In the beginning of 2020, a new version of SAFe will be available. It’s, as usual, fully backward compatible with SAfe 4.6, allowing a smooth migration.
There are now seven core competencies that enable business agility. Some are reframed and restructured and two new competencies to expand SAFe to encompass the entire enterprise and enable business agility. See the new SAFe big picture.
The two new competencies are: Continuous Learning Culture (CLC) and Organizational Agility (OA).
Continuous Learning Culture is based on three dimensions: Learning Organization (shared vision, systems thinking, mental models, team learning, personal mastery), Relentless Improvement (constant sense of danger, optimize the whole, problem solving culture, reflect at key milestones, fact based improvement), and Innovation Culture (innovative people, time & space, go see, experimentation & feedback, pivot without mercy or guilt, innovation riptides).
The three dimensions of Organizational Agility are: Lean-thinking people and agile teams (house of lean, SAfe principles, Agile Manifesto), Lean Business Operations (process time – delay time – process time) and Strategy Agility.
The old competence DevOps and Release on Demand is now called Agile Product Delivery. Here we see Develop on Cadence, Release on Demand, DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline. New is Customer Centricity (understand: market research, design: user research) and Design thinking within the Agile Product Delivery competency.
Enterprise’s business teams are now ‘on the train’ and participate in delivering and supporting innovative business solutions. These teams adopt the Lean and Agile values, principles and practices.
A tenth SAFe principle is added: Organize around value. This principle is based on Kotter’s ‘dual operating system’ as described in his book XLR8 – Accelerate. Building strategic agilty for a faster moving world. See my review.
If I look at my bird’s eye view on the agile forest, I have repositioned SAFe to emphasize that SAFe is now covering, within the product-level, the product-targeted as well as the culture-targeted selection.
See the Bird’s eye view on the agile forest blog for the complete article.
See the Scaled Agile website for more information on SAFe 5.0
Henny Portman's Blog 