Strategic themes are direct inputs to the portfolio canvas, as they may affect partners, key activities, customer segments, and revenue streams, and other portfolio business model elements. In turn, this influences the portfolio vision, which is the difference between the current state—and the more desirable—future state. They may impact solutions, partners, key activities, customer segments, and revenue streams, and other portfolio business model elements. These cycles follow the principles of lean scaled agile business strategy integration fundamentals, creating a structured approach to continuous improvement.

Roles in SAFe

Nexus is a lightweight framework designed by Scrum.org that creates an integration team accountable for coordinating multiple Scrum teams to deliver a cohesive product increment. DAD offers a hybrid approach combining Agile and Lean strategies, addressing the full delivery lifecycle with governance, architecture, and continuous improvement. SAFe integrates DevOps practices to ensure continuous integration, testing, and deployment. Built-in quality ensures that quality practices such as, Test Automation, Continuous Integration, and ensuring technical excellence are embedded into every step of development, not just at the end. If achieving top-level outcomes through Agile development sounds complex, organizations can build alignment in manageable steps.

What Is One Characteristic Of An Effective Agile Team?

These dashboards should be accessible to all stakeholders and updated regularly to maintain relevance. Measuring progress in developing the competencies of SAFe provides essential feedback that guides improvement efforts. Companies across sectors report similar obstacles when implementing the competencies of SAFe.

This competency enables organizations to apply agile practices at scale without sacrificing quality or predictability. The competencies of SAFe represent measurable, observable patterns of knowledge, skills, and behaviors that enable organizations to achieve business agility. New competency landing pages, accessible from within each SAFe Discipline, now follow a learning journey approach, with sections for learning, applying, and mastering techniques and practices.

Evolution in SAFe 6.0

• Discover what SAFe is and why modern organizations need it to thrive and achieve their goals.
• A strategic theme is an area in which your organization must excel in order to achieve your vision.
• They may impact solutions, partners, key activities, customer segments, and revenue streams, and other portfolio business model elements.
• CI is even more complicated when systems comprise software, hardware, components, and services provided by suppliers.
• Additionally, SAFe’s seamless integration with Enterprise Architecture ensures that large-scale solutions are delivered consistently, reliably, and aligned with long-term business objectives.

It is a two-day event that occurs at the beginning of every PI and focuses on establishing common goals through synchronized planning and identifying dependencies and risks. Teams present the plan to the entire ART at the end of the two days and vote on their confidence level of achieving their goals. Once the teams are highly confident, they commit to the plan and close the planning with a retrospective on the two days with continuous improvement in mind. SAFe integrates Lean principles into Portfolio Management, allowing for efficient decision making, lean budgeting, and faster value delivery.

Agile Portfolio and Value Stream Management

I’ve seen companies with great strategy and poor execution and also companies with poor strategy and great execution. Access the full article, SAFe tools, videos and a vibrant community of certified professionals dedicated to business agility and practicing SAFe. Hackathons and innovation events provide focused time for exploring improvements to products, processes, or tools. When organizations reward individual heroics, utilization rates, or delivery against fixed scope and schedule, they create forces that work against agile transformation. The assessment results should be visualized to create transparency and alignment.

The simplified Big Picture, released last year, was an important step on this journey. However, a higher level of detail was always needed to support those who are implementing or practicing SAFe. The Framework for Business Agility has been created to help organisations survive and thrive in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. It’s been shaped by the real-world experiences of Consortium members and other agile professionals. Zack Brown is a Partner Solution Strategist with Atlassian where he partners with the biggest consulting firms and enterprises in the world to help solve problems with the Atlassian platform of products. SAFe seeks to optimize the operational and development value streams that make the top-level run.

Organizations should identify the valuable elements from each approach and create a cohesive system that delivers business results. The SAFe competencies share philosophical roots with lean introduction principles. Both approaches emphasize value delivery, waste reduction, and continuous improvement.

• The parent value stream’s vision, roadmap, and solution intent align the other value streams to a shared purpose.
• They are different, to be sure, but the principles that will help to improve the quality of product and service are universal in nature.
• The competencies of SAFe represent measurable, observable patterns of knowledge, skills, and behaviors that enable organizations to achieve business agility.
• In 2025, many organizations adopt a customized blend of frameworks aligned to their culture, technology, and business needs – focusing on agility over rigid adherence.
• Organizations typically encounter various obstacles that can slow progress or derail transformation efforts entirely.

This reduces delays, improves product development flow, enables faster feedback, and creates more innovative solutions designed by those closest to the local knowledge. However, some decisions are strategic and global and have economies of scale that justify centralized decision-making. Since both types of decisions occur, creating a reliable decision-making framework is a critical step in empowering employees and ensuring a fast flow of value. At the same time, software development remains on the critical path for most enterprises. Thus, the new Agile way of working has become the predominant method for enterprises facing the challenges of an increasingly digital age.

Embrace Iterative Planning Cycles

The ESR is the nerve center of the enterprise, overseeing its portfolio investments and initiative execution. It plays a crucial role in monitoring the performance of programs and key initiatives across all major portfolios. This setup fosters strategy agility, enables cross-portfolio collaboration, and supports sustainable growth in key investment areas. Organizations that stick to traditional methods—like detailed upfront specifications and designs based on an assumed final outcome—may struggle to keep up.

Heat maps showing competency levels across different business units often spark productive conversations about priorities and approaches. Quantitative metrics that measure current performance in areas like delivery predictability, quality, time-to-market, and employee engagement. This approach to portfolio management connects directly to lean fundamentals, particularly in its focus on value streams, flow, and waste reduction.

Create an identity and data management platform that allows users to create one secure and private City profile. Leverage IoT and mobile technologies for transit planning, modeling, and mapping of pedestrian/vehicle behavior to improve transit options. The main traits everyone on the team should possess are a desire for collaboration and continuous improvement. An Agile team is all about communication , teamwork, problem-solving, technical development skills, and striving to improve the team’s velocity with each iteration. Quality assurance helps identify errors and flaws in the software code and design throughout the development process to prevent loss of time and money. It ensures that the end product is competitive, secure, and smoothly performs its expected functions.

The principles in this competency align closely with those found in Six Sigma Yellow Belt certification programs, particularly the emphasis on data-driven improvement and systematic problem-solving. Improve product quality and customer satisfaction with Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification. They demonstrate transparency, embrace uncertainty, and make decisions based on economic frameworks rather than political considerations. Understanding these interactions helps organizations develop more effective transformation strategies.