Strategy Deployment and SAFe

This is a slightly different variation on my series of posts comparing Strategy Deployment and other approaches. SAFe is definitely not a form of Strategy Deployment, but it does include references to strategy, so this post is more an exploration of how SAFe could work alongside Strategy Deployment.

First, lets get the usual caveats out of the way. I’m not specifically pro or anti SAFe. It has lots of good ideas in it, and they’re not always appropriate. I did my SPC in 2013 and I’ve worked with organisations where it has been helpful, and where its been a disaster. My goal in this post is to try and help understand when and how SAFe can work well more often, by looking through a Strategy Deployment lens. I’m not interested in “No True Scotsman” (or “Deckard Defence” which I’ve just been introduced to) type arguments.

This post has been in draft for a long time as SAFe tends to be a divisive subject. It was only while attending the recent virtual European SAFe Summit and watching talks and chatting with people about strategy, that I came to enough clarity to describe what has been bothering me.

Strategic Themes

Lets first look at where Strategy sits in the SAFe Big Picture.

SAFe includes Strategy at the Portfolio Level as a set of Strategic Themes which guide the Portfolio Vision, and thus the Portfolio Backlog and the Lean Budgets. As such, SAFe uses Strategy to define and fund Value Streams, and the Epics that flow through them. In other words, in SAFe the Value Streams are Tactical investments, and Strategy is implemented through product delivery. As such the usual iterative and incremental techniques work well to allow the products to evolve and emerge based on feedback.

That’s fine when strategy is directly related to the product or service that you are delivering, and when you already have the capability to effectively deliver it. However, what happens when your strategy is more about organisational transformation? What happens if SAFe itself is the Tactical investment, and Strategy is implemented through agile transformation?

I don’t think there is anything explicitly in SAFe which addresses this scenario, even though it is probably the case that most SAFe stories are about the transformation, rather than the product delivered. Experienced coaches will adapt to context and adjust SAFe so that it too can evolve and emerge iteratively and incrementally, aligned to strategy. Without that, however, SAFe easily becomes just another process to be implemented by the book.

Strategy Deployment

What I believe SAFe is missing is an Inspect and Adapt (I&A) cadence at the portfolio level. It’s all very well having I&A cadences in the teams and value streams, but what if the strategy itself is not having any business impact? How does an organisation know if SAFe is helping meet strategic goals, and how does it steer towards better outcomes if necessary?

While SAFe includes the feedback cadences to treat product development as a hypothesis to be tested, it does not contain any feedback cadences to treat SAFe, organisational change, or the strategy itself as a hypothesis to be tested. There are no dynamics of strategy deployment with collaborative exploration of ideas across the whole organisation and nested PDSA cycles around the whole transformation.

I’m slightly wary of suggesting adding even more into SAFe, but given the effort that’s gone into the “Big Picture” and all the other detail in there, I’d prefer to have the strategy and strategy deployment cadence explicit, such that all the other ideas can be treated as options to be experimented with.

I should note that SAFe does now include the Measure & Grow element as “the way a portfolio of value streams evaluates its progress towards business agility”. However, it is also to “determine improvement steps”, so while I can see how the assessments can be used to provide evidence of progress, if I”m being cynical, it feels generic (i.e. not context specific) and more like a SAFe Maturity Model. There is an expectation that SAFe will provide Business Agility, where’s in fact that is just a hypothesis.

There are also KPIs for each Value Stream which are informed by the Strategic Themes, although these still seem to be delivery focused.

Conclusions

In conclusion, it seems to me that SAFe’s focus is on the strategic delivery of a portfolio, but not on the strategic transformation of the organisation. There is no explicit strategy deployment cadence, and as a result any transformation is likely to be treated as a plan to executed rather than being allowed to emerge through experimentation and feedback.

My recommendations for anyone using SAFe for their agile transformation would be to answer the follow questions:

1. What is the business True North you are heading towards?
2. What Aspirations do you hope that SAFe will help you achieve?
3. What Strategies have led you to choose SAFe?
4. What SAFe Tactics help implement those Strategies?
5. What Evidence will you regularly review to give feedback on how well SAFe is serving you?

Of course, those are the elements of TASTE and can be visualised on a X-Matrix! By overlaying an X-Matrix on top of a SAFe Transformation, I believe there is a greater chance of adapting the framework as necessary to help an organisation itself adapt to its unique context and situation.