What’s New in

SAFe 4.6 for Lean Enterprises?

© Scaled Agile, Inc. 1.1

Introducing the
Lean Enterprise
The Lean Enterprise is a thriving digital
age business that delivers competitive
systems and solutions to its customers
in the shortest sustainable lead time.

© Scaled Agile, Inc. 1.2

Updated SAFe 4.6 Big Picture

Added the Five Core

Competencies of the
Lean Enterprise
New Government icon
and guidance
New tabbed
configuration selector

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SAFe 4.6 adds the five core competencies of the Lean Enterprise

Lean-Agile Leadership

Team and Technical Agility

DevOps and Release on Demand

Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering

Lean Portfolio Management

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Lean-Agile Leadership

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.

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 Lean-Agile Leadership Competency

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Evolving role of managers in a Lean enterprise

Reinforces the core values Leads the transformation

Supports SAFe principles Drives operational excellence
Adopts a Lean-Agile mindset People and team development
Coaches newly formed teams Career and skills development

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New SAFe Implementation Roadmap

New current state

starting points

New courses:

 SAFe DevOps
 SAFe Agile Software
Engineering
 SAFe System and
Solution Architect
(Beta)

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Team and Technical Agility

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

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 Team and Technical Agility Competency

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 Build quality in with 5 key practices

Highlights fast flow, architecture and design

Flow
quality, ‘SOLID OO’ design principles and
patterns, XP-inspired coding and quality
Architecture & Design Quality
practices, and system and release quality

Test-first with Behavior-Driven Code Quality

Development (BDD) for features and

stories System Quality

New guidance on Test-Driven Development

Release Quality
(TDD)

Comprehensive Agile testing overview in

advanced topics

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Master team agility with Scrum and Kanban

▸ Agile teams are cross-functional, self-organizing entities that can define,

build and test, and where applicable deploy, increments of value
▸ Scrum optimizes teams for communication and value delivery
▸ Kanban is applied to optimize value flow

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 Achieve code quality with test-driven development

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a

philosophy and practice that recommends
building and executing tests before
implementing the code or a component of a
system

A rich set of unit tests ensure that

refactoring efforts do not introduce new
errors, allowing developers to continuously
improve their designs.

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Create alignment and fast flow with behavior-driven development

Behavioral Driven Development (BDD) is a

collaborative process that creates a shared
understanding of requirements between the
business and the development team

The BDD process moves through three

phases—discovery, formulation, and
automation—where the acceptance criteria
are transformed into acceptance tests that
are later automated

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Collapse the V with test-first and test automation

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 Agile testing

Testing using these four quadrants (Q1 – Q4)

fosters a comprehensive testing strategy that helps
ensure quality

SAFe’s TDD and BDD articles detail practices for

quadrants one and two respectively

Continuous Integration provides more information

on quadrant three

NFRs, Continuous Integration, and Release on

Demand provide more information on quadrant four
Gregory, Janet, and Lisa Crispin, More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team , Addison-
Wesley, 2015.

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DevOps and Release on Demand

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.

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DevOps and Release on Demand Competency

Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Continuous Continuous Continuous Release

Integration Exploration Deployment On Demand

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Improve flow by mapping the current delivery pipeline

Feature Design Planning

Code Test
definition PT: 4h PT: 24h PT: 24h
PT: 4h LT: 8h LT: 40h LT: 40h
LT: 4h %C&A: 80% %C&A: 80% %C&A: 95%
%C&A: 75% 70% (UAT)

PM Deploy to Smoke QA +
accepts staging test PT: 4h UAT PT: 24h
PT: 2h PT: 4h LT: 40h
LT: 8h
LT: 40h LT: 700h %C&A: 100%
%C&A: 100%
%C&A: 100% %C&A: 90%

Deploy to Smoke QA + Production

prod test PT: 2h
LT: 2h
UAT signoff
PT: 1h %C&A: 100% PT: 4h PT: 1h
LT: 1000h LT: 4h LT: 1h
%C&A: 100% Production weekend %C&A: 100% %C&A: 100%

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Innovate with continuous exploration

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Improve quality and flow with continuous integration

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Reduce risk and transaction cost with continuous deployment

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Release on demand to meet the needs of the business

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Assess pipeline maturity with the DevOps health radar
“Every team can complete a full revolution in less than 24 hours.”
– Sr. Engineering Lead, Amazon

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Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering

Applying Lean-Agile principles and practices

to the specification, development, deployment,
and evolution of large, complex software
applications and cyber-physical systems

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Business Solutions and Lean Systems Eng. Competency

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Build large and complex solutions with 8 practices

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Improve decisions with the economic framework

1. Operate within Lean budgets and

guardrails

2. Understand solution economic

trade-offs

3. Leverage suppliers

4. Sequence jobs for maximum benefit

(using WSJF)

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 Plan and roadmap using multiple time horizons

Daily plan: Each day the team coordinates their work

in the DSU
Iteration plan: A plan created by the team to
determine how much of the team backlog they can
commit to for an upcoming iteration.
Current PI plan: The plan for the current PI
PI roadmap: A committed plan for the current PI and
offers a forecast for the next two to three PIs
Solution roadmap: A longer term—often multiyear—
view, showing the key milestones and deliverables
needed to achieve the solution vision over time

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Market rhythms and events influence the release strategy

Market rhythms and release value Market events

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Plan longer-term with the solution roadmap

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Lean Portfolio Management

Aligning strategy and execution by applying

Lean and systems thinking approaches to
strategy and investment funding, agile
portfolio operations, and governance

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 Lean Portfolio Management Competency

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Lean Portfolio Management creates strategic alignment

Connect the portfolio to enterprise strategy

New Lean budget and investment guardrails
Manages portfolio operations
Provide Lean governance across value streams

Strategy &
Investment Lean Portfolio
Funding
Management

Agile
Lean
Portfolio
Governance
Operations

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Define and charter the portfolio

Define the portfolio domain and

business model
Identify key portfolio constructs:
partners, activities, resources,
cost structure, revenue and
budget
Summarize portfolio value
streams

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Inform the portfolio with value stream canvases

Value stream canvases

define their value
streams and solution.
These inform the
portfolio current state

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Categorize investments by horizon

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Map value stream solutions by horizon

Horizon 3 Horizon 2 Horizon 1 Horizon 0

Decommission

Decommission

Evaluating Emerging Investing Extracting Retiring

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 Envision the future state

Use SWOT opportunities to

brainstorm potential future
states
Pick one!
Identify the epics that will get
Potential
you there Epics

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Keep investments on track with budget guardrails

Guide investments by horizon

Optimize value and solution
integrity with capacity allocation
Continuous Business Owner
engagement
Approve significant initiatives

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Ensure spending is aligned with investment horizon guidelines

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Optimize value and solution integrity with capacity allocation

System and Solution

Architect/Engineer New Features
(Design Authority)

Enablers

Tech Debt and Maintenance

Program
Backlog
Product and Solution
Management
(Content Authority)

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Approve significant initiatives

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 Continuous business owner engagement

The money is allocated, but it

has not been spent!
Business owner engagement
assures it is spent on the right
things

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 And one more thing …

© Scaled Agile, Inc. 1.45

How can businesses be Agile and win
large-scale government programs if the
government isn’t Agile?

© Scaled Agile, Inc. 1.46

SAFe for Government

A set of success patterns that help public sector

organizations implement Lean-Agile practices in a
government context

© Scaled Agile, Inc. 1.47

 SAFe is transforming technology
development in government
“In 10 months’ time we have turned a failing
effort into a success story for the warfighter, for
our organizational culture, and for the taxpayer.

We could not have executed a turnaround this

fast without SAFe…”

—Scott Keenan, JLVC Program Manager,

DoD Joint Staff Modeling & Simulation (M&S)

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Government agencies using SAFe

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 SAFe for Government

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 SAFe for Government guidance

Adapt governance practices to support Build a foundation of Lean-Agile

agility and lean flow of value values, principles, practices

Modify acquisition practices to Create high-performing

enable Lean-Agile development teams of government teams
and operations and contractors
SAFe for
Apply Lean estimating and Government
forecasting on cadence Align technology investments
with agency strategy

Adopt Lean budgeting Transition from projects to a lean

aligned to value streams flow of epics

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 Questions

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