Do you struggle with the planning and coordination of work across many interdependent teams to deliver value to your customers? Do you even track the notion of value? Are you able to align engineering investment with business strategy and make informed trade-offs when urgent business needs interrupt planned delivery? Maybe you don’t plan at all because that’s not the “agile way”? IBM Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) with SAFe to the rescue!

The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe) is the industry-leading methodology that has helped many enterprises realize the value of lean and agile adoption across an organization. SAFe describes the organizational “layers” – Portfolio, Program, and Team — and then articulates the roles, activities and artifacts that belong to those layers. Everyone in the organization participates, across business and engineering. The highest level, the Portfolio, is where ideas come into the system and the organization (which could be something like a line of business) decides what to do with it, at which point the lifecycle begins.

With the release of SAFe 4.0, the methodology provides a complete set of practices and guidelines for the largest IT and systems engineering organizations by formalizing the definition and governance of value streams. SAFe is very well-defined – you don’t have to make this stuff up. It has a vocabulary, a set of artifacts, roles aligned with specific activities and responsibilities, as well as workflows across the environment that embrace lean and agile principles. If you’re not familiar with SAFe, please take some time to explore more at scaledagileframework.com.

What is even better than SAFe alone? SAFe embedded in development tooling to help you get started! SAFe 4.0 beta templates are now available and can be used in CLM 6.0.1 or later. Key concepts such as Kanban, economic planning, and value delivery are built in to the tooling. Add some cool reporting on top of that and you have what you need to orchestrate the delivery of software and systems across your enterprise.

Insight at your fingertips

So, what do you want to know? How about the work you have planned or have already delivered… how is it aligned with business strategy? No problem.

How is team work aligned to business strategy?

What about dependencies across your Portfolio that might cause delays or, even worse, negatively impact quality? Got it.

Portfolio dependencies

Do you simply want to monitor status of delivery?

Program status

And what about “value”? Do you track it? Do you know how? CLM with SAFe gives you a starting point to capture the notion of value…

PI (Program Increment) Objective work item type

… and then report on your organization’s ability to get better at it!

Program value delivery trend

Are you ready to get started? Visit jazz.net/safe, and let us know if you have any issues or feedback. We’d love to hear from you!