Make SAFe® the way you work — without losing your precious know-how.
Bring your existing engineering, quality, safety, and company-specific practices into SAFe® — without creating a second way of working.
Running SAFe® alongside what you already have creates friction, not flow.
Your engineering, safety, quality, and release processes already exist when SAFe® arrives. Running them alongside the new framework creates overlapping activities, duplicate deliverables, conflicting roles, and uncertainty about which process actually applies.
- Overlapping activities
- Duplicate deliverables
- Conflicting roles
- Which process applies?
Two ways of working quickly become two sources of truth.
Teams navigate parallel process descriptions while quality, engineering, and transformation teams maintain different versions of how work should happen.
At Skyguide, this also meant the SAFe® implementation could not yet demonstrate that required safety and government controls were fulfilled.
Reconcile, don't map.
Start from the maintained Applied SAFe® baseline and bring the processes you already depend on into the same model. AI helps identify overlaps, conflicts, and missing elements; compliance stays connected; tailoring determines what applies in each context.
- Overlaps identified
- Conflicts resolved
- Compliance connected
- Tailored per context
How the integration runs
- 1Understand & reconcile
Bring in your existing engineering landscape and compare it with the Applied SAFe® baseline. Identify what already aligns, what overlaps, what conflicts, and what has no SAFe® equivalent.
- 2Build one governed process
Keep the practices that matter, remove unnecessary duplication, clarify responsibilities, and connect regulatory obligations to the activities and work products that satisfy them.
- 3Tailor & keep aligned
Resolve what applies to each ART, project, or product through governed tailoring and inheritance. Keep the model aligned as SAFe®, standards, or your own processes change.
Aerospace: controls kept, process integrated.
An aerospace organization already has systems-engineering, architecture, release, safety, and compliance processes. Instead of asking teams to follow those alongside SAFe®, the practices are integrated into one operating model. Overlapping tools and deliverables are removed, responsibilities clarified, and the process tailored for different contexts — essentially the approach used at Skyguide.
- Overlapping tools removed
- Responsibilities clarified
- Tailored per context
One operating model. No duplication. Clear responsibility. Fully compliant.
A fitted operating model that combines SAFe® with the engineering knowledge, controls, and documentation requirements the organization already depends on.
- Fewer duplicate activities and deliverables
- Clearer responsibilities across roles
- Compliance remains connected
- Adaptable by context
Skyguide integrated its existing process assets with SAFe® in less than four months, including adaptations for architecture, deployment and release, safety assessment, and compliance management. And it passed a full European audit.
With Applied SAFe®, we have been able to define the needed processes for our organization in a very short time. We combined the ‘new way of working’ with our existing knowledge on how to do system deployment; in a compliant and efficient manner.
Product capabilities behind this use case
Reconciling what you already run with the baseline, carrying the result as one governed process, and keeping the obligations your existing processes satisfied.
Questions we get
- Do we have to replace our existing engineering and quality processes with SAFe®?
- No. The goal is to keep the practices that already work and integrate them into one governed operating model. Applied SAFe® provides a complete and approved Lean-QMS for SAFe® as the baseline; your existing engineering, safety, quality, release, and company-specific practices are reconciled with it rather than discarded.
- How does the platform handle overlaps or conflicts between SAFe® and our existing processes?
- AI-assisted process analysis identifies where activities, roles, work products, or practices already align, where they duplicate each other, and where they conflict. Process owners can then decide what to keep, combine, change, or remove instead of maintaining two parallel ways of working.
- What happens to our existing compliance requirements?
- Regulatory obligations, standards, and internal policies remain connected to the activities and work products that satisfy them. Integrating processes therefore does not mean losing compliance coverage; it makes that coverage part of the same operating model as SAFe®.
- Can different ARTs or products still work differently?
- Yes. The organization can maintain one governed baseline while tailoring what applies to each Portfolio, Large Solution, ART, Product or Team, or other context. Variants inherit from the same model, so necessary differences do not turn into disconnected process islands.
- What happens when SAFe®, a standard, or one of our own processes changes?
- Change-impact analysis shows which process elements, mappings, and inherited variants are affected. Approved changes can then be propagated through the operating model instead of manually updating separate process descriptions.
Need help building the operating model?
PEDCO can do the reconciliation with you — assessing what you run today, deciding with your experts what survives, and engineering the one operating model that results.
Keep what already works. Integrate it once. Keep it aligned everywhere.
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