Series description

The Simplifying SAFe® webinar series is designed for two audiences:

• Organizations who have adopted SAFe® and are looking to both understand it and use it better, or
• Those who are considering SAFe or alternatives

“Simplifying” SAFe® does not mean to take things out of SAFe to make it simpler. Rather it means to look at SAFe from a different perspective that makes it simpler to understand while also making it more effective. This will make those having adopted SAFe more effective. Those considering SAFe will see both alternatives to SAFe or better adoptions that will work for them.

Viewing SAFe® from a value stream perspective

August 14, 2018
Al Shalloway | Recording | Slides (PDF)

As SAFe has matured it has added additional levels, roles, artifacts, practices, … While providing practitioners more capabilities, it has also made it harder to understand and use SAFe. We have found that looking at SAFe from the perspective of the value streams in an organization it both becomes easier to understand and facilitates taking a systems-thinking approach.

This webinar discusses how to view SAFe from the perspective of aligning strategy, initiatives, business backlogs, product backlogs, program backlogs, ops and delivery into a series of interrelated steps. This ties together the many pieces of SAFe and provides a more effective context for each of them.

Figure 1 is used during the webinar to illustrate this perspective.

Options for viewing

This video has seven sections. Watch the full video below. Or go to the streaming version which lets you jump to specific sections.

Resources mentioned in the webinar

Here are resources mentioned during the webinar

• The value stream in SAFe
• Middle Up-Down Management (PDF). This is mentioned in the FLEX Reading List.
• How do we know what features are highest value? Read Why doing WSJF on features does not make sense.
• What if Russ Ackoff had given a TED talk? This was also discussed in Al Shalloway’s talk at Agile 2018.

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Lean Portfolio Management

September 4, 2018
Al Shalloway | Recording | Slides (PDF)

SAFe provides considerable guidance on what needs to happen in order to achieve effective Lean Portfolio Management. However, many of the details of how to actually achieve these needed outcomes is left to the practitioner. Net Objectives’ has developed several concepts that can be used to do effective Lean Portfolio Management.  These include the following concepts:

• How to quantify what a company is wanting to invest in
• The concept of the Minimum Business Increment (MBIs) and tying it back to what the company is investing in
• A more sophisticated weighted shortest job first on MBIs
• Having an intake process

By providing clarity on what is the most important items to build, alignment on how to allocate the capacity of the organization is possible.  This is particularly useful to resolve conflicts when capacity is insufficient to meet the demand of business stakeholders.

Resources mentioned in the webinar

Here are resources mentioned during the webinar

• Middle Up-Down Management (PDF). This is mentioned in the FLEX Reading List.
• What if Russ Ackoff had given a TED talk?
• The Net Objectives Guardrails System
• Lean Leadership and Systems Thinking (talk)
• The Art of Action. Stephen Bungay. We highly recommend The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay for executives, management, and leadership who are responsible for transitioning their enterprises with Lean and Agile. We have created an authorized summary of the essential concepts from each chapter of this important book. Download the article (PDF).

Special Webinar: How Value-Driven Organizations Gain Visibility as They Scale Agile

• with Net Objectives and Targetprocess
• Tuesday, 18 September 2018 1:00pm ET / 10:00am PT
• Register

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Understanding the SAFe value stream

TBD
Al Shalloway | Recording | Slides (PDF)

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Creating and governing the intake model

TBD

Al Shalloway | Recording | Slides (PDF)

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Agile Product Management and ATDD in SAFe

TBD
Al Shalloway | Recording | Slides (PDF)