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 start every quarter with a bold intention: this is the quarter we finally make traction on our future-proofing initiatives. You have a list of strategic bets that will open new markets and secure the company’s longevity. But then Monday morning hits. A legacy server goes down. A key client requires an immediate bespoke feature update. The sales team needs support to close the quarter. Slowly but surely, the “tyranny of the urgent” takes over. By the time the quarter ends, your team is exhausted from keeping the lights on, and those critical strategic bets haven’t moved an inch. You are surviving today, but you are mortgaging tomorrow.
The Hidden Costs of an Unbalanced Portfolio
When your portfolio is heavily weighted toward immediate demands at the expense of long-term strategy, you aren’t just delaying innovation; you are actively degrading your competitive advantage.
Innovation Starvation: While you pour resources into maintaining the status quo, your competitors are building the disruption that will make your core business obsolete.
Legacy Anchors: Without a strategy for “Horizon 0” (retiring systems), you continue to fund low-value work and legacy debt, draining the budget needed for growth.
Economic Sub-Optimization: By saying “yes” to every urgent request, you dilute your focus. You end up with a traffic jam of good ideas, but very few great outcomes actually getting delivered to the market.
A Glimpse of the Solution
The answer isn’t just “working harder”—it is implementing the Managing a Balanced Portfolio competency. This component of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) moves you away from reacting to fire drills and toward intentional Horizon Planning. By visualizing your work through a Portfolio Kanban, you can actively manage the flow of value across different horizons:
Horizon 1: Extending your core business.
Horizon 2: Growing emerging value.
Horizon 3: Placing future bets.
Horizon 0: Retiring what no longer serves you. This framework empowers Portfolio Leaders to make data-driven “Go/No-Go” decisions, ensuring you are allocating capacity to the future, not just the present.
Your First Step
You can do a quick assessment of your portfolio’s health this week. Review the last 10 significant initiatives or Epics where your portfolio has made significant progress in delivering.
If 90% or more of your investment is sitting in Horizon 1 (Core), your portfolio may not be balanced for the future.
You are optimizing for safety today at the risk of irrelevance tomorrow.
Unlock the Full Blueprint
Recognizing the imbalance is the start; fixing it requires a systemic approach. The Managing a Balanced Portfolio competency provides the tools to implement Horizon Planning, visualize flow with Kanbans, and use economic prioritization to make the hard choices easier.
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.
It’s the annual planning meeting, and the star project is unveiled—a massive digital transformation, a new product line, a major platform overhaul. It has executive backing, a compelling narrative, and a huge budget. Everyone nods; it feels right. The entire organization begins to mobilize, committing months, or even years, of effort to this single, big bet.
But deep down, a quiet question lingers: “How do we know this is what customers actually want?” Too often, the answer is, “We just do.” You’re building what you think the market needs, hoping your intuition pays off, all while precious resources are poured into an unvalidated future.
The Hidden Costs of Unvalidated Bets
When an investment is based on an unvalidated assumption—even a “really good” one—the cost isn’t just the initial budget. It’s a cascade of failures that silently drain your organization’s potential and can lead to significant financial losses.
Wasted Capacity: Entire departments spend months building a complex solution that customers don’t adopt, leading to 100% opportunity cost. That’s time and talent you will never get back, delaying other potentially valuable initiatives.
Delayed Value & Diminished Competitive Advantage: While you’re busy building the wrong thing, your competitors are capturing market share by solving the real customer problem first. This directly impacts your growth, market position, and ability to innovate, leaving you to play catch-up.
Eroding Morale: Nothing burns out a team faster than seeing their hard work and long hours shelved because the initial hypothesis was wrong. It breeds cynicism and resistance to the next big idea, impacting future productivity and retention.
From Gambling to Learning: A Glimpse of the Solution
The antidote to this high-stakes gambling is to treat big ideas not as directives, but as hypotheses. In SAFe®, this is the core of the Validating Investment Opportunities competency.
Instead of funding a massive, multi-year project, you fund the smallest possible experiment—a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)—designed to test a critical hypothesis with real customers. By applying a rapid Build-Measure-Learn cycle, you use real data—not opinions—to decide whether to pivot, persevere, or stop the initiative before you’ve wasted millions. This shifts the conversation from “Are we finished?” to “Did we learn?” It’s about reducing waste, de-risking innovation, and accelerating value delivery by ensuring your investments align with real customer needs.
Your First Step
You can start de-risking your investments this week. Look at the biggest, most expensive initiative (Epic) currently funded or being considered in your portfolio. Write down in the lean business case, what business outcome do we hypothesize will occur because this is delivered to our customers? Ask product leadership and architects, what’s the smallest thing we can build in under 3 months to see if that hypothesis might be true?
Then, gather the Epic Owner and relevant Business Owners and ask this one crucial question:
“What is the single, riskiest assumption this entire investment rests upon, and what is the cheapest, fastest experiment we could run next week to prove or disprove that assumption with real customer feedback?”
If the answer involves building a large part of the final product, you’re still planning a bet, not a validated investment. Your goal is to find the smallest actionable learning, not the first deliverable.
Unlock the Full Blueprint
Knowing you should test assumptions is easy. Building an organizational system that does it repeatedly, at scale, is hard. The Validating Investment Opportunities competency provides a complete blueprint for defining Epics, crafting compelling MVPs, and establishing the processes to make data-driven portfolio decisions that accelerate learning and value.
Stop betting the business on a guess.
Unlock the full SAFe Framework, with the competencies and guidance needed to build an organization that out-learns the competition. 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’ve just concluded the annual strategy offsite. The vision is bold, the goals are ambitious, and the leadership team is energized to conquer new markets. But when you and your peer portfolio leaders return to the office, the energy slowly fizzles out.
Despite the new slide decks, the new strategy never translates into action. Realignment is difficult; most companies have to hire expensive consulting firms just to untangle their organization and identify the value streams and product lines that matter. Because you lack a native model to organize these portfolios yourself, your funding and focus remain perfectly aligned to deliver last year’s strategy. You are trying to row in a new direction, but every portfolio is pulling its oar a different way.
The Hidden Costs of a Strategy-Structure Gap
When your organizational structure is not aligned with your strategic goals, it creates constant friction that silently sabotages your success.
Wasted Investment: Precious capital and talent are spent on low-priority work. Worse, different teams in different portfolios unknowingly duplicate efforts, solving the same problem in isolation and wasting valuable resources.
Strategic Drift: The company’s vision points north, but the inertia of the existing portfolios keeps pulling the execution south. This gap between what you say and what you do widens over time, making strategic goals impossible to reach.
Decision Paralysis: With unclear ownership of value streams, even simple decisions are endlessly escalated. Agility dies as leaders wait for approvals from committees that lack the context to make an informed choice.
From Complexity to Clarity: Identifying Value
The solution is to intentionally design your organization to match your strategy. In SAFe®, this is the Organizing Portfolios competency. This involves structuring your organization around clearly identified products, solutions and value streams—the end-to-end set of steps required to deliver a product or solution to a customer.
Instead of grouping people by function, you create a portfolio with all the people, funding, and authority needed to serve the value streams within it. This clarity of purpose and responsibility is what enables clear strategic execution. Teams are empowered to make fast, smart choices because they are fully aligned and have the context of the larger strategic goal.
Your First Step
You can begin to diagnose your strategy-structure gap this week with a simple exercise. Take your company’s single most important strategic goal for this year and ask your leaders:
“Which teams and which budgets are directly contributing to this goal?”
If they can’t draw that map with clarity in under 30 minutes, your organizational structure is obscuring—not enabling—your strategy.
Unlock the Full Blueprint
Visualizing the problem is the first step, but realigning an enterprise requires a proven approach. The Organizing Portfolios competency provides a complete blueprint for defining value streams, structuring portfolios for flow, and dynamically adapting them as your strategy evolves.
Stop letting your legacy portfolios dictate your strategy.
Unlock the full SAFe Framework, with the competencies and guidance needed to build an organization that can execute your vision. 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.
It’s 2:00 AM on a Saturday. A critical deployment has failed, again. You’re on a conference call with a team of exhausted engineers who are trying to manually roll back a change, hoping they don’t make things worse. Your business stakeholders, who were promised a seamless update, are sending frustrated emails.
You have brilliant engineers, yet every release feels like a high-stakes gamble. The path from a developer’s laptop to a live customer is a murky, complex maze of manual handoffs, tribal knowledge, and heroic efforts. You’re responsible for the outcome, but you have no real visibility into the slow, error-prone system that produces it.
The Hidden Costs of an Opaque Pipeline
An unpredictable and inefficient delivery process isn’t just a technical problem; it’s a significant liability that generates compounding costs.
Erosion of Business Trust: When you can’t provide clear answers on when a feature will be delivered or why a release failed, the business loses confidence in the technology organization’s ability to execute. “IT” becomes seen as a bottleneck, not a strategic partner.
Hero-Driven Burnout: Your process relies on a few key individuals who know the “magic” to get things deployed. This is not a sustainable model. It creates single points of failure and burns out your most valuable talent, who eventually leave for environments where they can be more effective.
Innovation Gridlock: When every release is a high-risk, all-hands event, you can’t afford to do it often. This means valuable features, bug fixes, and security patches sit on the shelf for weeks or months, undelivered. Your innovation pipeline is clogged by your own internal friction.
From Black Box to Glass Box: A Glimpse of the Solution
The solution is to transform your delivery process from an unpredictable art into a reliable science. In SAFe®, this is the Continuously Delivering Value competency. The core of this is building a Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP)—an automated, visible, and streamlined path from idea to deployment.
The goal is to identify and break down pain points, transforming your pipeline from a series of disconnected, manual steps into a transparent system where every stage—from build to test to deployment—is optimized for speed and quality. This turns your release from a high-stakes, manual event into a low-risk, automated process.
Your First Step
You can’t fix a process you can’t see. Your first step is to make the work visible. This week, gather your key technical leads around a whiteboard. Include developers, QA, release management, and operations, and ask them to perform a simplified Value Stream Mapping exercise.
Pick the last feature your teams released. For that feature, “Map every step we remember—both manual and automated—that a piece of code goes through to get to production. Then, estimate the ‘wait time’ and ‘pain points’ between each step.”
The delays you uncover will be staggering, and they will point directly to some quick improvements you can resolve.
Unlock the Full Blueprint
Making your pipeline visible is the first step toward fixing it. But creating a true continuous delivery capability requires a systematic approach to automation, testing, and collaboration. The Continuously Delivering Value competency provides a full blueprint for visualizing, building, and optimizing your delivery pipeline.
Stop letting release day be a source of dread.
Unlock the full SAFe Framework, with the competencies and guidance needed to build a fast, reliable, and transparent delivery 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.
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.
