What is SAFe®
SAFe is is a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles, practices, and competencies. It is the world’s leading framework for Business Agility, the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative, digitally-enabled business solutions.
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.
Seven Core Competencies of Business Agility
SAFe is built around the Seven Core Competencies of Business Agility that are critical to achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage in an increasingly digital age:
Lean-Agile Leadership – Advancing and applying Lean-Agile leadership skills that drive and sustain organizational change by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential
Team and Technical Agility – Creating high-performing Agile teams as well as sound technical practices including Built-in Quality, implementing and measuring flow, and more
Agile Product Delivery – Building high-performing teams-of-teams that use design thinking and customer-centricity to provide a continuous flow of valuable products using DevOps, the Continuous Delivery Pipeline, and Release on Demand
Enterprise Solution Delivery – Building and sustaining the world’s largest software applications, networks, and cyber-physical solutions
Lean Portfolio Management – Executing portfolio vision and strategy formulation, chartering portfolios, creating the Vision, Lean budgets and Guardrails, as well as portfolio prioritization, and roadmapping
Organizational Agility – Aligning strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance
Continuous Learning Culture – Continually increasing knowledge, competence, and performance by becoming a learning organization committed to relentless improvement and innovation
Mastery of these seven core competencies enables enterprises to achieve the agility needed to successfully respond to volatile market conditions, changing customer needs, and emerging technologies. Each competency is summarized in a knowledge base article and reflected in related guidance throughout the SAFe website.
The above 7 competencies have been evolved and enhanced in the newest SAFe version. Version 6.0 is a substantial leap from 5.1 that includes increased emphasis and guidance for achieving a more continuous—and ever-faster—flow of value delivery to customers. You can learn more about the significant changes in the “What’s New in SAFe 6.0” overview.
Improving business outcomes
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.
Since the earliest days at Scaled Agile, their belief has been simple: Better software and systems make the world a better place. Version 6.0 represents an ambitious expansion of that mission: to enable business agility via the continuous flow of customer value required for enterprises to compete and thrive in the digital age. This requires every part of the organization involved in delivering and supporting technology-based solutions—development, operations, manufacturing, legal, marketing, finance, compliance, sales, and others —to embrace the principles and practices of Lean and Agile. SAFe helps enterprises achieve business agility through the research and thought leadership reflected in the SAFe website and world-class courseware, training, community resources, and certification programs.
Many large and small enterprises are getting outstanding business benefits from applying SAFe. Benefits typically include:
- 20 – 50% increase in productivity
- 25 – 75% improvements in quality
- 30 – 75% faster time-to-market
- 10 – 50% increase in employee engagement and job satisfaction
As you can imagine, with these results, SAFe adoption is growing rapidly worldwide. Seventy percent of Fortune 100 companies and a growing number of the Global 2000 have certified SAFe professionals and consultants on-site, and over 1,000,000 practitioners have been trained to date.
Support for SAFe
The Scaled Agile Framework is supported by the SAFe® Studio platform and Scaled Agile’s dedicated Customer Success Team. To ensure success for teams and the enterprise, an extensive network of 500+ Scaled Agile Partners provide strategic advisory services, implementation support, training, coaching, and technology platforms for SAFe collaboration, visibility, and flow in almost every region of the world.
While every business situation is unique, the SAFe Implementation Roadmap is still the most tested and proven method for guiding the organizational changes needed to deliver results.
For more on SAFe, you can browse the SAFe website and subscribe to SAFe news, where you will be the first to get notification of new developments.
©Scaled Agile, Inc.
SAFe and Scaled Agile Framework are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.
