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Your Agile Teams are ready to sprint. The product vision is clear, the funding is approved, and the market opportunity is right now. But then, you hit a wall. You need a partner—a vendor to supply a critical component or specialized skill. Suddenly, agility grinds to a halt. You enter the world of traditional procurement: months of writing detailed requirements for an RFP, waiting for sealed bids, and enduring long rounds of contract redlining. By the time the ink is dry, the market has shifted, your requirements have changed, and your Agile Teams have been idling. You aren’t co-innovating; you’re just waiting on paperwork.
The Hidden Costs of Transactional Sourcing
When your procurement process operates in a silo separate from your development value stream, it creates a drag on the entire organization.
- Lost Market Windows: While you negotiate terms and conditions, competitors who treat partners as extensions of their team are already launching.
- Transactional Friction: Focusing rigidly on “lowest price” and fixed scope creates an adversarial relationship. Vendors protect their margins rather than solving your problem, leading to change-order wars later.
- Innovation Stagnation: When you dictate the solution in a rigid RFP, you cap the potential for innovation. You get exactly what you asked for, not necessarily what you need or what the expert vendor could have proposed.
From Vendors to Partners: A Glimpse of the Solution
The solution is to stop treating procurement as a back-office administrative function and start treating it as a strategic capability. This is the Lean-Agile Procurement (LAP) competency. LAP moves away from the “us vs. them” transactional model toward co-innovation. Instead of paper-heavy RFPs, LAP utilizes collaborative events—like the Big Room Workshop. Here, key stakeholders and potential partners come together to clarify goals, co-create solutions, and even draft agile contracts in real-time. It integrates procurement directly into the Agile release train, ensuring that legal and sourcing align with the rhythm of value delivery.
Your First Step
You can start shifting the mindset from transaction to partnership this week. Identify one critical vendor or partner relationship currently in the pipeline or up for renewal. Ask your team:
“Are we collaborating with this partner to define the solution, or are we just negotiating the price of a predefined output?”
If the answer is the latter, you are likely leaving innovation—and speed—on the table.
Unlock the Full Blueprint
Moving from traditional sourcing to Agile partnerships requires a new toolkit. The Lean-Agile Procurement competency provides the frameworks you need, including the Lean Procurement Canvas™, to align partners, create adaptive legal frameworks, and reduce risk.
Stop letting contracts become your bottleneck.
Unlock the full SAFe Framework to build a supply chain that moves as fast as your strategy. Get complete access by purchasing your SAFe® Insider membership today.
In this Series:
- Catch up on last week’s post: Managing a Balanced Portfolio
- Coming up next: Enabling Agility with Enterprise Architecture
¹ Mirko Kleiner, “The Values of Lean-Agile Procurement,” Lean-Agile Procurement Alliance, accessed December 8, 2025, https://www.lean-agile-procurement.com.