First of all, what is business agility?

At its simplest, business agility is the capacity and willingness of an organization to adapt to, create, and leverage change for their customer’s benefit in all aspects of the business. As we all know, agile methods began in software development. Over time these methodologies, practices, and tools started being used in other industries and business sectors.

In order to fully raise the value of agility end-to-end, this methodology should not be limited to the development organization. The biggest impact is achieved when the entire company uses lean and agile practices to continuously and proactively deliver innovative solutions faster to the customer. Because of this, business agility is now in the focus of SAFe® 5.0.

SAFE ® defines business agility as: „The ability to compete and succeed in the digital age by responding quickly to market changes and opportunities with innovative business solutions. It requires that all those involved in providing solutions – business and technology leaders, development, IT operations, law, marketing, finance, support, compliance, security and others – apply lean and agile procedures to continuous Providing innovative, quality products and services faster than the competition. „

Overall it’s important to remember, Business agility happens when the entire organization—business and tech leaders, compliance, development, finance, legal, marketing, operations, sales, security, support—use Lean and Agile practices to continually and proactively deliver innovative business solutions faster than the competition. 

SAFe 5.0 What’s new, what changed? 

The new release adds key elements that help solidify business agility across the enterprise while putting the customer at the center of everything. Therefore, new elements have been added to the Big Picture, while others have been updated or completely changed.

The structure of the 4 configurations: Essential, Large Solution, Portfolio and Full SAFe® remain the same for the most part. A minor change is that now there is no Team level or Program level within the Essential configuration, it is not just Essential with no distinction between these two levels. There are now 7 core competencies, which is 2 more than in SAFE ® 4.6, and these are complemented with an Overview Tab which describes these competencies on a high level.

This overview is a useful tool for providing an initial orientation to SAFe, as well as an introduction to the business agility assessment, and for framing conversations with senior leaders.

These updates and new elements, such as the two core competencies of learning the culture and business agility, design thinking with a clear customer focus, or the replacement of IT-focused development teams with business teams, clearly show how the entire framework works at all levels to align with business agility.

Agile product delivery isn’t enough. Business agility happens when the entire organization – business and tech leaders, compliance, development, finance, legal, marketing, operations, sales, security, support – use Lean and Agile practices to continually and proactively deliver innovative business solutions faster than the competition.