PRODUCT DETAILS OF APPLIED SAFE®
Applied SAFe is an interactive and ALM tool-agnostic framework of how to achieve business agility in a regulatory compliant way. Facilitated by customizable and tailorable descriptions with clearly defined roles, their interaction, and supporting artifacts, it enables a clear and common understanding for all participants. With mapping to existing organizational processes and regulatory standards, it ensures agility and compliance of activities as self-proving evidence.
Applied SAFe® is a stand-alone product from PEDCO and is fully based on and kept in sync with the current SAFe® version by Scaled Agile, Inc. (SAI). Each release is also officially approved by SAI. As required, you can easily tailor all elements of the process model to your needs, simply by answering a series of out-of-the-box tailoring questions. It’s also possible, to enhance and/or adapt the tailoring questions to create your own version. When moving to future versions of SAFe®, Applied SAFe® will automatically support you in the upgrade process and will let you selectively decide whether to update your customized content to the latest official version or not. In short, Applied SAFe® allows you to extend or modify all of its content in order to better reflect the specific requirements of your organization.
It is exciting to see PEDCO’s Applied SAFe® come to life as a sophisticated, enterprise-ready solution for organizations wanting to adapt SAFe to their context and accelerate better business outcomes. We are extremely pleased to be partnering with the outstanding innovators at PEDCO on this important contribution to the SAFe community. The potential to help ease the way for fully comprehensive SAFe adoption is enormous.
Michael Stump, Managing Director – EMEA, Scaled Agile Inc.Process excellence is all about using the right practices. Applied SAFe adds great value, because it allows also large organizations to reap the benefits of agile practices. With Applied SAFe, we can help our customers to become agile without putting their standard compliance at risk
Erich Meier, CTO, Method ParkThe user feedback on Applied SAFe® is inspiring and acknowledges that our approach for process engineering and its lean-agile application combined with regulatory compliance is of great value. Our cloud-based SAFe® implementation as an executable process model on Stages is percived as an enabler for modern systems engineering and R&D organisations globally.
Stefan Küffer, Principal Process Engineer, PEDCO - Managed Process Services“We truly understand the challenges faced by our clients when implementing SAFe, particularly for those operating in regulated industries. By working in partnership, PEDCO and cPrime are uniquely positioned to provide customized and comprehensive enterprise-ready solutions for organizations wanting to adapt SAFe to their context. With PEDCO’s Applied SAFe, the potential to smooth the path to a full SAFe adoption that ultimately translates to high business value and customer delight is substantial.”
Eyal Abukasis, Chief Operations Officer, cPrimeACTUAL, CONCRETE EXAMPLES
The sections below contain screen shots of the actual implementation of Applied SAFe®, they serve as testimonials of what the product looks and feels like.
PEDCO AG is a proud collaboration partner of Scaled Agile Inc.
SAFe® and Scaled Agile Framework® are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.
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Processes
A process is a logical sequence of related activities to create a performance or a transformation of a work product. The elements are phases, roles, documents and methods. They describe:
- What has to be done
- When (in which phases)
- By whom (which roles are involved)
- How (in form of recommended practices)
Essential activities are expected to produce the relevant work products as a “happy path” without error handling.
Phases
Phases divide the process into time sequences. Phases and milestones are time or event-related element types. Their names and numbers are determined by the control needs of the organization and its stakeholders.
- Relevant reports
- Contained milestones
- Executed activities
- Involved roles
Work Product Models
Work Products are grouped in packages. Applied SAFe® provides the package on each level an overview of the Work Products and their direct relations.
Work Product Models:
- Are a great help in order to understand dependencies on a larger scale.
- Ease the navigation between work products and enable another view of the processes and the results.
- Show their relationships, as well as their direct relations outside of the package.
Work Products
Work Products (Documents, Software, Models, etc.) are the work results of the process and its activities.
- Each performed activity leads to the creation or revision of at least one work product.
- Work Products define and describe the items needed as input or created as output of one or more activities that are the responsibility of a single role.
- Between the work products, there are dependencies. This means, in order to be able to create a Work Product certain Work Products are required.
- Dependencies between Work Products (WP) will be automatically determined and rendered in the view of a WP.
Roles
A role is assigned responsibilities, skills, and knowledge to perform the process activities defined in a role description. An explicit definition of responsibilities for work products is essential for the successful performance of developments.
- Applied SAFe uses a role-based access control, where the permissions are linked to roles instead of users
- One role can thereby be assigned to several users and vice versa
- Every role possesses one or more permissions
Activities
Activities are the main element for process users; these descriptions have to be understandable and must contain:
- Role according the RACI/RASIC
- Phase performed
- Predecessor and successor activities
- Input and output work products
Activities do not contain any secondary information like ‘How to…’ this belongs to a practice.
Practices
While activities tell you what to do, practices describe exactly how something can be done.A practice is used to refine an activity. It is a profound description of how to do something.
A practice is a method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark. In addition, a practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered.
Practices also indicate which training you should attend.
Tailoring
Tailoring is possible on several levels. The grade of tailoring depends on your need for customization. You can adapt the process by using one of the following possibilities:
- Tailoring Assistant
Use our prebuilt automated tailoring option and answer clear questions which allow you to quickly adopt the process to your needs. Unnecessary process elements like roles, activities or work products can be altered based on your answers. - Manual Tailoring
Specific elements of a process model can be modified - Comprehensive enhancements
Applied SAFe can be used as a core model and completely enhanced and altered while still keeping the upgrade capability to later Applied SAFe Versions.
Metrics
Metrics are the base to control, steer, and improve a specific system. A metric determines an organization‘s behavior and performance based on certain KPI’s. While traditionally many metrics are finance based, inwardly focusing on the performance of the organization, metrics also focus on the performance against customer requirements and value.
Applied SAFe® comes with a set of predefined metrics to build on. By defining new metrics, we build on the paradigm of Goal -> Question -> Metric.
Guided Tours
Built-in guided tours help you to get started. Different guided tours explain how to navigate the structure and how to use the product.
They teach you:
- How you get started with Applied SAFe®.
- How to instantiate the model for your company, portfolios, programs, and team-levels.
- How you can tailor, adapt and enhance the model.
- How to use the different license levels of Applied SAFe®.
