I have recently upgraded my SAFe Practice Consultant to version 6.0 and I’m excited about this SAFe update and wanted to share why….
The guidance on the responsibilities of each role is improved and I particularly like how it stresses the interactions. I spend so much of my time talking about the importance of the collaboration of the ‘the three amigos’ – RTE, SA and PM.
I like that the team-level agile practices are less tied to Scrum. In my experience, a significant minority of teams are better off running Kanban or Scrumban at a team level and it’s nice to see this acknowledged.
The team-level technical practices in the built-in quality article are much more comprehensive and actionable. I’ve found that it’s a common anti-pattern to neglect technical practices when focusing on the agile-at-scale implementation.
There is more guidance on value stream management and creating the flow of actual value. In my experience, many transformations begin to struggle when they get to Lean Portfolio Management (LPM). One interesting note in the material is that the pattern of getting to LPM after several trains were up and running is changing, and most organizations are now implementing LPM as they launch their early trains.
The Metrics and Measure & Grow articles have been merged which makes much more sense to me.
There’s more of a focus on outcome measurement – which is needed by so many. I also really like the increased prominence of OKRs as they’re such a good mechanic and, as is now explicitly called out, can be used on many different levels.
I’m looking forward to training my first v6 course in a few weeks.
You can watch SAFe’s own intro video here: https://youtu.be/PWfCvSUBnHE