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The SAFE Agile Framework Training for Business Agility refers to an organization’s ability to thrive in the digital age by swiftly adapting to market shifts and emerging opportunities through innovative, digitally-enabled business solutions.
In the digital era, everything moves rapidly, including customer preferences, competitive challenges, technological advancements, business expectations, revenue prospects, and workforce requirements. To meet customer expectations at the pace of market changes, businesses must validate innovations with customers and be willing to pivot decisively when needed.
Advancements in technology, such as AI, Big Data, Cloud, and DevOps, offer new avenues for creating value. These technologies empower enterprises to diversify their product lines, modernize existing offerings, reach wider markets, make data-driven decisions, and optimize solution development processes. The key to success in the digital age is the ability to embrace change and leverage technology to stay competitive and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
In her book “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital,” Carlota Perez delves into the evolution of business, society, and financial cycles by examining five significant technological revolutions spanning the last three centuries. The analysis begins with the Industrial Revolution and continues with the ‘Age of Steam and Railways,’ ‘The Age of Steel and Heavy Engineering,’ and finally, the current ‘Age of Software and Digital,’ as depicted in Figure 1.
Perez’s research reveals that these technological revolutions have been catalysts for profound social changes, disruptive shifts in markets, and the emergence of new economic paradigms. These transformative events are world-changing disruptions that typically occur only once in a generation.
Undoubtedly, they found themselves currently immersed in one of those defining eras—the deployment period of the age of software and digital. At this time, every business operates as a software business. To put it plainly, thriving in the deployment period necessitates possessing substantial software and system development capabilities that empower genuine business agility.
“The organizations we created in the 20th century were designed much more for reliability and efficiency than for agility and speed.” — John P. Kotter
While most leaders acknowledge the threat of digital disruption, many struggle to make the necessary transition to thrive in the next economy. The question is, why? Part of the reason lies in the fact that the traditional hierarchy, which has served us well until now, is not well-suited for a world where rapid change is the new norm.
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John Kotter, an organizational researcher, and author, illustrates in his book “Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World,” that successful enterprises don’t start off as large and cumbersome. Instead, they often begin as agile, fast-moving networks of motivated individuals focused on responding to customer needs and new business opportunities. In these organizations, roles and reporting relationships are flexible, and people collaborate naturally to identify customer needs, explore solutions, and deliver value in creative ways. Essentially, it’s an adaptive “entrepreneurial network” of individuals working together to capitalize on opportunities (see Figure 2).
As the enterprise experiences success, it naturally seeks expansion and growth. This growth necessitates a clearer definition of individual responsibilities to ensure essential tasks are accomplished. Consequently, specialists are brought in to provide expertise, and new functional areas are established. To ensure legal adherence and compliance, policies and procedures are implemented, leading to repeatable and cost-efficient operations. The business starts to adopt a functional organizational structure to facilitate scaling, which results in the formation of silos. Meanwhile, in parallel, the entrepreneurial network continues its pursuit of new opportunities to deliver value (see Figure 3).
As the organization seeks larger economies of scale, the hierarchy expands, reaching a point where it starts conflicting with the entrepreneurial network.
Over time, as the hierarchy gains authority from current revenue and profitability, it clashes with the faster-moving and more adaptive network. As a result, the network often gets overwhelmed and crushed in the process. Unfortunately, one of the casualties in this clash is the focus on the customer (see Figure 4).
However, without the presence of the entrepreneurial network, the organization lacks the agility needed to respond swiftly to shifts in customer needs or the emergence of disruptive technologies or competitors.
This situation can lead to an urgent crisis, putting the company’s survival at risk. While the well-established organizational hierarchies of the past fifty years have proven to be valuable in supporting the recruitment, retention, and growth of employees worldwide, they may not be sufficient to address the current challenges.
John Kotter suggests that the solution is not to discard the existing structures and start anew, but rather to reintroduce a more agile, network-like structure that works in conjunction with the hierarchy. This concept is referred to as a “dual operating system,” as illustrated in Figure 5 and explained in the following section. By implementing this dual operating system, companies can effectively address rapid-fire strategic challenges while still retaining the stability provided by the traditional hierarchical approach.
In this dual operating system, the current hierarchy, personnel, and management largely remain intact. However, a second virtual operating system is established, organized around Development Value Streams to embody the entrepreneurial network.
Within each Development Value Stream, one or more Agile Release Trains (ARTs) unite under a common business and technology mission. These ARTs plan, commit, develop, and deploy collaboratively.
While the management reporting structure may remain unchanged, the teams within an ART become self-organizing and self-managing, eliminating the need for daily task direction. This new virtual organization breaks down the traditional functional silos that hinder flow and innovation.
By organizing the second operating system based on value streams instead of functions, SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) provides a way for organizations to prioritize customers, products, innovation, and growth while coexisting with their existing hierarchical structure.
Furthermore, this dual-operating system is flexible and built on time-tested Lean-Agile SAFe practices. It allows for rapid reorganization without fully disrupting the existing hierarchy, as depicted in Figure 5. This adaptability is crucial to meet the demands of business agility.
The definition of SAFe Agile Framework Training for Business Agility revolves around the capacity to thrive and succeed in the digital era, swiftly adapting to market shifts and seizing emerging opportunities with innovative, technology-driven business solutions. Through the implementation of SAFe, organizations naturally cultivate Lean, Agile, and DevOps capabilities, allowing for incremental delivery at scale across the entire ‘Business Agile Value Stream’ (BAVS) – from identifying an emerging opportunity to delivering the appropriate solution (as shown in Figure 6). Conventional approaches like phase-gate and waterfall delivery are insufficiently rapid to meet the demands of this dynamic landscape.
Figure 6. The Business agility value stream
Achieving this entails aligning and optimizing all functions, processes, activities, teams, and events from start to finish, with a primary focus on maximizing speed and quality.
The objective is to create a rapid flow of value through each step of the entire business agility value stream, ensuring the delivery of solutions that capitalize on the business opportunity.
Achieving business agility is a degree of expertise across SAFe’s seven core competencies, as illustrated in Figure 7.
Although each competency can provide value individually, they are interdependent. True business agility can only be attained when the organization achieves a reasonable level of mastery in all of them. While it may seem like a challenging endeavor, the path to success is clear.
Here’s a brief description of each core competency, along with a link to a corresponding SAFe Agile Framework Training article that offers more guidance:
By mastering these seven core competencies, organizations can attain the agility required to effectively respond to dynamic market conditions, evolving customer demands, and emerging technologies.
The improvement becomes challenging without proper measurement. SAFe incorporates three measurement domains – outcomes, flow, and competency (Figure 8) – to effectively gauge business progress and advancement.
Figure 8. Three SAFe measurement domains support the goal of business agility
The path to business agility is continuous and endless. Measuring it enables enterprises to gauge their progress on this journey and serves as a reminder to celebrate even the smallest successes along the way.
Overall, agile project managers and agile certifications have an impact and will undeniably only grow to be more in demand. Visit all our courses on Agile here, and get certified.
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