What Is New In Safe 6.0 & Why It’s Important?

By Author: Agile Waters
Total Articles: 45
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We advise going directly to the source by visiting the official “What’s New?” page at the SAFe website for a complete list of changes along with in-depth explanations and illustrations.

Scaled Agile Inc. (SAI) categorises the 6.0 upgrades generally into the following six groups:

Strengthening the foundation for business agility
Empowering teams and clarifying responsibilities
Accelerating value flow
Enhancing business agility with SAFe across the business
Building the future with AI, Big Data and Cloud
Delivering better outcomes with Measure and Grow, and OKRs
Strengthening the foundation for business agility:

A new feature of SAFe 6.0 that helps to clarify what business agility entails is the Business Agility Value Stream. The stages taken to develop a minimum viable product (MVP), validate it, produce it, and deliver a market opportunity are shown in the value stream. This value stream helps participants understand business agility and offers a more organized method of delivering business value. It is crucial to remember that, depending on the business context, ...
... the example value stream provided might need to be further extended. For instance, business agility delivery in some circumstances may involve:

Training customer support employees.

Developing new partners.

Dealing with the operational Support

The six Lean principles that form the framework’s core Lean philosophy have also been expanded upon in SAFe 6.0. This explanation offers a more in-depth breakdown of fundamental principles, making it simpler for everyone to comprehend them.

Empowering teams and clarifying responsibilities

Several Agile practitioners have built successful careers around developing knowledge in the roles and responsibilities described in SAFe since they are an essential component of the broader framework. Many of these duties have been made clearer with version 6.0, which ought to make their work even simpler and more efficient. Although almost all of the roles and ideas have been modified to conform to the new framework, the following modifications are the ones we think are the most significant:

Accelerating value flow

The framework now outlines eight properties of flow and eight associated accelerators to make value flow more quickly, expanding on the significance of the new SAFe Principle (#6):

The eight properties of flow and the eight flow accelerators from Principle #6 are described in new section headers on The Big Picture called Team Flow, ART Flow, Solution Train Flow, and Portfolio Flow.

Enhancing business agility with SAFe across the business

We have always thought that agility should govern workflows across the entire organisation, not just in IT. SAFe 6.0 enablement information now contains a far more substantial knowledge base surrounding how to make that happen. For example,

Building the Future with AI, Big Data, and Cloud

SAFe has released new guidelines for integrating the three transformative technologies of AI, Big Data, and Cloud in software and system development. These technologies are increasingly crucial for businesses to compete in the present and future. The papers in SAFe provide extensive explanations of these technologies and explain how they can be applied inside the framework.

Delivering better outcomes with Measure and Grow, and OKRs

Despite mostly vocabulary and organizational changes, SAFe 6.0 has strengthened the framework’s emphasis on metrics, OKRs, and making data-driven decisions — a notion we consistently educate our clients.

As Scaled Agile Inc.’s trusted advisors and partners, we are continuing to learn about and implement these SAFe 6.0 updates. As such, we will update and add to this article. Please get in touch with an expert if you have any questions.