SAFe® 5.0 Distilled

SAFe^® 5.0: The world's leading framework for business agility.

Business agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to unprecedented market changes, threats, and emerging opportunities with innovative business solutions.

SAFe^® 5.0 Distilled: Achieving Business Agility with Scaled Agile Framework^® explains how adopting SAFe helps enterprises use the power of Agile, Lean and DevOps to outflank the competition and deliver complex, technology-based business solutions in the shortest possible time.

This book will help you:

• Understand the business case for SAFe: its benefits, and the problems it solves
• Learn the technical, organizational and leadership competencies needed for business agility
• Refocus on customer centricity with design thinking
• Better align strategy and execution with Lean Portfolio Management
• Learn the leadership skills needed to thrive in the digital age
• Increase the flow of value to customers with value stream networks

• Part I: Competing in the Age of Software
1. Business Agility
2. Introduction to SAFe
3. Lean-Agility Mindset
4. SAFe Principles
• Part II: The Seven Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise
5. Lean-Agile Leadership
6. Team and Technical Agility
7. Agile Product Delivery
8. Enterprise Solution Delivery
9. Lean Portfolio Management
10. Organizational Agility
11. Continuous Learning Culture
• Part III: Implementing SAFe, Measure and Grow
12. The Guiding Coalition
13. Designing the Implementation
14. Implementing Agile Release Trains
15. Launch More ARTs and Value Streams; Extending to the Portfolio
16. Measure, Grow, and Accelerate

God, I decided that I needed to learn the theoretical background to SAFe, and boy was I in for a surprise. In reality, it is a big Concept bingo (a bit in I had identified around 30 concepts that they tried to stuff into it, without making any coherent sense of the merger, when I thought to myself, I am only really missing three parts: Re-eningeering, Covey's 7-Habits and some crap about Tom Peters Excellence, when lo and behold Covey shows up, and about 20 pages later Tom Peters are quoted...).

SAFe is sometimes accused of being RUP (Rational Unified Process) in a new dress, but the only thing comparing this SAFe with RUP is that they are overburdened processes, that makes very little sense and which you can sell consultants for the adaptors to make it correctly (20-30 pages are assuming that you must use certified SPCs to make the concept work). It is shallow, unworkable, and incoherent, whit the added caveat in the book that if you don't adopt everything in the right way (from pair-programming in object-oriented languages) to how you set-up the enterprise mission (strategy is glossed over as something coming from God, so it will probably be addressed in later versions), etc, it will not give you the expected advantages and you need more consultant help. 

This should be a funny thing, if not so many mindless IT departments hadn't adopted it as the "truth". 

Many of the concepts in the framework are usable in themselves (Scrum, DevOps, OKRs, Lean, Lean Startup, Organizational Development, CI/CD, Knowledge Management, Design Thinking, Continuous Improvement, etc), but just mixing them doesn't make it a success.

The interesting part is that it manages to show modern management thinking and IT development thinking in the same framework, so that we can see what is on top of everybody's mind right now. Otherwise, avoid it and wait for the next "new" framework to show up.