Putting the Customer first in SAFe 5.0

Business Agility

The newest version of the Scaled Agile Framework, SAFe 5.0, has been officially released on January 7, 2020. With a major focus on business and organizational agility, SAFe is breaking out of the technology and software parts of the enterprise and embracing agility in all areas of the organization. One of the reasons that SAFe has become the leading enterprise Agile framework is because it is continuously improving, incorporating the latest research, and responding to input and feedback from its Customers and Gold Partners. SAFe 5.0 shows what great things can be produced by the feedback system in that network. Check out the new version of the SAFe 5.0 Big Picture below.

Agile Rising is particularly happy to see SAFe incorporate Customer Centricity and Design Thinking as core elements of SAFe 5.0. These are additions that we have been advocating for with Scaled Agile since 2016, based on the experience that we have had with our customers incorporating Design Thinking with SAFe and Agile for many years. Chris Ruch, Agile Rising’s President and SAFe SPCT, gave a presentation about at the Agile 2017 Conference about the need for Customer Centricity in SAFe and other scaling frameworks, as well as highlighting the re-world examples of user experience, user research, and customer engagement activities as part of SAFe implementations. We are looking forward to continuing to help our customers’ product development, software development, and business teams take a customer first approach to their innovation work.

Two of the other new areas of focus in SAFe 5.0 are Measure and Grow and creating a Continuous Learning Culture, both of which Agile Rising stand ready to help our customers embrace in 2020. Measure and Grow provides guidance on how organizations evaluate their progress towards business agility and determine their next improvement steps through facilitated self-assessments and retrospectives. Agile Rising’s transformation consultants are not only experts in SAFe, they have also been trained in facilitating these health assessments using the SAFe self-assessment model, as well as other tools such at Comparative Agility and Agility Health. We can help you implement a Measure and Grow program in your organization and a relentless improvement process to act on the feedback gathered through that program.

Helping our customers create and support a continuous learning culture is core to what we do at Agile Rising. As you contemplate how to adopt SAFe 5.0, whether as adopting SAFe for the first time or upgrading your organization to the latest version of SAFe, or expanding your SAFe implementing by driving customer centricity with your Product Management team or implementing lean portfolio management, Agile Rising can help you. Contact us to have a conversation about putting together a game-plan for how to be successful implementing SAFe 5.0 in 2020 or join us at one of our public SAFe 5.0 classes.