What is a SAFe Enterprise and How Does It Function?

Many of the times I have been encountering the common term regarding the SAFe enterprise. However, it is still not clear among many as to what this is and how it can help an organization. I will be starting with a clear idea and indication behind the SAFe enterprise. 

SAFe enterprise is known to organize their portfolios to help ensure that a continuous flow of valuable solutions remains present for organizational success. Just imagine a system where you are regularly transferring some value to your customer’s plate. This strategy is massively popular to indulge in maximizing the revenue of a firm by several degrees. 

Let us see some more aspects and understand the term SAFe enterprise to its fullest. 

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SAFe for Business Transformation

Software developers and testers are originally known to help create products with better understanding. Taking the initial concept, SAFe is known to deliver value to your customers due to its scaled agile framework. In simple words, the scaled agile framework helps business units transform the organizations across their whole teams. 

This is a particularly important thing to note as an organization SAFe enterprise schemes delivers continuous adaptability. Thus, your team also needs to subscribe to such models and ensure value creation and delivery. The SAFe framework also helps the organization for scaling in large, complex, and distributed systems across a team. 

This is a flexible structural strategy that ensures all participants in a scaled agile framework concentrate on one idea. However, It is also known that the same concept as the idea of agile is broken and distributed to the many layers of the hierarchy as it goes towards the bottom employees who deliver the value.

Enterprise Portfolio Management or EPM

The term Enterprise Portfolio Management is also known as the approach taken by the organizations to: 

• Control critical aspects of business operations. 

• Control multiple projects at the same time. 

• Define and comprehend the functions of each program. 

• Control the investments of every department within the organization, and so on. 

It can be said that EPM is the projection of managing projects at any level of the organization and anchoring them towards the desired goal. Naturally, the distinctive characteristic that sets EPM apart from the rest is the all-encompassing view of project management it embraces. Other methods rather just concentrate on one project at a time. 

One may state that by means of EPM it becomes possible to elevate the importance of a certain project within the cross-project relations to the necessary level. Therefore, projects that are important for the organization are proposed first, and then real-time adjustments are initiated on them. Ultimately, using the advantages of EPM, an organization can get strategic vision alignment and maintain a competitive advantage. 

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Organizing the Portfolio for SAFe Guided Success

For success, every company must follow a certain set of strategies that work best for them. These strategies encompass absolutely everything, starting from resources to aligning the team members with the goals. Take an example of a firm that contains around 200 people with 50 people in the top management. 

This means a total of 250 people are working in the firm. Now, as per the agile framework under SAFe, the end product is always delivering value. If starting from the top 50, the bottom 200 receives instructions and sets a standard of procedure, then it inculcates value to every stage of operations. 

For example, if the company I just described works on making software that streamlines payments, everyone must know their products inside out. A developer must know the UI, transaction details they need to process backend to server, and the ultimate action that application tends to achieve. 

When such aspects are clear, it helps you align better with the roles and initiate towards success. Thus, after the complete development, even the testers are able to inspect and find out the overall defects. Therefore, once a product is developed, it works accurately and delivers substantial value. 

Allocation of Portfolio Budgets 

It is important for any organization to allocate budgets effectively and ensure business success. This is a critical measure as per guidelines designed under SAFe enterprise model. In the SAFe model the budgets are allocated after taking into consideration a combination of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) and Participatory Budgeting (PB). The allocation of portfolio budgets integrates flexibility and strategic alignment at the same time. In the SAFe enterprise approach to LPM, budget allocation is no longer firm, with the replacement of project-based funding instead of stable and non-negotiable funds.

If ARTs or Agile Release Trains are funded instead of project levels, more flexibility is provided by LPM to tackle the drift towards alternative, better business options.

Now, let us discuss participatory budgeting, or PB, in which stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process. Therefore, their suggestions have been provided by all relevant stakeholders to the work, and it eventually becomes one of the key points for strategic investments.

It is also known to drive cross-functional teams according to best scopes, so the job will get done. One can further notice that it recognizes dependencies and constraints between initiatives with a participatory budget.

Thus, when you integrate PB and LPM, organizations are able to achieve better balance and flexibility. Apart from that, these value addition models are known to truly stand down in providing the delivery of value by integrating a chain to meet the strategic value goals. 

Coordinating Cross-Portfolio Initiatives

In the SAFe enterprise, one of the effective points that you need to note down is coordination. It is important for you to coordinate among multiple members and design the strategic goals for delivering value. Cross-portfolio initiatives enable seamless coordination and collaboration across various Agile Release Trains, or ARTs, and value streams. 

Thus, ultimately, it reduces redundancy, aligns the efforts, and also enhances the various organizational agility points. SAFe also focuses on the continuous alignment process through a portfolio Kanban system. Kanban is one of the agile frameworks that provides visibility to the status of the initiatives and helps identify potential dependencies as well.

Coordination across different portfolios requires regular and structured events such as program increment planning sessions (PIPS). In PIPS, the cross functional teams are known to come together and stay within the same page for organizational benefits. Let me give an example: a guy working in operations (DevOps) comes face to face with a guy working in data accumulation to work together. 

The Enterprise Portfolio 

When you are working with a SAFe lean enterprise, the key aspect is that performance is the ultimate decision maker. Starting from evaluating the team’s progress to delivery of the value chain, everything depends on the performance of the product. 

The SAFe framework promotes the usage of particular ‘tracking KPIs’. These KPIs may also be collimated with OKRs (objectives and Key Results) to provide measurable insights. In this situation, KPIs can be defined as time to market, customer satisfaction, ROI, and other metrics that show to what extent that portfolio is creating value.

Moreover, Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) would recommend the constant monitoring of the aforementioned performance metrics, which is in line with the concern for adaptability and quick feedback inherent in the Agile manifesto. 

Such controllable factors as financial results, resource consumption, and innovation performance are usually tracked to ensure that a certain portfolio remains relevant to the strategic goals of the company and the current market environment.

Thanks to the constant tracking of these indices, organizations are able to detect resource constraints, reallocate resources, and take management actions based on information that increases efficiency and effectiveness.

SAFe also endorses the use of value stream metrics, which envisage valuing the supply chains as value delivered in each stage of production. 

The combined usage of such measures fosters a better understanding of the extent of intervention of the concerned actors in higher level objectives and encourages the actors towards effective interdependence in cross functional ventures.

Real Life Example

A pertinent real-life scenario of SAFe and Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) can be illustrated from John Deere’s heavy success in Agile transformation over the recent years.

As one of the leading manufacturers of agricultural equipment, the company adopted SAFe in recent years, in order to scale agile practices to its global teams and align the portfolios to customer-centric objectives. 

In the first place, the project management of John Deere was very captivating and unique in nature. Various departments functioning in different silos. Once they incorporated the SAFe enterprise approach they built ARTs to focus and bring teamwork across the different functions. 

The organization's ability to associate product development portfolios was improved by this modification, with a better focus on delivering value to the customers and quickly adapting to changes in the agriculture sector's demands.

Further influence on these results by the performance of the company as well as the measurement processes is likely. Additionally, the responsibility to utilize metrics that tend to reduce the lead time into the market as well as elevate customer satisfaction is also shouldered by such a framework.

Thus, such a model that incorporated SAFe interportfolio coordination, budgetary adjustments, and performance measures was very important in coping with changes in the industry and staying ahead of the competition in the fast-changing environment.

Conclusion

The SAFe enterprise that aligns to the Lean Portfolio is said to assist associations in bridging gaps that exist between strategy and agile execution. Associations improve teamwork among teams and result in increased resource utilization.

It is, therefore, with this approach in SAFe that any company can respond based on the demands in the market. Furthermore, they are streamlined into a business environment and can continue with a continuous delivery of value. 

If you want to maximize your value creation and be a part of such a network, you should take up the SAFe course from StarAgile. Staragile’s courses are market-oriented, thus helping you succeed in taking the SAFe Agilist certification.

Frequently Asked Questions 

1. What do you mean by scaled agile framework?

This is an organizational framework that helps in implementing agile practices and ensures constant value delivery. It is a product that directly helps in success and works towards a better understanding as well. 

2. Is there any difference between SAFe and Scrum?

Yes, SAFe is an organizational framework that intends to help organizations create value. On the other hand scrum is an agile based methodology to manage a small portion of the team. 

3. Does SAFe use sprints?

Yes, SAFe enterprise working pattern does include sprints, which contains a detailed idea of iterations. However, as mentioned these iterations are known as program increments in SAFe working method.