The ART to allocate efforts on delivery value

According to Scaled Agile Framework, a value stream is the primary construct for understanding, organizing, and delivering value in SAFe.

• Operational Value Streams – Contains the steps and the people who deliver end-user value using the business solutions created by the development value streams.

• Development Value Streams – Contains the steps and the people who develop the business solutions used by operational value streams. (These are the value streams that a SAFe portfolio manages.)

Once you have identified how the company delivers value to the market, with solution identification, you must identify what people are working on each value stream: operational and development.

The Agile Release Train (ART) in SAFe is the primary high-level tool used to organize activity to deliver value. Other frameworks (Agile and classic) use projects and programs to organize around the delivery of value and value’s alter ego, funding. ARTs are used to deliver, enhance and support the functionality needed for business facing value streams to exist within an organization.

At this point, everybody in the organization, that is part of one ART, knows how is linked to a value stream, what are building as enabler or deliver value to the customers.

Then, feature backlogs are managed at the Program, rather than the Portfolio level. Initiatives that cross value streams are managed with Business and Architectural Epics, but once an ART is funded, decision making within the value stream is decentralised. This will lead to organisations starting to fund IT capability rather than the current practice of funding IT projects through up front lengthy business case development.

With KVASAR you have a quick way to start using SAFe approach to align the whole organization towards deliver value to customers.