Definition: SAFe is the world’s leading framework for Business Agility. SAFe integrates the power of Lean, Agile, and DevOps into a comprehensive operating system that helps enterprises thrive in the digital age by delivering innovative products and services faster, more predictably, and with higher quality.
SAFe provides guidance on how businesses and employees can grow and respond to change. It started with the SAFe knowledge base and a training and certification program. Today, SAFe is in its sixth major iteration and has been adopted by more than 20,000 enterprises across the globe. More than 1,000,000 practitioners have been trained through a role-based curriculum and use SAFe Studio, supported by more than 500 world-class transformation and platform companies.
Configurable and scalable, SAFe allows each organization to adapt the Framework to its business needs. With four out-of-the-box configurations, SAFe supports the full spectrum of solutions, from those requiring a small number of teams to those complex systems that require hundreds—and even thousands—of people to build and deliver.
Surviving in the age of digital is not guaranteed. Business agility isn’t an option; it’s imperative. Even businesses that don’t consider themselves Information Technology (IT) or software companies—professional services, financial services, manufacturers, healthcare institutions, defense contractors, government agencies, and more—are now all highly dependent on their ability to rapidly produce new, high-quality, innovative, digitally-enabled products and services.
Improves Business Outcomes
Created from over a decade of field experience, SAFe draws from four primary bodies of knowledge: Agile development, systems thinking, Lean product development, and DevOps. It helps enterprises answer the following types of questions:
- How do we align technology development to strategic business goals?
- How do we deliver new value on a predictable schedule so the business can plan?
- How do we improve the quality of our solutions and delight our customers?
- How do we scale Agile practices from teams to ARTs across value streams and the enterprise to deliver better results?
- How do we organize people around value to deliver value effectively and avoid the delays inherent in a traditional, functional structure?
- How do we create an environment that fosters collaboration, innovation, and relentless improvement for our people?
- How can we change our culture so that it is safe to fail? How do we encourage people to take risks, think creatively, and embrace continuous learning? How can we help our teams improve without getting in the way?
By adopting SAFe—and applying its well-described set of values, principles, and practices—the enterprise can address these questions and realize more significant business and individual benefits.
SAFe 6.0 enables business agility and improves business outcomes for organizations of all sizes across the world. SAFe has produced dramatic improvements in time to market, employee engagement, higher quality, higher customer satisfaction, and improved economic outcomes. It also helps create more productive, rewarding, and fun cultures.
Figure 1 highlights these benefits derived directly from Customer Stories authored by SAFe customers.
SAFe Evolves Continuously
A hallmark of SAFe is that it stays current with new and evolving business and technology trends. Our incremental delivery model enables enterprises to adapt quickly and stay ahead of the competition by leveraging the latest knowledge in SAFe. For example, COVID-19 forced many organizations to change how Agile teams and ARTs collaborate. As a result, PI Planning, Organizational Agility, and Agile Teams’ guidance were updated quickly.
Most updates to SAFe require changes to various articles and new advanced topics. However, Big Picture (BP) updates are sometimes needed to emphasize and provide ready access to the latest content. Minor releases of the BP occur under a ‘dot release' like SAFe 5.1. Such minor releases are incremental and do not require upgrades to training and certification.
Over time, the incremental advances and significant new knowledge drive the release of a new version, as was the case with SAFe 6.0. In these cases, SAFe practitioners and SPCs must keep pace with upgraded knowledge, training, and certification.
To help our community keep current with the latest guidance, we’ve introduced a new feature that provides a log of meaningful incremental changes on the home page under the heading, ‘What’s New in SAFe.’ When you click on a change item, it will open a blog post and guidance article to inform our readers of the ‘why’ and ‘what’ was changed.
Introduction to the SAFe 6.0 Big Picture
The SAFe website features an interactive Big Picture graphic. It provides a visual model of the Framework and is the primary user interface to the knowledgebase. Each icon of the image is clickable and offers access to extensive SAFe guidance. The configurations support a full range of development and business environments and the foundational principles, values, mindset, roles, artifacts, and implementation elements that comprise SAFe.
The main components of SAFe are described in the following sections.
SAFe 6.0 features an Overview tab that illustrates the Seven Core Competencies (Figure 3) and their twenty-one dimensions that enable business agility. They are the primary lens for understanding and implementing SAFe. The focal point for all the competencies is the customer. Lean-Agile Leadership is the Foundation. This overview is valuable for providing an initial orientation to SAFe, introducing the business agility assessment, and framing executive briefings.
The following competencies offer the knowledge, skills, and behaviors which enable enterprises to achieve business agility:
