from stakeholder organizations outside the Solution Train.
Readiness progress must be reviewed on a regular cadence with solution train progress. Progress can be represented in the Solution Kanban between the Funnel and Backlog stages, as shown in Figure two. In our example, these stages replace the Analyzing state provided as a starting point in SAFe.
Figure 2. Refinement Stages in Solution Kanban
The organization must also allow each refinement step to vary over time, as it makes sense for the solution. For example, as the development of the solution progresses toward a releasable version, the architecture should stabilize. Therefore the readiness of the backlog item in the architecture dimension should progress very quickly, if not skip some readiness steps. As solutions approach a major release, the contributors’ capacity can shift from readiness to execution of the current release or readiness for the next release.
Because refinement happens in a regular cadence of iterations, weekly, for example, the refinement crews should be empowered to make these decisions in refinement iteration planning.
Employ Dynamic Agility
So is there a definitive template of dimensions with levels and a step-by-step process for determining the DoR? Not quite. And we don’t think that a prescriptive process is best for most organizations.
Instead, we advocate for using the organizational skill of dynamic agility.
As the size and complexity of a solution grow, so do the number and type of variables: compliance type, hardware types, skills required, size of the development organization, size of the enterprise/business, specialization of customer types, and so on. This complexity is augmented by company culture challenges, workforce turnover, and technology advancements in emerging industries.
Individuals’ motivation and innovation suffer when they get lost in the morass of complexity. When things don’t get done, more employees are added to help fix the problem. This workforce growth only magnifies the complexity again.
In contrast, the organizational skill of dynamic agility stimulates autonomy, mastery, and purpose for individuals within teams, teams-of-teams, and large solutions.
Consider the House of Dynamic Agility represented in Figure three.
Figure 3. House of Dynamic Agility
How can dynamic agility be applied to large solution refinement? DoR identification and maintenance of its dimensions and levels happen through a regular cadence of the right events. How often should these occur, for how long, and who should attend? What elements will represent and communicate the DoR? What roles are best suited to own and facilitate the management and use of DoR over time? How will collaboration across the organization happen most efficiently for maximum benefit? These questions are best determined in the context of the large solution.
Conclusion
Large solutions require a balance of preparation and execution to achieve an optimal flow of value. Conducting backlog refinement in preparation for a large solution planning conference and PI Planning lets decomposed work items be implemented without risk of rework. Avoiding over-specification in refinement allows ARTs to innovate and accomplish within the guardrails of refinement. Enabling large solutions to leverage dynamic agility builds ownership, collaboration, and efficiency in a large-scale endeavor.
Look for the next post in our series, coming soon.
About Cindy VanEpps, Project & Team, Inc.
From crafting space shuttle flight design and mission control software at Johnson Space Center to roles including software developer, technical lead, development manager, consultant, and solution developer, Cindy has an extensive repertoire of skills and experience. As a SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT) and Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) expert, her thought leadership, teaching, and consulting rely on pragmatism in the application of Agile practices.
About Wolfgang Brandhuber, Project & Team, Inc.
Dr. Wolfgang Brandhuber has been a Scrum Developer, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Chief Scrum Master, and Agile Head Coach in various Agile environments. His passion is large solutions. Since the advent of the large solution level in the Scaled Agile Framework in 2016, he has set up and helped solution trains improve their complex systems. During his 18 years as a professional consultant, he worked over 16 of those in the Agile world and more than nine years with SAFe. Among other certifications, he is a certified SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT), a Kanban University Trainer (AKT), and an Agility Health Trainer (AHT).
About Malte Kumlehn, Project & Team, Inc.
Malte helps deliver complex ecosystems, people, Cloud, AI, and data-powered digital transformations toward business agility. He pioneers intelligent operating models for portfolios with large solutions as a SAFe® Fellow, advisory board member, and executive advisor in this field. He guides executives in developing the most challenging competencies that allow them to deliver breakthrough results through Lean-Agile at scale. His experience has been published by Accenture, Gartner, and the Swiss Association for Quality over the last ten years.
It was May of 2012, the year that the Mayan calendar said the “great cycle” shall come to an end. And with every cycle comes a new cycle. This new cycle was the beginning of an evolution of knowledge, sharing, and learning around how society builds the world’s largest systems.
For those of you who’ve followed the history of the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFeⓇ), you’ll remember that the book Agile Software Requirements had just been published in 2011. And you’ll also recognize this book as the foundation and initial version of the Scaled Agile Framework. Just open the front cover and you’ll find Dean Leffingwell’s initial “Big Picture” rendition of the Framework. The book itself was fueled by Dean’s 2007 — 2008 blog series, where he published the initial articles and concepts within Scaling Software Agility and Agile Software Requirements, both books that helped move the market.
The book unfolds the “why” behind the Framework. Dean discerns that to scale agility, an aspect of Lean is requisite. He further goes on to state that Lean is required to scale agility because of its focus on value streams, principles, and tools that enhance value delivery to customers and its elimination of waste in the development process. You’ll also recognize the influence of Don Reinertsen’s Principles of Product Development Flow as some of the early concepts within the Framework. What you may not know is that the publication of Don’s book caused Dean to go back to the drawing board and rewrite his book.
And for those who know Dean personally, you know that respect for people and culture is a passion of his that continues to be prevalent in Lean as well as in SAFe.
Now, while writing and sharing the book was clearly an affection of Dean’s, taking the knowledge and research in the book and translating it into a learning experience was also a passion. Today marks the anniversary of the first Scaled Agile Framework Certification class!
#1 SAFe Program Consultant Certification, May 25, 2012
Roughly 30 curious agilists attended the first SAFe® Program Consultant (SPC) certification. The course was a bootstrapped effort, invite-only. I remember Dean personally reaching out to those who had leveraged the early concept of SAFe.
At the time, I was a product owner. I was honored when my Lean leader said “yes” to funding and allowed me the time and opportunity to learn and evolve my knowledge of my role and how to better scale and build systems that our customers needed.
Taught based on V0.94 of the Framework (isn’t that a work of art?), the course introduced the concepts of Lean and Agile, roles and responsibilities, and the practicalities of scale. The class format was similar to today’s, with the first two days about the mindset and principles and the second two days focused on implementation techniques such as identifying value streams and “finding the kidney,” which is a metaphor for identifying who within the organization contributes to value creation and designing Agile Release Trains (ARTs).
It was hosted at the f/k/a Rally Software headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. Instructors included Dean Leffingwell, Alex Yakyma, Drew Jemilo, and Colin O’Neil. Enterprise representatives included Nokia, McAfee, Mitchell International, EMC, Tendril (the case study in Agile Software Requirements), and Nordstrom. And of course, there were the consultants represented by IconATG, Rally Software, Blue Mercury, and Net Objectives.
In the true spirit of SAFe, the class was full of hands-on experiential exercises, teaming within the class, and knowledge that helped create the evolution and advancement of our traditional Agile mindsets to Lean-Agile mindsets.
There was even a proctored exam on the last day. If memory serves me, there were at least 30 essay questions and about 75 percent of the class graduated as the first SPCs!
I fondly remember chatting with Drew Jemilo, envisioning what SAFe could be in a decade. I can honestly say that the market has validated the need and exceeded all of our visions and expectations. It’s helped tens of thousands of organizations organize and deliver the highest-value products and solutions to their customers and created a powerful career market for lifelong learners, partners, and consultants.
Fast Forward 10 Years
The Framework has never stopped evolving and adapting to the field. Perhaps that’s what makes it unique: continuous value delivery to its customers. As humans, we thrive to evolve and learn, and this enables the sharing of knowledge from people like you.
Some of the latest enhancements include the addition of Principle #10: Organize around value (which was always present, just not as detailed and prevalent) and the seven core competencies of the Lean enterprise, which are crucial to achieving and sustaining your competitive edge.
Today, more than 1,000,000 practitioners and 20,000 enterprises worldwide in nearly every industry trust SAFe. Gartner names SAFe the #1 most considered and adopted framework for scaling Agile. If we were to apply Geoffrey Moore’s technology adoption curve from his book Crossing the Chasm to SAFe, it would most likely be in the early majority, and even in the tornado phase.
If there’s one thing for certain, customers are seeing results, and the Scaled Agile Framework has evolved its initial mission of “Better software and systems make the world a better place.” Today, Version 5 represents the most ambitious expansion of that mission in our history: to enable the business agility that is required for enterprises to compete and thrive in the digital age.
Sincere gratitude to my friend, Alex Yakyma, who helped maintain SAFe history with the visuals and helped refresh my memory of the event.
Learn more about the evolution of the Scaled Agile Framework, follow the SAFe blog, and join us at the 2022 SAFe Summit!
About Jennifer Fawcett
Jennifer is a semi-retired, empathetic Lean and Agile leader, practitioner, coach, speaker, and consultant. As a SAFe Fellow, she contributed to and helped develop SAFe content and courseware. Her passion and focus have been delivering value in the workplace by creating communities and culture through effective communication, product management, product ownership, executive portfolio coaching, and compassionate leadership. She has provided dedicated service in these areas to technology companies for over 35 years.
Note: This is the third post in the Practice Makes Permanent series. Read the first post here and the second post here. You can watch my webinar on PI Planning here.
Is your SAFe® implementation slowing? Has the energy and enthusiasm faded and it feels like just one more process change? Maybe you’re just not seeing the value you expected? That’s OK because PI Planning presents significant opportunities for your relentless improvement of the SAFe journey.
If you’ve read the previous posts in this series, you know that the right kind of SAFe practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes permanent. And you know that using creative tension will help you find the right outlook to discover new opportunities and foster relentless improvement. The reality is that many Agile Release Trains (ARTs) have a distorted view of PI Planning—they see it as a readout of the already created plan or a time to direct teams toward a plan rather than the discovery session it’s intended to be. This makes it a great place to get your implementation back on track. PI Planning is an opportunity to discover the plan for the next PI. Discovery is exciting, it’s engaging, and it’s about learning.
Through my years of teaching and implementing SAFe, I’ve identified key practices to help organizations successfully discover a plan for the upcoming PI. My goal in providing these tips and techniques is to give you practical ideas on how to revolutionize your PI Planning and improve the quality of your plans.
Consider these key practices to make PI Planning a discovery session:
Breadth vs. depth planning
Good objectives start early
Iteration plans from PI Planning are “what if?” scenarios
Raise the levels evenly
Preconceived is pre-committed—limit pre-PI Planning
Breadth vs. Depth Planning
During PI Planning, the Agile teams are instrumental in converting the ART vision and roadmap into team-committed objectives while discovering the risks, dependencies, and delivery goals for the PI.
The anti-pattern
A very common anti-pattern in PI Planning is when teams focus on one iteration at a time, attempting to create a solid plan for iteration one, followed by a deep dive in iteration two, and so on. This is dangerous because we’re not seeing the big picture of the whole PI. And often we get to the draft plan review, and the teams don’t have a high-level, end-to-end plan, which is critical for the management (adjustment) review and problem-solving activity.
Additionally, because teams have gone iteration by iteration, concentrating on creating and loading stories, they haven’t collaborated sufficiently on with other teams on dependencies. This can potentially lead to radical plan changes during team breakouts on day two.
Implement breadth vs. depth
This is where breadth vs depth comes in. Encourage your teams to think across the whole PI and create a very high-level plan within the first 60–90 minutes of the first breakout session. This will include initial starter objectives, the discovery of some initial dependencies on other teams, high-level goals for each iteration, and some initial stories (perhaps slotted into an iteration). These activities give teams a broad, overall approach.
Now, they can use the remaining time in the breakout to improve the depth by:
Discovering more stories
Identifying more dependencies
Refining objectives
Identifying and (perhaps) mitigating more risks
This breadth vs. depth strategy ensures that there’s always a draft plan to review and helps teams align on the approach and effort distribution.
Here’s a quick recap of the key principles of breadth vs. depth:
Start with a high-level, end-to-end plan that’s full of holes.
As time permits, go back and fill in those gaps.
Focus on “based on what we currently know, this is our plan. However, we know we have more to learn to fill in some gaps.”
Raise the water level evenly. Create some story placeholders, which will generate some objectives, which will raise some dependencies, which will identify more stories, which will update objectives, and so on.
Apply SAFe® Principle #3: Assume variability; preserve options. Start with minimal constraints and a high-level approach and add details as they emerge.
Good Objectives Start Early
Team objectives are one of the key outputs of the planning effort. Objectives are a team’s opportunity to say:
“Hey, ART leadership, we saw the vision, we saw the roadmap from the top x features. Here’s our contribution to the success of the ART for this PI.”
This is a powerful opportunity to engage SAFe Principle #8 and SAFe Principle #9 and is a critical component to ensuring alignment.
Many teams struggle with understanding objectives because they’re not used to being asked, “What can you contribute to our success?” Instead, they’re used to being told “this is what needs to be done.” I like to explain objectives with an analogy.
Team objectives
Imagine you’ve just read a really powerful, thought-changing book (such as Donald Reinertsen’s Principles of Product Development Flow). Most likely you’ve read the book chapter by chapter. You want to share the power of that book with your friend, and you’ll probably share highlights and key areas and concepts from your perspective. Now, another friend reads the same book and shares their key takeaways from their perspective. While there may be similarities in key concepts (for example, Economic Sequencing) each perspective may pick up on different areas and ideas that were key to them but that maybe didn’t stand out to you.
The chapters in the book are the features. All the teams read the features and come away with their key areas and contributions. These are the team objectives. Some teams may have shared contributions across the ART (Program Objectives), but many will have specific contributions unique to their own team (Team Objectives).
Start early, iterate often
So, how do you achieve these powerful objectives within PI Planning? That’s where the phrase “good objectives start early” comes in. Objectives should start as early thoughts and concepts and grow in clarity and alignment as the breakout continues.
These are the key principles to successfully writing objectives:
Start writing objectives early in the first breakout.
Don’t wait until you have ‘perfect’ objectives; perfect is the enemy of good.
As you learn more about the plan during the breakout conversations, potential objectives will emerge. Write these down, no matter how incomplete they are.
As you learn more about the objective through further planning-fueled learning, update the objectives.
Don’t try to start with SMART objectives, work toward them.
Iteration Plans from PI Planning Are What-If Scenarios
A common issue that limits the self-organization aspect of SAFe Agile teams is the mistaken belief that teams are creating iteration plans that must be locked in and committed to. This is a highly critical point: teams do not commit to iteration plans in PI Planning. They’re committing to the objectives they discover, and to the Program Board, which identifies when they believe they can deliver on the features and what dependencies are needed to deliver. When teams have the false belief that they’re going to be held accountable for plans for four iterations in sequence, they become nervous, realizing they can’t really know exactly what will be needed for each iteration. They believe they’re being held to a mini-waterfall approach. Actually, the opposite is true.
We ask teams to create iteration plans so that they can discover the objectives they want to commit to, discover the significant dependencies needed to deliver the features they pull in and discover the risks that may threaten the plan. The plan they create is one of many possible ways they can deliver, and many of the details of the actual plan will surface as they execute that plan. In my experience, the specific iteration plans the teams create are about 60-percent accurate. As long as we have the significant dependencies and risks identified, that level of accuracy is good enough to get started.
Key principles around the what-if scenario approach:
Teams do not commit to iteration plans. They commit to objectives and the Program Board’s dependencies and Feature deliveries.
Teams create iteration plans to unearth dependencies, discover objectives, and learn how to deliver to the business.
The iteration plans will almost certainly change as we iterate through the Program Increment. Understanding that we are only identifying one of many possible scenarios to deliver on these objectives helps the teams focus on what’s important.
Raise the Levels Evenly
Closely associated with the breadth vs. depth concept is ensuring you have a good balance of focus on each component of the Draft Plan Review. Following SAFe Principle #4, we want to shorten our Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA) cycles to increase the pace of learning. If you think of each key area of focus in the team breakout, we have:
Creating, sizing, prioritizing user stories and enabler stories
Identifying and improving team objectives
Identifying and attempting to mitigate risks
Discovering, discussing, and gaining commitment to cross-team dependencies
Updating the Program Board as we discover new feature delivery and dependency aspects in the emerging plan
Consider each of these areas as buckets to fill. We don’t want to fill one bucket to the top and then go to the next. Instead, we want to evenly bring up the level on all buckets together. That means we want the teams to generate some stories, which can lead to updated objectives, which can lead to new risks identified or mitigated, leading to new commitments with other teams, and leading to updates to the Program Board. This order is not rigid, there’s nothing wrong with discovering a dependency, adding some stories to cover this dependency, and then updating Program Board. The idea is to make sure that we are keeping the levels (amount of recorded information) approximately even across all the buckets.
These are the key principles to raising the levels evenly:
Don’t try to create a full iteration-by-iteration plan too early.
Use the energy and knowledge from adding to one bucket to add to the next bucket.
At regular intervals, step back and review the levels in each bucket. Are these relatively evenly filled? If not, do we need to revert to focus on a particular bucket?
At key points, review the entire plan we have created so far. Do we see major gaps? Dangerous assumptions? Note: a great time to do this is about five minutes before the next Scrum of Scrums team breakout. It provides a really clear view of the current progress that will help us identify any systemic issues in our planning process.
Preconceived Is Precommitted—Limit Pre-PI Planning
Before we start PI Planning, we need the right level of readiness. But too much can lose the discovery aspect of PI Planning. Finding that balance is a learning journey, but there are key elements to balance.
Too much pre-PI Planning:
Takes away from the current PI effort. The focus should be on this PI’s objectives, not pre-planning for the next.
Locks into a plan that is not well-informed. PI Planning is about learning, not perfecting. The best objectives come from shared learning during PI Planning.
Damages the team-of-teams culture in the ART.
Too little pre-PI Planning:
Leaves the teams anxious
Can waste time in PI Planning trying to answer foundational questions
The right balance of PI Planning:
Allows teams to ask intelligent questions during the morning briefings. The test I apply is to verify: are the questions probing and refining (good) or are they high level and more about initial alignment (not so good).
Ensures we have the right people in the room. For this PI’s features, we may need other shared services and assistance. Knowing this in advance helps us extend invites to the right people.
Sets the stage for PDCA-based learning cycles during PI Planning. When teams come into PI Planning thinking they already have the right plan, it leads to a fixed mindset for the next PI, which blocks the true discovery needed. We want the team of teams (ART) to iterate through these PDCA cycles together as they discover the plan.
I use a very simple approach—called the five-sticky rule—to help teams understand a good starting point for the level of pre-planning needed. Each team is encouraged to bring five sticky notes into PI Planning that represent potential stories. This requires the team to do enough discovery around the features, vision, and other elements needed in the next PI but keeps them from creating a deep-dive plan that loses the discovery aspect. Please note that the five-sticky rule is more of a guideline than a rule and can be adjusted as needed.
These are the key principles to finding a balance of pre-planning:
Prepare to create the plan, don’t pre-create the plan
Look for intelligent, informed questions during the briefings
Beware of a fixed mindset view of the plan coming into PI Planning
PI Planning is one of the Ten Critical Success Factors to achieve transformational progress with SAFe. By applying the above ideas, you can make it the dynamic, engaging, energetic event it’s intended to be. So, go make your PI Planning a discovery session!
Check back soon for the next post in the series.
About Dwayne Stroman
Dwayne is an Enterprise Transformation Coach and Trainer and SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT) with more than 20 years of experience. He is ultra-passionate about helping large organizations learn how to build the right products and deliver optimal value through learning and customer validation. Dwayne uses his SPCT role to help several Fortune 100 companies, as well as many growing companies in finance, retail, healthcare, and logistics, realize the benefits of a Lean-Agile mindset. Connect with Dwayne on LinkedIn.
How to use the gap between where you are and where you want to be
This post is part of the ongoing Practice Makes Permanent blog series. Read the first post here.
OK, so your Lean-Agile transformation is stalling. It’s not delivering the increased value and reduced delivery times you expected. Your teams are struggling and perhaps updating their resumes. You thought that implementing the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) would bring you these outcomes, but you’ve discovered you’re not using all Ten Critical Success Factors of SAFe. Perhaps you’ve discovered that you’re not actually implementing SAFe correctly as you intended, which means you’re probably not gaining the full value of what the Framework has to offer. The key to taking full advantage of this realization is to be encouraged rather than discouraged. We can’t improve until we see the improvements that are needed. The purpose of this article is to help you see that these discoveries should be cause for celebration, not concern.
One of my favorite books (and authors) is Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. In his book, Peter describes the concept of creative tension as ”the tension between vision and reality.” It’s the concept of discovering the gap between where you are and where you want to be and using that gap as energy to make improvements. Think of it as a transformational snowball effect.
SAFe guidance depicts the perfect scenario where an organization exemplifies all seven core competencies, delivering high quality and accurate value to customers, and having the kind of culture and work environment that makes it a great place to work. Then we look at the current reality and realize we have a long way to go to reach this nirvana state of business agility.
Sometimes that gap seems insurmountable, unachievable, and perhaps just unrealistic. As we identify that first improvement opportunity and implement that first improvement effort, we start to see some excitement and engagement. We’re still a long way from that nirvana view, but we’re starting to make progress. And that creates more energy for the next effort. So, we take on the next improvement effort, and there seems to be just a bit more engagement and hope that we can move forward. And that’s where we start to see the snowball effect of relentless improvement.
The snowball effect.
For each improvement we make, we gain more energy, engagement, and willingness to change. And we start to go faster. And faster. And faster. And now, that relentless improvement pillar seems to make more sense, and in fact, becomes part of our DNA. As Peter Senge stated, “The most effective people are those who can ‘hold’ their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly.”
Positive change is contagious. It brings excitement and hope to the organization. That energy must start somewhere. So, as Taichi Ohno said, “If you are going to do Kaizen continuously … you’ve got to assume that things are a mess. Too many people just assume that things are all right the way they are … If you assume that things are all right the way they are, you can’t do Kaizen. So, change something!”
My point is to change something with a huge grin on your face because you can see the snowball effect of creative tension pulling you upward.
A team celebrating its small wins.
So, when you see that gap between your current reality and where you want to be, you should view it as an opportunity, not a negative situation. In other words, you should view every improvement opportunity with excitement and anticipation of where you can go next on the journey toward business agility.
As change agents, we’ve learned that empathy along the transformation journey is vital. We know how hard it is, so we fully understand why you skipped some of the steps. But now is the time to restart or renew that journey. In subsequent posts, we will talk about specific activities and components we can use the creative tension approach to jump-start a Lean-Agile transformation. The goal of this series is to help you find the next opportunity to accelerate that snowball effect in your transformation.
Check back soon for the next post in the series.
About Dwayne Stroman
Dwayne is an Enterprise Transformation Coach and Trainer and SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT) with more than 20 years of experience. He is ultra-passionate about helping large organizations learn how to build the right products and deliver optimal value through learning and customer validation. Dwayne uses his SPCT role to help several Fortune 100 companies, as well as many growing companies in finance, retail, healthcare, and logistics, realize the benefits of a Lean-Agile mindset. Connect with Dwayne on LinkedIn.
A big part of my personal life revolves around motorcycles, specifically road racing and coaching. When I’m working with new racers or track riders who want to improve their skills, the first thing I do is ask them to complete this sentence: “Practice makes _____.” Almost everyone says “perfect!” But usually, the opposite is true. When racers go out on the track and continue to repeat bad habits, such as not moving their eyes down-track or using poor body position, they simply cement the wrong technique, which is more difficult to correct later. I always teach riders to focus on learning the basics and build on these good techniques until they become permanent. We all start with the belief that practice makes perfect. However, if you practice the wrong things, the only thing you perfect is the wrong approach. (Note: I want to thank Nick Ienatsch from the Yamaha Champions Riding School (YCRS) for helping me see the importance of learning the right skills before starting to practice. Working with Nick and the crew at YCRS and ChampSchool taught me so much about the importance of getting the basics right.)
The author coaches the basics in an off-track drill.
Switching sports metaphors, a favorite phrase from football coaches (Marv Levy may have been the first to use this) is to “learn how to do it right and then practice it until you never get it wrong.” That’s how we bake in the right techniques, and where practice makes permanent is our ally.
When implementing SAFe®, it’s common to bring in old habits from your organization’s history. It’s hard to break free of these past practices but it’s even more difficult to change them once they’ve been brought into the transformation effort. There are many common anti-patterns that organizations practice and make permanent, including:
Multiple Program Backlogs (whether real or virtual) make it difficult for the teams or ART to focus on the most important thing to work on; this damages Lean flow due to context switching.
Leadership believing that their job is to direct work, which is in direct opposition to SAFe Principle 8 (unlock intrinsic motivation) and SAFe Principle 9 (decentralize decision-making).
Not using the IP iteration for its vital purpose to be a buffer for capacity and to support ongoing innovation, improvement, and synchronized planning.
Using PI planning as a readout of assigned plans, rather than allowing the teams to use team breakouts to discover the best plan to meet business needs.
Objectives given to the teams rather than teams creating their own objectives. When teams review the vision and roadmap and then create their own objectives, they gain engagement and alignment with business and Product Management to demonstrate they understand the value needed.
A common issue we see is organizations treating SAFe as a buffet where you can pick and choose what you implement and what you don’t. While SAFe is highly configurable and is not at all prescriptive, there are key elements that you must implement for real success. These 10 critical success factors are the basic components that you learn and practice until you never get them wrong.
This doesn’t mean that you must be perfect to start. Learning to implement SAFe correctly is just like learning to ride both fast and safe. You learn the proper techniques and continue to inspect and adapt until you get it right, then practice these techniques until they become instinctive. That’s when the speed comes. The same concept applies to your SAFe implementation—learn the 10 critical success factors and practice them until they become instinctive. You will make mistakes along the way because getting these factors right takes time and effort. But if you continue to focus on these basics, they become part of the culture and the norm for your organization. That’s when you experience the true value of a SAFe implementation.
Practice Makes Permanent Blog Series
In this blog series, I aim to share my experiences from the field in helping organizations master and apply good, basic, Lean-Agile and SAFe practices to promote successful SAFe implementation.
Upcoming topics I plan to cover include PI planning, the Program Backlog, and SAFe roles. My hope is that as part of this effort, you will be able to achieve business agility through the Lean-Agile mindset.
Dwayne is an Enterprise Transformation Coach and Trainer and SAFe Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT) with more than 20 years of experience. He is ultra-passionate about helping large organizations learn how to build the right products and deliver optimal value through learning and customer validation. Dwayne uses his SPCT role to help several Fortune 100 companies, as well as many growing companies in finance, retail, healthcare, and logistics, realize the benefits of a Lean-Agile mindset. Connect with Dwayne on LinkedIn.
Globalization is an important growth strategy for Scaled Agile. Localization of SAFe content enables our customers worldwide to participate and learn in their own native language. And it helps drive the adoption of SAFe across international markets.
We need several key ingredients to create a great global product. One of them is people. Since I started working at Scaled Agile, one of the most rewarding experiences was building a global SAFe In-country Review (ICR) team comprised of SAF SAFe experts —known as SPCs and SPCTs—from around the globe. All of them are highly experienced Agile coaches and transformation leaders who are changing the way people work in their respective countries. I’ve had the utmost pleasure of working closely with this team and I can tell you that they are fantastic people!
At Scaled Agile, translation quality, including that of our glossary, is critical. We don’t simply translate a term. We make sure every term has been discussed and thoroughly vetted by our passionate ICR team. Does the term or concept exist in the target language? If the concept can be translated in multiple ways, which one is most appropriate given the context? Do we use the traditional translation of the term or the anglicized version? Does the transliteration make sense instead? These are just a few examples of the questions that our ICR team addresses on a regular basis.
After all, the glossary is an integral part of the learning experience. And we need to ensure that SAFe content is well-translated and of high quality. Thanks to our ICR team’s effort, the SAFe glossary is now available in 13 languages.
The holiday season is a perfect time for reflection. I’d like to take a moment to recognize the contribution of the ICR team and properly thank everyone who contributed. The list below includes past and current ICR team members (listed in alphabetical order by the first name). These individuals went above and beyond to contribute to the SAFe community by sharing their knowledge and devoting their time. They’re helping to make SAFe more accessible to learners worldwide.
I’d like to say a heartfelt thank you to our special ICR team because we couldn’t have done it without you! I look forward to working with everyone in the new year as we will continue to update the SAFe glossary and focus on courseware translations.
Wherever you are, whatever you are celebrating, I wish everyone a healthy, happy holiday season!
Interested in becoming an ICR? Please ›click here to learn more.
About Yuka Kurihara
Yuka is Director of Globalization Services at Scaled Agile, Inc. She has 20+ years of experience building corporate globalization strategies and leading localization technology and operations in enterprises of all sizes. Connect with Yuka on LinkedIn.
