SAFe Implementation Roadmap: Empowering Your Business for Agile Excellence

 

"The SAFe Implementation Roadmap acts as a compass, providing organizations with a clear direction and guiding principles for their agile transformation." - Dean Leffingwell, Creator of SAFe.

The Need for an Implementation Roadmap: Challenges and Benefits

Shifting from the traditional waterfall culture of working to an agile way of working starts with developing the right script for SAFe implementation. After adopting SAFe, many organizations are improving their cost reduction, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction. But still, the idea of transformation opens room for various doubts and challenges for many businesses. Some of the common challenges faced by organizations are:

1.      Resistance to a new culture: The very first challenge that any business faces in its transformational journey are developing a mindset for change. Adapting new agile practices becomes difficult for employees and stakeholders especially when they have a strong existing habit of favouring traditional hierarchical processes. So, SAFe Implementation Roadmap encourages organizations to establish a vision for change. It helps businesses to understand the importance of purpose, motivation, and alignment for SAFe transformation.

2.      Organizational alignment: In a large enterprise where so many people are involved, achieving alignment between teams, departments, and business units can be challenging. So effective communication and collaboration should be practiced to make the people understand the vision, goals, and benefits of SAFe implementation.

3.      Transformation management: Often organizations lacking skills to manage the transformation leads to confusion, and frustration within the organization. So, it is crucial to address concerns and resistance to encourage the smooth adoption of new practices.

4.      Lacking senior leadership support: Implementing SAFe becomes an uphill battle if there is a lack of leadership support. The agile teams require experts in Implementing SAFe Certification to champion the transformation and guide them to actively participate in the transformation journey. So, the second step of the implementation roadmap depicts the need for senior executives and leaders to attend the two-day course Leading SAFe, so that they can train other team members and change leaders.

5.      Skill Development: To successfully implement SAFe practices, individuals require to obtain new skills. That’s why, SAFe Implementation Roadmap insists on providing training to Lean-Agile change agents so that they can understand their roles and acquire the necessary knowledge to work in an agile environment.

SAFe Implementation Roadmap in action:

Example: A Media Company

A media company wanting to embark on its digital transformation journey fails to meet the needs of its customers. Because the waterfall approach did not support the speed required to deliver value. After implementing small agile practices, the company decided to adopt SAFe.

The company decided to implement the roadmap in the commercial and content production business areas. After driving some incredible results like 20% cost reduction, 24% employee engagement, and 86% customer satisfaction the company decided to expand its SAFe practices.

So, how is it possible with SAFe Implementation Roadmap? Let’s discuss the steps adopting which businesses can drive their agile transformation. Some of the crucial steps that help organizations achieving business agility include:

1.      Creating a sense of urgency:  Before adopting transformation, the company must communicate the urgency for change across the team members. They must emphasize the benefits of SAFe practices such as faster time to market, improved customer experience, and increased productivity. 

2.      Forming a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence: Secondly, the company must establish a LACE. It is a team of experienced agile coaches, change agents, and trainers to facilitate the implementation process.

3.      Evaluating current state and defining future state: Organizations must conduct assessments to understand their current state to identify the pain points, impediments, and areas of improvement. Without setting clear goals and objectives for the SAFe transformation, it is meaningless to blindly follow the implementation process.

4.      Creating an Implementation Plan: Using the SAFe Implementation Roadmap, the company can create an implementation plan with specific steps, timelines, and dependencies. This can also help in deciding on pilot teams to start the adoption process.

5.      Training leaders: Next the companies must focus on providing comprehensive training programs like Leading SAFe, Implementing SAFe online training to upskill their workforce.

6.      Launching ARTs: Establishing Agile Release Trains for value delivery consistently and predictably.

7.      Sustaining improvement: Maintaining regular retrospectives, feedback loops, and metrics to track the progress and make the necessary changes to support the needs of customers.

Title Descriptions

1.      How does the SAFe Implementation Roadmap adapt to the context of the different organizations?

SAFe Implementation Roadmap provides a structured framework that is designed to be adaptable and flexible to accommodate the unique needs and contexts of different organizations.

2.      What are the training programs suggested for senior leaders for the implementation process?

Advanced training programs such as Leading SAFe, Implementing SAFe Certification, and SAFe Practice Consultants help senior leaders to guide agile team members.

3.      What is the range of skills covered by Implementing SAFe Online Training?

Implementing SAFe Online Training develops a range of skills such as technical skills, agile methodologies and frameworks, leadership and influencing skills, change management skills, defining meaningful metrics, and more.

 

About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. We provide various SAFe certification courses along with DevOps, Scrum, Agile Coaching and more trainings. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.