Scaled Agile, the organization behind SAFe, just released their newest version of the framework - SAFe 5. Version 5 becomes available to the general public in January 2020, but already Certified SAFe® Program Consultants (SPC) get a preview and the chance to upgrade their certification to the newest version. Joachim Rossberg at Solidify already managed to become SAFe 5 certified; he was actually among the first 25 in the world to do so!

Joachim has been involved with Scaled Agile for a long time, and this is a great sign of his committment to excellence in the area. We're very proud of his achievement and can safely say that he is among the very top agile practitioners in Sweden.

Joachim's thoughts about SAFe 5

The SAFe framework has reached large sucesses in the latest years. Many organisations have discovered that it just isn't enough to solely use one or a few Scrum teams for their product development. Instead the need to scale up has become increasingly more important as the complexity rises.

There are some attractive ways to scale up like using The Nexus framework, Scrum@Scale, LeSS and what not. They are all great frameworks to use. But what I find attractive with SAFe is the focus on the whole business not only system developement.

SAFe 5 is the new version of SAFe and will be released in the coming weeks. In this version the focus on Business Agility has further increased quite a lot. (Business Agility means the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative business solutions, https://v5preview.scaledagileframework.com/business-agility/)

"Business Agility requires that everyone involved in delivering solutions—business and technology leaders, development, IT operations, legal, marketing, finance, support, compliance, security, and others—use Lean and Agile practices to continually deliver innovative, high-quality products and services faster than the competition", https://v5preview.scaledagileframework.com/business-agility/. This focus is what sets SAFe aside from many of it's competitors and is the thing that has gotten me interested in the framework.

SAFe 4.6.02 internally at Solidify

In addition to Joachim's achievement, we at Solidify recently held a SAFe 4.6.02 training. As many in the software development industry now starts to realize the value of being able to scale up to enterprise levels and understand the pillars of the underlying principles.

During these two days, many of our own interested colleagues participated. Knowledge sharing is something we value highly and being able to learn from the best we have is something we can't take for granted.

We're happy to say that with Joachim's help, we can now better understand the competencies needed to become a Lean Enterprise, as well as the skills for supporting and executing both PI planning events and coordinating multiple Agile Release Trains.

Finally, if you want help understanding the Lean-Agile mindset and why it's so effectuve in today's adapt-or-die marketplace, we offer this course on demand at your own organization. With world class teachers such as Joachim himself, we guarantee that you'll develop the skillset needed to bring your Agile initiative to scale. If this sounds interesting, feel free to contact us at info@solidify.se.