The Agile Manifesto: An illustrated guide

By Simon Buehring

What’s New in SAFe 4.6?

We are delighted to announce the introduction of SAFe 4.6, highlighting the introduction of the Five Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise. They are now the primary lens for understanding and implementing SAFe. Mastery of these five competencies enables enterprises to successfully navigate digital disruption and to effectively respond to volatile market conditions, changing customer needs, and emerging technologies.

Each competency is summarized in a new overview article and is also reflected in related guidance throughout the SAFe website. Each competency is described in the sections below.

Each competency is summarized in a new overview article and is also reflected in related guidance throughout the SAFe website. Each competency is described in the sections below.

Lean-Agile Leadership 

The Lean-Agile Leadership competency describes how Lean-Agile Leaders drive and sustain organizational change and operational excellence by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential. They do this by learning, exhibiting, teaching, and coaching SAFe’s Lean-Agile mindset, values, principles, and practices. 

Lean-Agile Leadership Related Article Changes 

• The prior Lean-Agile Leaders article was combined with the Lean-Agile Leadership competency article 
• The SAFe principles have been updated with a redraft of Principle #3 — Assume variability and preserve options 
• A new advanced topic article, Evolving Role of Managers describes the changes and ongoing responsibilities of line management in the new way of working 

Team and Technical Agility 

The Team and Technical Agility competency describes the critical skills and Lean-Agile principles and practices that are needed to create high-performing Agile teams who create high-quality, well designed technical solutions. 

• Team agility – enables high-performing Agile teams that are organized and operate with basic and effective Agile principles and practices 
• Technical agility – provides Lean-Agile technical practices to create high-quality, well-designed technical solutions that support current and future business needs

Team and Technical Agility Related Article Changes 

• The entirely new Built-In Quality article describes the five dimensions that enable building in quality – flow, architecture and design quality, code quality, system quality, and release quality 
• Product Owner, Scrum Master, Dev Team, and Agile Teams articles were changed to reflect the new guidance and thinking from the Team and Technical Agility competency and their responsibilities in Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) 
• New advanced topic articles on: 

1. Test-Driven Development (TDD) – TDD is a philosophy and practice that recommends building and executing tests before implementing the code or a component of a system. 
2. Behavioral Driven Development (BDD) – BDD is a Test-First, Agile Testing practice that provides Built-In Quality by defining (and potentially automating) tests before, or as part of, specifying system behavior. 
3. Agile Testing – is a comprehensive overview of Agile testing strategies using the updated Agile testing quadrants.

DevOps and Release on Demand 

The DevOps and Release on Demand competency describes how implementing DevOps and a continuous delivery pipeline provides the enterprise with the capability to release value, in whole or in part, at any time necessary to meet market and customer demand. Along with the associated articles, this new competency revises and enhances the depth of guidance on implementing a full continuous delivery pipeline.

DevOps and Release on Demand Related Article Changes 

• Deeper and more advanced Continuous Delivery Pipeline guidance that includes mapping the current delivery pipeline and assessing and improving flow with the DevOps and Release on Demand health radar (contains 16 dimensions). 
• All new Continuous Exploration, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment and Release on Demand articles, which reflect the 16 dimensions of the health radar 
• Updates to the DevOps article to reflect changes resulting from the DevOps and Release on Demand competency 
• Updates to the Feature article to describe its role in BDD

Business Solutions and Lean Systems 

The Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering competency describes how to apply Lean-Agile principles and practices to the specification, development, deployment, and evolution of large, complex software applications and cyber-physical systems. 

Business Solutions and Lean Systems Related Article Changes 

• New specific guidance — eight practices for building large and complex solutions — in the new Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering competency article 
• New Economic Framework with four primary elements: 

1. Operating within Lean budgets and guardrails 
2. Understanding solution economic trade-offs 
3. Leveraging Suppliers 
4. Sequencing jobs for the maximum benefit (using WSJF) All new Roadmap article introduces multiple planning horizons and the Solution 

• Roadmap, which provides a longer-term—often multiyear—view, showing the key milestones and deliverables needed to achieve the solution Vision over time. The roadmap also contains new guidance on understanding and applying market rhythms and events.

Lean Portfolio Management 

The Lean Portfolio Management competency describes how an enterprise implements Lean approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and Lean governance.

Lean Portfolio Management Related Article Changes 

• Updated strategy formulation in the Enterprise article and a definition of the portfolio. 
• Updated Strategic Themes resulting from the new Lean Portfolio Management competency. 
• New Portfolio Canvas describes how a portfolio of solutions creates, delivers and captures value for an organization. The portfolio canvas also helps define and align the portfolio’s value streams and solutions to the goals of the enterprise and provides a basis for how it can be evolved to meet the vision of a future state. 
• New Lean Budget Guardrails article provides guidance on how to ensure that the right investments are being made within the portfolio’s budget. For example, these guardrails help balance near-term opportunities and long-term strategy, and continuous business owner engagement helps assure that investments in technology, infrastructure, and maintenance aren’t routinely ignored. 
• Updated Lean Budgets article provides new guidance for moving from traditional budgets to Lean budgets, guiding investments by horizon and applying participatory budgeting. 
• Updated Value Streams article, which includes a section on defining value streams and a revised Development Value Stream Canvas that aligns better with the new Portfolio Canvas. 

SAFe for Government 

The new SAFe for Government article describes a set of success patterns that help public sector organizations implement Lean-Agile practices.

The SAFe for Government article will also serve as a landing page for a more comprehensive treatment in applying SAFe in a national, regional or local government context. This work-in-process provides specific guidance to address the following concerns: 

• Building a foundation of Lean-Agile values, principles, and practices 
• Creating high-performing teams of government teams and contractors 
• Aligning technology investments with agency strategy 
• Transitioning from projects to a lean flow of epics 
• Adopting Lean budgeting aligned to value streams 
• Applying Lean estimating and forecasting in cadence 
• Modifying acquisition practices to enable Lean-Agile development and operations 
• Building in quality and compliance 
• Adapting governance practices to support agility and lean flow of value 

It’s important to note that these recommendations for Lean-Agile adoption in government do not require a different version of SAFe or suggest modifying SAFe terms and practices to fit government protocols. In fact, experienced practitioners in government services have reported that they achieve the best results when the SAFe model and terminology are used without modification.

New SAFe Implementation Roadmap 

The SAFe Implementation Roadmap has been updated to include three new courses: 

• SAFe DevOps 
• Agile Software Engineering 
• SAFe System and Solution Architect 

Additionally, a ‘Waterfall/Ad hoc agile’ starting point was added to the front of the roadmap to acknowledge where most organizations begin their transformation journey. Also, all 12 SAFe Implementation Roadmap articles have been updated to reflect the new competency guidance.

Other Important Stuff 

In addition, we’ve made a number of enhancements and changes to the site itself: 

• Improvements to the performance of the SAFe website, especially for countries outside of North America 
• Revised glossary translated in 10 languages 
• Improved top menu navigation 
• New tabs to select the configurations of SAFe. Each configuration can be referenced by a separate URL 
• New download posters page where you can now also order fabric posters for all configurations of SAFe and the Implementation Roadmap

What's New in SAFe® 4.6 from Scaled Agile, Inc. on Vimeo.

What is Lean Portfolio Management

Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) shares similar goals with a traditional PPM organization but has some significant differences that can offer some substantial incremental benefits. LPM involves applying a lean agile mindset and a modernized set of practices based on lean principles to the conventional functions of portfolio management. Transforming to Lean Portfolio Management means shifting from annual planning and budgeting cycles with fixed scope expectations to more agile and fluid rolling-wave planning with a more continuous flow of work managed by a Portfolio Kanban system.

In the Scaled Agile Framework, the owners, architects and portfolio management team continuously analyzes the proposed epics that make up the portfolio solution sets. Once each (and the minimum viable product) is reviewed, elaborated, estimated and approved (with a Lean business case) they are added to the portfolio backlog to be scheduled for implementation.

Critical to the success of Lean Portfolio Management is ensuring alignment of the portfolio with the enterprise’s business objectives and strategy – and effective collaboration with the key stakeholders to ensure the right investments are made in the right areas.

Additional differentiating responsibilities of Lean portfolio management include agile approaches to forecasting and budgeting, establishing lean portfolio metrics to manage performance and progress, a more frequent and integrated compliance process, and providing governance and support for continuous improvement of a more decentralized practice with groups like an Agile PMO Lean-Agile Center of Excellence and/or communities of practice.

Version 4.5 of the Scaled Agile Framework has significantly elaborated on the elements of Lean Portfolio Management recognizing the opportunity to provide some new perspectives and enhanced practices to PPM.

https://www.scaledagileframework.com/whats-new-in-safe-46/