Processes
Logical sequences of related activities that create a performance or transform a work product.
Applied SAFe®
The executable process model inside the platform
Applied SAFe® is an interactive, ALM tool-agnostic framework for achieving business agility in a regulatory compliant way. Integrated with Applied SAFe® Platform, the process model your organization runs on becomes the process model your audits are measured against.
Objective
Give every participant a clear, common understanding of what has to be done, when, by whom, and how — through customizable and tailorable descriptions with clearly defined roles, their interaction, and supporting artifacts.
Benefits
Agility with compliance. Mapping to existing organizational processes and regulatory standards makes the agility and compliance of activities self-proving evidence.
Always in sync with SAFe®. A stand-alone PEDCO product, fully based on and kept in sync with the current SAFe® version by Scaled Agile, Inc. Each release is officially approved by SAI.
One model, two jobs. The same model that guides delivery teams feeds the Process Library — so audits assess the process you actually publish, not a re-typed copy of it.
Model elements
Phases & milestones
Time or event-related elements that divide the process into sequences, named by the organization's control needs.
Activities
The main element for process users — role per RACI, phase, predecessors and successors, input and output work products.
Work products & models
Documents, software and models produced by activities, grouped in packages with their dependencies rendered automatically.
Roles
Responsibilities, skills and knowledge needed to perform activities — with role-based access control.
Practices
Profound descriptions of how something is done — benchmarked methods that refine an activity and point to the right training.
Tailoring
Tailoring Assistant, manual tailoring, or comprehensive enhancement — all while keeping upgrade capability.
Metrics
A predefined metric set built on the Goal → Question → Metric paradigm, extendable with your own KPIs.
Guided tours
Built-in tours that explain how to navigate the structure, instantiate the model, and tailor it for your organization.
Applied SAFe®
Process model: processes, phases, activities, practices
What has to be done, when, by whom, and how — described at the level of detail a regulated organization has to defend.
Processes
A process is a logical sequence of related activities that creates a performance or transforms a work product. Its elements are phases, roles, documents and methods, and it describes what has to be done, in which phases, by which roles, and in the form of which 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 whose names and numbers are determined by the control needs of the organization and its stakeholders — each carrying its relevant reports, contained milestones, executed activities, and involved roles.
Practices
While activities tell you what to do, practices describe exactly how something can be done. A practice is a method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to other means, used as a benchmark, and it evolves as improvements are discovered.
Activities carry the audit trail
Every activity names its RACI role, its phase, its predecessor and successor activities, and its input and output work products — the same relations Applied SAFe® Platform's Process Knowledge Graph reasons over.
Applied SAFe®
Work products & roles
The results of the process, who owns them, and how they depend on each other.
Work products
Documents, software, models and other 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 the items needed as input or created as output of activities owned by a single role.
- Dependencies between work products are determined and rendered automatically.
Work product models
Work products are grouped in packages; each level gets an overview of its work products and their direct relations.
- Understand dependencies on a larger scale.
- Navigate between work products and see another view of processes and results.
- See relationships inside the package and beyond it.
Roles
A role carries assigned responsibilities, skills and knowledge. Explicit responsibility for work products is essential for successful development.
- Role-based access control — permissions link to roles, not users.
- One role can be assigned to several users, and vice versa.
- Every role possesses one or more permissions.
In the integrated platform, the work product model is what an Automated Control can be extracted from: the documents a project must produce are already declared in the process model, so the compliance checklist does not have to be authored twice.
Applied SAFe®
Tailoring & upgrades
Adapt every element of the process model to your organization — and still move to the next SAFe® version.
Tailoring Assistant
Answer a series of out-of-the-box tailoring questions; unnecessary process elements such as roles, activities or work products are altered based on your answers. The questions themselves can be enhanced or adapted to create your own version.
Manual tailoring
Modify specific elements of the process model directly where the standard description does not fit your context.
Comprehensive enhancements
Use Applied SAFe® as a core model and enhance or alter it completely, while still keeping the capability to upgrade to later Applied SAFe® versions.
Version upgrades, decided element by element
When moving to future versions of SAFe®, Applied SAFe® supports you through the upgrade and lets you selectively decide whether to update your customized content to the latest official version. Each Applied SAFe® release is officially approved by Scaled Agile, Inc.
Applied SAFe®
Metrics & guided tours
Steer the system with the right KPIs, and get teams onto the model without a training project.
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 KPIs. While many metrics are traditionally finance based and inwardly focused, metrics also focus on performance against customer requirements and value. Applied SAFe® comes with a set of predefined metrics to build on. New metrics are defined on the Goal → Question → Metric paradigm.
Guided tours
Built-in guided tours help you get started. Different tours explain how to navigate the structure and how to use the product.
- How to get started with Applied SAFe®.
- How to instantiate the model for your company, portfolios, programs and team levels.
- How to tailor, adapt and enhance the model.
- How to use the different license levels.
See the baseline against your own process model.
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