How is Essential SAFe different from Portfolio SAFe?
Essential SAFe
Essential SAFe, as the name suggests, is the minimum number of components in the agile framework that you need to transition into Agile product development. To get going and evolve from there.
What does that mean?
- It means that you understand your customer needs.
- It means that you have coordinated teams of agile teams to deliver value to customers.
In a scenario for Essential SAFe, you may have one or two large customers that yield enough revenue for you to sustain a profitable business, and so you don’t need Portfolio SAFe.
Applications for Essential SAFe
You are more than capable of running an organization that serves both customer and organizational objectives with the essential SAFe framework, and with a small number of agile teams.
Some people believe that the SAFe framework configurations are designed for progression, a kind of roadmap for scaling in the future, but they are instead designed to meet organizations where they are currently at and to serve them in the most appropriate manner.
If the organization plan to consolidate their position over the next 5 years and focus on delivering increased value, optimizing production capability, and optimizing the value of the products and features they create, then Essential SAFe will serve them perfectly over that period.
Portfolio SAFe
For large organizations who create multiple solutions for multiple customer segments across multiple geographies and industry segments, Portfolio SAFe is the perfect scaling #agileframework to help align teams of agile teams with organizational and customer objectives.
Applications for Portfolio SAFe
Asking an enormous, traditional organization to transition to Agile or SAFe overnight could be a big ask, and so some of those organizations may choose to begin with Essential SAFe and slowly migrate to Portfolio SAFe over time.
However, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations who choose to shift their entire project management teams into product development teams, and Portfolio SAFe is the perfect way to do that.
Portfolio SAFe becomes the starting point for those organizations and allows them to grow agile capabilities in a structured, proven format guided by agile coaches, agile consultants, and agile trainers that specialise in SAFe or Scaled Agile Framework.
The business case for Portfolio SAFe.
The reason organizations choose Portfolio SAFe rather than other agile frameworks or initiating smaller pockets of agility before making the full transition is because those teams then come up against systemic issues that prevent them from achieving business agility.
The organization is simply not structured or designed in a way that facilitates agility, it instead is designed to support legacy project management and traditional management.
Funding projects versus funding capacity.
One of these issues is funding of work.
Lean Portfolio Management in SAFe addresses that issue by guiding the organization away from funding short-term project teams who come together and then disband, and into funding capacity for product development in alignment with one or several value streams.
You can also think of a value stream as a customer journey. Everything that needs to happen from the point of conception to the delivery of value to the customer environment.
So, we aren’t thinking about a project, we are thinking about funding capability across value streams and the degree of capacity that we want to enable or empower in alignment with specific customer and organizational strategies.
- Which of our customers is the most valuable to our organization?
- What is the organizational strategy that aligns with that customer journey?
- What degree of capability, in the context of that customer strategy, do we want to fund?
- What problems will we encounter in the value stream if we don’t tackle this through a Portfolio SAFe approach? What is going to prevent us from achieving our objectives?
A journey to agile capability.
Lean Portfolio Management in SAFe is a journey.
We don’t simply flick a switch and the entire solution works from end-to-end in the way we planned or imagined it would. It is a journey of discovery, and through frequent inspection and experimentation, we adapt what we are doing until we have optimized the value stream.
As we work through the transition to Agile, organizational and systemic impediments arise, and we slowly resolve each of those until the flow of value from inception to customer delivery is optimized.
We may also learn that what we initially thought was valuable, is no longer valuable because of disruption or change in our customer markets, and so we need to adapt what we are doing to meet the new requirements and needs.
In traditional management, there was a tendency to plod along and deliver against the original plan, regardless of what happened in customer environments or markets, because the focus was on delivery within specific time and cost constraints rather than agility.
We want to avoid that.
We want to proceed with the best plan we are capable of but respond and adapt, as appropriate and necessary, based on the data and evidence we gather through the process of product development and continuous delivery of value to customers.
Proven Agile Capability
We encourage our clients to begin with Portfolio SAFe, if that is the appropriate framework for their context and application, because it allows us to build capability using proof and evidence.
If we start with this value stream, we often hit organizational or systemic impediments right away.
As we resolve those impediments, it isn’t just being resolved at the local level, it is optimizing for the whole system and so the next value stream that we work with won’t encounter that same problem or impediment in their journey. It has already been resolved.
Also, evidence is paramount in organizational transformation.
As we work on developing Agile capability in a specific value stream, and get that working effectively and efficiently, we now have evidence that what we are doing is working.
Other departments aligned with different value streams get to witness agile and SAFe in action, and their appetite for change grows in alignment with the value of the outcomes that we achieve.
We are proving the business case for Portfolio SAFe with each new value stream that we address, which grows confidence and trust in the work that we are doing, leading to frictionless adoptions of SAFe down the line.
The process reveals organizational impediments and problems, and as we resolve each of those problems, it makes it significantly easier for the next value stream to transition to Agile down the line.
So, that is the difference between Essential SAFe and Portfolio SAFe.
About Value Glide
Value Glide are a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) consultancy, coaching practice, and training specialist who work with organizations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.
As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team are invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and use the data and evidence we gather from each implementation to inform our training, coaching, and consulting services.
In a nutshell, empirical process control or empiricism.
If you are thinking of adopting agile within your organization and have identified SAFe as a great agile framework to adopt, implement and improve your business agility, visit our SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program page or view our SAFe Consulting Services page.
If you have identified a need for an agile coach and SAFe coach to help your organization adopt and implement SAFe, visit our SAFe Coaching Services page.
If you want to know more about SAFe and how to lead SAFe, visit our SAFE Training page for a host of options, from Leading SAFe to a SAFe Release Train Engineer course.
#SAFe #scaledagileframework #scalingagile #agile #agileframework #agilecoach
