How to create a roadmap for SAFe implementation

A Leading SAFe Training in Chennai that leads to the SAFe Agilist Certification is seen by most organizations as an employable way to gain benefits sooner. Agile methodology allows for multiple teams to respond to changes quickly. It allows frequent and continuous delivery systems to flourish which allows for long term planning. 

It usually does not matter thus where one is on their Agile journey or if you are applying Scrum or Kanban, or have only recently started. The need to manage work, people, and time has to go into this long-term strategic vision. In software development, it is slightly harder to paint a vision with tools that are disconnected or if an organization is using a mixture of project portfolio management tools. The key to a long term agile plan is to keep the project details as well as the task estimates in-sync with the roadmap.

These easy steps can help you build such a long-term Agile plan:

1. Start with the big picture: For any project or product to be successful, one needs to define a vision and chalk-out the strategic themes. These themes should answer the concerns of the organization and focus on the problem areas. Agile then can provide the user experience, performance, competitive features, security, and more in a variety of combinations as it suits your particular organization. Often people want everything in one go which leads to problems with managing the time and money, so one should first focus on the high-priority themes and make your way down the line. This will help one to focus their time and energy to do things well.

2. Identify the big-ticket items: It is recommended that one choose and focus upon a single problem that the organization is facing and try to remove it before going ahead. Filling up the plate with too many items will only result in the chaos which generally leads to a new organization simply refusing any further to implement Agile.

3. Break down the work: Agile allows for the work to be chunked into pieces called epics which simplifies the work. This will also provide a granular view of all the steps that are required in your roadmap to achieve the final goal. Any work that pertains to improvements on the product can sit in the product backlog till development finishes.

4. Get estimations: Once all the work has thus been broken into smaller chunks of work, a roadmap will then require a rough estimation of the time. The work of a roadmap is to plan all of the action so that the product and solution may evolve. And the experience of the team and knowledge of their rate of work will help one to predict the completion time of each epic with better accuracy. One may also need to refer to older projects to make this prediction and involving the developers and the rest of the team in this process will help with accuracy.

5. Create smart releases: With the use of agile development, teams get to deliver a working piece of the software at the end of each sprint as a release or version. However for a roadmap, one needs to define some rough release points so that you may estimate the release dates over the next quarter. 

6. Keep improving: Any of the Leading SAFe Training in Chennai will stress that any plan needs improvements in short bursts. A professional with the SAFe Agilist Certification knows the culture of SAFe to be that a project is never done.

About This Author

H K Singh https://www.xebiaacademyglobal.com/SAFe-Product-Owner-Training-in-Bangalore Joined: September 20th, 2019