Gone are the days when companies had the luxury of long delivery cycles to get everything right. Now, organizations have to predictably and quickly get new functionality in customers’ hands, or risk not being able to adapt to changing markets. This is true for all businesses, including those building the world’s biggest and most complex systems. And they’re turning to Lean systems Engineering practices to take advantage of frequent product release cycles that provide fast feedback.

In SAFe^® 4.6, we introduced the Five Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise—key abilities that are critical to achieving better business outcomes through Lean, Agile, and DevOps practices. As engineers build and deploy ever-larger applications to bring big ideas to life, they’re challenged by increasingly complex, connected, and unpredictable environments. The Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering competency describes how an enterprise can move from stage-gated development approaches to a flow-based, value-delivery-focused model to develop its most significant solutions. Typically, these large solutions include many different components, such as software, cyber-physical systems, and complex networks. And most have high assurance requirements for safety, security, compliance, and reliability.

SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs) play a key role in helping organizations optimize the activities to specify, design, construct, test, deploy, operate, and evolve these solutions. Our newest toolkit for SPCs—Building Really Big Systems with SAFe—provides specific guidance on how to make the Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering competency more tangible, and empower organizations building the world’s largest systems to continuously flow value. The toolkit dives into detail around the eight practices for building really big systems with SAFe:

The slides in the new toolkit can help organizations, government agencies, and their suppliers improve the way they build really big systems.

To further develop your knowledge and skills, please read the competency article here and work with SPCs in your organization to apply Lean Systems Engineering principles and practices to streamline your continuous value flow.

If you’re an SPC or SPCT, you can download this new toolkit here.

As always, we’d love your feedback on this new resource.

Stay SAFe,
—Harry