Announcing a New Release of SAFe 5!
February 9, 2021
7 comments
By Dean Leffingwell
The digital world is changing at an ever-increasing pace and Scaled Agile is committed to the evolution of SAFe to help organizations achieve business agility. Relentless improvement is central to this mission: it helps us improve the Framework based on experiences from our customers and partners.
To this end, on behalf of the entire Scaled Agile team, we are delighted to announce an update to SAFe 5, including an enhanced 5.1 Big Picture.
Key Highlights of This SAFe 5 Update
- An enhanced Big Picture better emphasizes flow and continuous delivery.
- Operational Value Streams become first-class citizens in this new release, with an icon and article dedicated to that topic. Development Value Streams get a more clearly defined label and additional treatment. These articles also describe how emerging development value stream patterns support making operational value streams more profitable.
- A completely redesigned Principle 10, Organizing around value, highlights many of these changes. In addition, topologies and behaviors for designing teams and ARTs are introduced in this article, and integrated in Agile Teams and throughout the Framework.
- New guidance around DevSecOps technical skills and tools help teams better power their continuous delivery pipeline. A new landing page provides access to new articles and presents the expanded DevOps practice domains.
- Broader guidance for applying Lean-Agile practices to business domains can be found in the new Business and Technology article.
- Integrated Participatory Budgeting fosters a dynamic and collaborative process of allocating funding to value streams.
- And finally, after years of requests and obvious demand, we’ve provided guidance for applying SAFe to Hardware Development.
There’s far more in this new release than we can describe here, so check out What’s new in SAFe 5.
Our Commitment to Relentless Improvement
We’ll continue to evolve SAFe to ensure it stays current with new and evolving business and technology trends. These updates will often include new articles as well as changes to existing articles, updates to courses, toolkits, and other community platform assets, and from time-to-time updates to the Big Picture.
We owe a special thanks to all of you in the SAFe community for your feedback and support. Your passion for the best SAFe possible has driven us to deliver what we like to believe to be the most capable and adaptable Framework in the world.
Enjoy, stay tuned, and stay SAFe!
—Dean Leffingwell, SAFe Chief Methodologist
—Richard Knaster, SAFe Fellow
—Dr. Harry Koehnemann, SAFe Fellow and Principal Consultant
—Dr. Steve Mayner, SAFe Fellow and Principal Consultant
—Inbar Oren, SAFe Fellow and Principal Consultant
—Marc Rix, SAFe Fellow and Principal Consultant
—Andrew Sales, SAFe Fellow and Principal Consultant
Author Info
Sita Ravindran
Need to attend a workshop and do SAFE SM training in Dallas TX. any recomendation?
harry
Hi Sita. You can access our Training Calender here – https://scaledagile.com/calendar/. Good luck!
Rahul Pasrija
Dear Dean, it has been a pleasure reading your books and now updates to SAFe. Latest updates related to Development value stream and downstream impacts are really good. You will be pleasantly surprised to know that we are driving these kinds of principles already at one of our European automotive customers. Client ha a product centric IT operating model and we are helping them with what I call “Operating Model Transformation”. I have been repeatedly telling them about mastering the Business Value Stream and Technology value stream as the essence of carrying out this transformation. It is good to see this being validated with latest updates in SAFe. Presently building a framework and a journey for the client for Operating Model transformation and look forward to learning from your work.
Regards
Rahul
kunle O FASALOJO
I will review the SAFe 5.1 and see how it aligns with the current digital transformation disruptions strategies, business agility and the role of leadership.
Francois Richer
Great update ! Thank you very much. It will help me a lot in explaining SAFe in Industrial context, as usual SAFe is ahead !
Daniel Larsen
Great article, and very interesting that hardware is finally getting in to the framework too.
However, with the aircraft example of Lift, Control and Propulsion, what happened then to the concept of end to end value?
A PI where only Lift is delivered, does not in itself provide a flying value, but only a brick to the Flying Machine puzzle, which is – for those who still favors waterfall – is a “what did we tell you” scenario 😉
I do see and understand the funnel of uncertainty that is approached in an agile way, but 😉
However – interesting, and will become even more interesting when HardWare and FirmWare get even more description.
Marc Rix
Thanks for the comment, Daniel. The hardware article was presenting a specific example of the Wright brothers’ approach to inventing a flying machine. They tackled the specific engineering challenges of lift, control, and propulsion separately, iterating on each as a distinct solution. Sometimes this is necesary when building complex solutions for the first time, or when capacity is limited. At some point, though, you’re right, we should shift focus from optimizing for value at the component level to optimizing for value at the system level.