https://www.scaledagileframework.com/

Enterprise: represents business entity to which each safe portfolio belongs

Connecting Enterprise Strategy to portfolio:

  1. Budget is total funding provided to portfolio for CapEx and OpEx; Portfolio budget is then allocated to individual value streams
  2. Strategic themes are specific, differentiated business goals that communicate aspects of strategic intent from enterprise to portfolio
  3. Portfolio context provides constant feedback to support governance and inform ongoing strategy development

Strategy Formulation:

Strategic Themes are differentiating business objectives that connect a portfolio to the strategy of the Enterprise. Strategic themes provide the enterprise with the differentiators to move from the current state to a more desirable, future state. They help drive innovation and competitive differentiation achievable only through effective portfolio Solutions.

Strategic themes are primary inputs to other portfolio elements. They affect:

  1. The value stream budgets
  2. The content in the Program and Solution Backlogs
  3. The ART and Solution Train vision and Roadmap
  4. The Economic Framework

Epic Owners are responsible for formulating and elaborating the epic, and analyzing its cost and impact. They define an MVP where applicable and secure approval (or rejection) of the epic

Enterprise Architect promotes adaptive design, and engineering practices and drives architectural initiatives for the portfolio. Enterprise Architects also facilitate the reuse of ideas, components, services, and proven patterns across various solutions in a portfolio.

Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) function has the highest level of decision-making and financial accountability for the products and Solutions in a SAFe portfolio.

LPM function with three primary responsibilities:

  1. Strategy and investment funding,
  2. Agile portfolio operations, and
  3. Lean governance.

Portfolio Kanban is a method used to visualize, manage, and analyze the prioritization and flow of portfolio Epics from ideation to implementation and completion.

Portfolio Kanban is a method used to visualize, manage, and analyze the prioritization and flow of portfolio Epics from ideation to implementation and completion.

Portfolio Backlog is the highest-level backlog in SAFe. It provides a holding area for upcoming business and enabler Epics intended to create a comprehensive set of Solutions, which provides the competitive differentiation and operational improvements needed to address the Strategic Themes and facilitate business success. Epics are analyzed in the portfolio Kanban to establish feasibility, a Lean business case, and a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Lean Budgets is a set of practices that minimize overhead by funding and empowering Value Streams rather than projects while maintaining financial and fitness-for-use governance.

Accounting with SAFe:

  1. Fund Value Streams, not Projects

2. Empower value stream content authority

3. Provide objective evidence of Fitness for Purpose

SAFe provides regular, cadence-based opportunities to assess progress every PI via the Solution Demo and, if necessary, every two weeks via the System Demo. Participants include such key stakeholders as the Customer, Lean Portfolio Management, Business Owners, and the teams themselves.

4. Approve EPIC level initiatives

5. Exercise Fiscal Governance with Dynamic Budgeting

Value Streams

Value Streams represent the series of steps that an organization uses to build Solutions that provide a continuous flow of value to a Customer. SAFe value streams are used to define and realize Portfolio-level business objectives and organize Agile Release Trains (ARTs) to deliver value more rapidly.

Organizing around value offers substantial benefits to the organization, including faster learning, shorter time-to-market, higher quality, higher productivity, and leaner budgeting mechanisms.

A significant event triggers the flow of value, perhaps a customer purchase order or new Feature request. It ends when some value has been delivered—a shipment, customer purchase, or solution deployment. The steps in the middle are the activities the enterprise uses to accomplish this feat. A value stream contains the people who do the work, the systems they develop or operate, and the flow of information and materials. The time from the trigger to the value delivery is the lead time. Shortening the lead time reduces the time-to-market. That is the focus.

KPIs:

Each value stream defines a set of criteria, or key performance indicators (KPIs), which can be used to evaluate the ongoing investment and to evaluate if enterprise is achieving an appropriate return on substantial investment.

The type of value stream under consideration drives the KPIs that the business will need, for example:

  1. Some value streams produce revenue, or end-user value directly, in which case revenue may be an appropriate measure.
  2. Other metrics such as market share or solution usage may provide additional insight.
  3. Other value streams, or elements of a value stream, are creating emergent new offerings. In this case, potential return on investment (ROI) is a lagging economic measure. Instead, using nonfinancial, innovation accounting KPIs to get fast feedback may be a better choice.
  4. Some development value streams are merely cost centers, which serve internal operational value streams and are not independently monetized. In this case, measures such as customer satisfaction, net promoter score, team/ART self-assessment, and feature cycle time may be more relevant.
  5. In the most significant scale, a value stream may establish an even broader set of measures, such as those represented by the sample Lean-Agile portfolio Metrics.

Value Stream Coordination:

They are of two types:

  1. Coordinating multiple value streams within a portfolio
  2. Coordinating multiple ARTs within a value stream

Responsibility for what gets built – Product Owner > Product Management > Solution Management

Responsibility for how it gets built – Agile Team > System Architect/Engineering > Solution Architect/Engineering

Responsibility for servant leadership-based operation and execution – Scrum Master > Release Train Engineer (RTE) > Solution Train Engineer (STE)

Solution Portfolio Management – Has the overall responsibility for guiding a portfolio to a set of integrated solutions.

Enterprise Architect – Provides technical guidance for the long-term evolution of the technologies and platforms and the larger Nonfunctional Requirements (security, Compliance, performance, and more) for the portfolio solution set.

Agile Program Management Office (APMO) – The APMO—along with the STEs and RTEs—is typically responsible for supporting decentralized, but efficient, program execution. The APMO provides support for standard reporting patterns, shared best practices, and growth and dissemination of institutional knowledge.

Reference: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/