SAFe Implementation Roadmap
James Halprin, helping organisations through Lean-Agile Transformation
7 min readAug 17, 2018
“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” — Peter Drucker
The SAFe Implementation Roadmap describes the steps, or ‘critical moves,’ an enterprise can take to implement SAFe in an orderly, reliable, and successful fashion. While adopting SAFe will vary based on context, the Implementation Roadmap offers insight to a fairly common implementation pattern. The roadmap has been shaped by proven change management strategies, and the experience of hundreds of global enterprises who have adopted SAFe.
Leverage Elabor8’s deep experience in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) in your transformation.
I’ve launched many Agile Release Trains (ARTs), with and without the SAFe Implementation Roadmap, and have seen firsthand the significant benefits from following the roadmap.
While I’ve summarised the 12 steps below, it is worth keeping a couple of points in mind. Firstly, while the roadmap lays out a common adoption pattern, by no means is this the only way to roll out SAFe. Use this pattern as a guide, and most importantly understand the intent so you can tailor based on context. Secondly, transitioning to SAFe is a large scale change initiative that must be managed accordingly, and there are many pitfalls to be aware of along the way. For more information on the critical role that change management plays, check out, ‘This is Why Your Agile Transformation is Failing’.
- Reaching the Tipping Point — To embark on any transformation there needs to be a catalyst for change or ‘tipping point’. Typically this falls into one of two categories: either the organisation has a ‘burning platform’ whereby they are failing to compete and the existing way of doing business is not delivering the desired outcomes and / or the organisation has proactive leadership that are seeking to continually improve. The tipping point will ultimately need to create a compelling reason to change and associated vision for the organisation to rally behind. To ask people to change is to ask them to take a risk. Hence, it is critical that the reason that compels the change is captured and articulated in a vision statement and widely radiated.
- Train Lean-Agile Change Agents — In the book ‘Leading Change’, Kotter discusses eight stages of guiding organizational transformation, the second step being to create a ‘sufficiently powerful guiding coalition’. We need to create a SAFe coalition to drive the change. We do this by:
1.Training the Lean-Agile change agents as SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs) to guide the implementation across the enterprise
2.Train executives, managers and other leaders to support the implementation
3.Charter a Lean-Agile Centre of Excellence to drive.
See article 5 in this series for more details on the various SAFe courses. - Train Executives, Managers, and Leaders — SAFe places a very large emphasis on the role of the leader in the transformation — without strong and active leadership the transformation will take longer and ultimately be far less successful that it should ultimately be. In particular, leaders should exhibit a Lean-Agile mindset, apply Lean-Agile principles and know what the responsibilities are of SAFe Lean-Agile leaders.
Leading SAFe, which is the seminal SAFe course, is key in helping leaders understand their role in a SAFe enterprise. - Create a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence — A Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) is a small team of people dedicated to implementing the SAFe Lean-Agile way of working. This is typically made up of a cross functional team whose primary role is to implement the change and are empowered to do so. The LACE has many responsibilities some of which include communicating the vision and urgency for the change, creating and executing the implementation plan, and providing training and coaching to the enterprise.
- Identify Value Streams and ARTs — A value stream is a primary construct for understanding, organizing, and delivering value in SAFe. Each value stream is a long-lived series of steps used to create and deliver value to our customer. Once we’ve defined our value stream(s) then we can go about designing our Agile Release Trains (ARTs) to ensure they are effectively realizing the value.
A one day Value Stream Workshop has been created to help with this critical step of the Implementation Roadmap. - Create the Implementation Plan — The focus on this step is to begin the planning process by creating the Implementation Plan using an Agile mindset. That is, we don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that we can plan everything upfront but rather we want to do just enough planning so that we can get started and learn by doing. There are three key elements we need to identify in the Implementation Plan; pick the first value stream, select the first ART, and create a preliminary plan for additional ARTs and value streams.
- Prepare for ART Launch — With the implementation plan in hand, now is the time to execute the activities necessary for a successful ART launch. SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs) often lead the implementation of the initial ARTs, supported by SAFe-trained program stakeholders and members of the LACE. From a change-management perspective, getting the first ART launch right is very important. The activities required to prepare for the ART Launch include defining the ART, setting the launch date and cadence for the program calendar, training ART leaders and stakeholders (Leading SAFe), establishing the Agile teams, training Product Managers and Product Owners (SAFe POPM), training Scrum Masters (SAFe SSM), assessing and evolving launch readiness. Perhaps the most challenging part of ART Launch Preparation is the preparation of the Program Backlog to take into our first planning session where we coach our new group of Product Owners to rethink solution requirements and define emergent vertical slices of value that can be released incrementally.
- Train Teams and Launch the ART — With the key ART stakeholders trained and on board, and launch plans in place, now is the time to train the teams and launch the ART. SAFe for Teams (S4T) is used to train the teams, and this is ideally run as a Big Room Training event where all members of the ART (up to 125 people) are trained together in the same event. There are several advantages to Big Room Training including accelerated learning, a shared experience, cost efficiency and collective learning.
While there are many ways to launch an ART, the quickest way to launch an ART is to follow the Quick Start method where S4T is run on Monday and Tuesday and is immediately followed by the first Program Increment (PI) Planning session on Wednesday and Thursday. At the completion of the 2 day PI Planning event the ART will be officially launched and ready to execute their first Program Increment. - Coach ART Execution — At this stage of the implementation everyone has now been through one or more role based training sessions, the first ART has been launched via a two day PI Planning session and the teams are off and running on their first PI. To help the ART transform into an empowered, engaged, and aligned team-of-Agile-teams building solutions that deliver value in the shortest sustainable lead time, now is the time to shift focus from planning and training and on to coaching and supporting the ART as required.
- Launch More ARTs and Value Streams — With one ART now launched and some runs on the board, it’s time to take the organisational learning and apply it to the other value streams and ARTs in the enterprise by following the same pattern as described in the Implementation Roadmap. Only by doing this can the enterprise start to realize an even greater return on their investment: faster time-to-market, higher quality, higher productivity, and increased employee engagement. In this regard, the SAFe Implementation Railway Kanban can be used to determine the readiness of launching subsequent ARTs.
- Extend to the Portfolio — As more ARTs are launched, more demands are inevitably placed on the portfolio to accommodate and ultimate enhance this new way of delivering value. This is the time in the transformation that consideration should be given to implementing the Portfolio level of SAFe and the guidance it provides around implementing a Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) function.
- Sustain and Improve — Making it to this stage of the implementation roadmap requires substantial work so if you’ve made it this far well done! The question to be tackled at this point is how to sustain and improve the overall adoption and execution of SAFe in the enterprise? Having a strong focus on relentless improvement, ongoing leadership training, the continuing role of the LACE, Communities of Practice (COPs), implementing Agile HR practices, tracking metrics across ARTs and a strong focus on DevOps would be some of the key things to consider.
In addition, now would be the time to consider rolling out the advanced SAFe courses, if this has not already been done, including SAFe Release Train Engineer (RTE) and SAFe Advanced Scrum Master (SASM).
In the final article of this series we take a deeper look at the various role based training options available that ensure everyone in the enterprise can learn about the framework in more detail from their own perspective.
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