Hi folks,

We are pleased to announce the release of an update to the white paper ‘Accelerating Business Value with SAFe and TBM.’  This updated white paper has the latest TBM and SAFe content.

Why TBM?

As organizations learn how to increase business and technical agility with SAFe, they also face another significant challenge—how to manage the massive increase in technology spending that now exemplifies most companies. Moreover, many IT organizations do not have full transparency into their spending or have a method for allocating their costs, and therefore may not be able to demonstrate the real value they bring to the business in return for the investment in technology.

Fortunately, there’s an established approach for running IT like a business—Technology Business Management (TBM)­–which provides technology leaders with standards and validated best practices to communicate the cost, quality, and value of IT investments to their business partners.

TBM makes it possible for the business to be accountable for their consumption of IT services and software development initiatives by providing a bill of IT or show backs.

Apply TBM for Participatory Budgeting

TBM will also help organizations understand their baseline cost of development and support for the Solutions that deliver current business capabilities. In turn, this information can be used as input for Participatory Budgeting to establish Value Stream Budgets. Furthermore, TBM makes it possible to understand the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of solutions, applications, and systems. TCO is important because it provides the complete cost of developing or purchasing software or systems and the ongoing cost of maintenance and support.

TBM and SAFe, Better Together

Applying TBM with SAFe provides a powerful combination that enables IT to deliver more value with more transparency, to achieve greater business agility, and to establish a stronger and more accountable partnership with the business. Together, these two frameworks help IT shift from ‘running-the-business’ spending to ‘growing-the-business’ investment, which results in faster and better business value, aligned with the strategy and goals of the enterprise. Additionally, TBM can provide you with important insights on your customer-facing vs. internal business initiatives, providing another tool to help your enterprise become more customer-centric.

You can download the white paper here.

We hope that you’ll find this white paper to be a valuable resource to accelerate value delivery and to better communicate the increasing value of IT to executives, leaders, managers, and practitioners.

Stay SAFe,

—Richard Knaster, SAFe Fellow