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Project delivery · independent commentary

SAFe

A team of teams, a moving vocabulary, and the half of it nobody reads

What the Agile Release Train actually is, why PI Planning is not Sprint Planning at scale, how SAFe splits a role Scrum deliberately keeps whole, and the renames that make older material quietly wrong. A note on sources. The SAFe Glossary is public and complete, and every definition below is taken from it. The detailed articles behind those definitions are free to begin and then require a Scaled Agile account, so the reasoning on each card is ours rather than theirs. The framework is also revised monthly — faster than anything else on this site — so check the date at the foot of the page.

Start the map 6 pillars · 18 cards · about 27 minutes end to end

The map

Five minutes, once. Rate each pillar before you start and the cards you are shakiest on come first. Skipping it costs you nothing but the ordering.

  1. What SAFe is

    Five disciplines, four configurations, and an operating model rather than a team method.

  2. The Agile Release Train

    The organising unit. Not a team, not a project, and not temporary.

  3. Cadence — the Planning Interval

    The timebox everything else hangs off, and the event people most often misname.

  4. Roles

    Where SAFe splits what Scrum keeps whole, and which role is not what its name suggests.

  5. Flow and portfolio

    How work gets sequenced, and the two kinds of value stream people conflate.

  6. A framework that moves

    Monthly revisions, renamed vocabulary, and a second operating model arriving in parts.

Apply it

One scenario per sitting, about ten minutes. No marking scheme that pretends to be objective — a rubric you are invited to argue with.

Sources: SAFe Glossary (Scaled Agile, Inc.), Scaled Agile Framework, What's new in SAFe? — the framework's own change log. Written from those texts and last checked on against reporting on them — not read line by line against the primary documents. Every card names the clause it comes from precisely so you can settle it at the source, and [email protected] is where a correction goes.

SAFe® and Scaled Agile Framework® are registered trade marks of Scaled Agile, Inc. ytyk.org is not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by Scaled Agile, Inc. These cards are independent commentary written in our own words; no SAFe text, graphic or Big Picture is reproduced here.