Welcome to Scaled Agile Framework® 5!
Hi, I’m Dean Leffingwell, Creator of SAFe® and Chief Methodologist at Scaled Agile, Inc. On behalf of the entire Scaled Agile team and the SAFe Contributors, it is my personal pleasure to introduce you to the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe) 5, which was released in January, 2020.
SAFe® for Lean Enterprises is a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles, practices, and competencies for achieving business agility using Lean, Agile, and DevOps.
The latest version, SAFe 5, is built around the Seven Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise that are critical to achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage in an increasingly digital age:
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 is also reflected in related guidance throughout the SAFe website. Read more in the SAFe 5 for Lean Enterprises article.
Enterprise leaders also want to benchmark how well the organization is presently performing in each of the seven competencies as they design their next steps to achieving business agility. They want to know how to leverage the organization’s strengths, and also want to understand the critical ‘grows’ that are needed to address any areas of weakness. Further, leaders want to know how their organization compares to others that are on a similar journey. To that end, SAFe 5 includes assessment tools to help measure progress along 21 dimensions (3 per competency) of business agility.
For more information about SAFe 5’s assessment tools, read the Measure and Grow article.
Our Mission
Since the earliest days at Scaled Agile, our core belief has been simple: Better software and systems make the world a better place. Version 5 represents the most ambitious expansion of that mission in our history: to enable the business agility that is required for enterprises to compete and thrive in the digital age. This requires every part of the organization involved in delivering technology-based solutions – development, operations, manufacturing, legal, marketing, finance, compliance, sales, and others – to embrace the principles and practices of Lean and Agile. We help enterprises achieve business agility through the research and thought leadership reflected in the SAFe website, and through our world-class courseware, training, community resources, and certification programs.
As you can see from the numerous Customer Stories many enterprises—large and small—are getting outstanding business benefits from applying SAFe. The aggregation of these cases shows that the most common 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 kinds of results, SAFe adoption is growing rapidly around the world. Seventy percent of Fortune 100 companies and a growing number of the Global 2000 have certified SAFe professionals and consultants on-site, and over 700,000 practitioners have been trained to date.
Support for SAFe
The Framework is supported by the SAFe Community Platform, Customer Success Team, and an extensive network of 400+ Scaled Agile Partners providing platform, training, consulting, and implementation services in almost every region of the world. And while every business situation is unique, we have found that 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, please browse the website and subscribe to SAFe updates, where you will be the first to get notification of new developments. Also, check out the Resources menu, where you will find:
- Free posters for the SAFe Big Picture graphic, the House of Lean, SAFe Lean-Agile Principles, and SAFe Implementation Roadmap
- Free videos, recorded webinars, and presentations
- Links to SAFe books, white papers, and advanced topics
Be sure and check out our corporate site at scaledagile.com where you will find details about the latest SAFe courses, the global class calendar, the Scaled Agile Partner Directory, news about SAFe events, and much more. And when you’re ready, attend a SAFe course and get certified. At any given time, there are well over a thousand SAFe classes being offered worldwide. You never know; I might see you at one of them.
Our commitment is to continuously evolve SAFe to provide value to the industry—better agility, better systems, better business outcomes, better organizations, and better daily lives for the people who build the world’s most important new technologies and solutions—but only you, the leaders, adopters, and practitioners, can tell us whether or not we have accomplished that.
Stay SAFe!
—Dean and the Scaled Agile Team
A Brief History of SAFe
With five major updates since its initial release in 2011, SAFe has grown with the marketplace as we uncover new and better ways of developing software and systems. Although new versions of the SAFe Big Picture are released only occasionally, the Framework knowledge base is continuously updated with new and improved guidance between releases. Please subscribe to SAFe Updates to stay informed of these important changes.
Below is a quick view of the Framework’s history.
Last update: 10 February 2021
