Why Scale Agile with SAFe?

• Agile methods can help teams do better work

Many organizations adopt agile organically, starting with a single team. But often, when they go to scale agile across multiple teams, departments, or business units, they struggle. The need for alignment, planning, cadence, roles, and communication, which may have seemed simple among a dozen team members, becomes challenging to implement across hundreds and even thousands of people.

From Agile to Business Agility with SAFe

• The ability to compete and thrive in the digital age

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Agile product delivery alone isn’t enough. You need business agility.

It’s when the entire organization—business and technology—uses Lean and agile practices to continually deliver innovative business solutions faster than the competition. With business agility, you can capitalize on emerging opportunities and respond to surprises and uncertainty. You can make faster decisions, allocate funds with greater flexibility, and align the right people to do the right work.

What is Business Agility?

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Business Agility is defined as agility in an organization’s culture, leadership, strategy, and governance that adds value to all stakeholders who operate in uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments.

Business agility is the ability of an organization to:

• Adapt quickly to market changes – internally and externally
• Working solutions over comprehensive documentation
• Respond rapidly and flexibly to customer needs
• Adapt and lead change in a productive and cost-effective way without compromising quality
• Continuously be at a competitive advantage

Why Business Agility?

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Challenges

• Future is unpredictable
• Technology changing ever faster
• Creating greater uncertainty on our needs and requirements.

Businesses that are able to embrace Agile

• Adapt faster
• Deliver little
• Often to testing the environment
• Customer focused

How to Achieve Business Agility

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Business agility begins with a mental shift. Getting your entire organization to adopt this mindset is a major undertaking, but it’s worth it. As a change agent, you can help executive leaders recognize this and equip them to:

• Align strategy with execution to determine what to fund and why. This helps you develop and maintain a portfolio of products and services that meet the evolving needs of customers and the organization itself.
• Focus on the customer, using design thinking to build the right products for the right people at the right time.
• Optimize value streams using cross-functional collaboration between technical and business teams to get those products to market faster.