Enterprises survive and thrive in the digital age according to how quickly they can deliver innovative business solutions in response to market opportunities and threats. In SAFe, this is called business agility and is the goal of the Lean Enterprise. A critical component of business agility is organizational agility—one of SAFe’s seven core competencies.

Introduced in SAFe 5, organizational agility requires Lean-thinking people and Agile teams throughout the enterprise. Let’s face it, ideas, solutions, and value flow much faster when leaders and practitioners in Development, Finance, People/HR, Marketing, Legal, Operations, and other functions share a Lean-Agile mindset and way of working.

We also recognize that SAFe offers much more guidance for software and systems development than for other business functions. But that is changing.

I am thrilled to announce the arrival of business agility experience reports—a new collection of articles devoted to exploring Agile transformations beyond IT. Exclusively sourced from the SAFe community, each experience report describes real-world challenges and successes in applying Lean and Agile concepts in operational value streams across a wide range of industries.

The inaugural set of four experience reports emerges from the pioneering work of these SAFe Fellows:

• Rebecca Davis
• Adam Mattis
• Michael Stump (with Fabiola Eyholzer)
• Yuval Yeret

We thank them for their valuable insights and high standard of quality set for future reports. This library will continue to grow over the coming months, allowing all of us to learn together about the patterns and anti-patterns that help and hinder the development of organizational agility in the enterprise.

You can access the experience reports here or by navigating to Resources > Experience Reports in the menu bar at the top of any framework page.

Enjoy! More to come…

— Marc