Large Solution Integration and Delivery

The Large Solution Integration and Delivery Discipline describes how to apply SAFe principles and practices to the specification, development, operation, and evolution of the world’s largest and most sophisticated software, hardware, and cyber-physical systems.

This discipline of SAFe is focused on solutions that require the work of many value streams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs) that need to align on delivery. For simplicity’s sake, the various scaling scenarios are collectively described as ‘large solutions,’ regardless of whether 6 Agile Release Trains are building an enterprise software application or 60 ARTs are delivering a cyber-physical solution such as a defense system, satellite, or autonomous vehicle.

Figure 1 shows the elements, processes, and outcomes of large solution integration and delivery. Click on the icons to learn more.

NOTE: This discipline scales up the practices described in the Team and Technical Agility Discipline, which covers the more common scenario of Agile Teams working as part of a single ART across both software and hardware.

Figure 1. The elements, processes, and outcomes of the Large Solution, Integration, and Delivery discipline.

As shown in Figure 1, building and evolving large solutions is a significant undertaking that requires careful planning and execution. These large solutions often involve hundreds or even thousands of engineers, and they must often meet strict regulatory and compliance requirements. The inherent complexity not only encompasses technical challenges but also involves crafting user journeys that span multiple products and business lines. In the case of cyber-physical systems, a diverse range of engineering disciplines is necessary, along with the integration of hardware and long lead-time components. Given these challenges, it’s crucial to implement sophisticated and rigorous practices in engineering, operations, and system evolution.

Large solutions are built by large value streams composed of multiple Solution Trains, ARTs, teams, and suppliers. To scale even further, value streams can be nested (as shown in Figure 1, and described in more detail below). The parent value stream’s vision, roadmap, and solution intent align the other value streams to a shared purpose. All value streams operate on the same cadence, which allows them to synchronize their planning, alignment, review, and improvement events and activities.

Each value stream delivers to a customer. The ultimate customer of the integrated solution, the end-user or operator, resides at the end of the parent value stream. Internal customers also exist at the end of each of the nested value streams. They are often the teams consuming the work of that value stream so they can then provide a larger, integrated unit of value.

Throughout SAFe, Agile Teams, ARTs, Solution Trains, and Portfolios each operate with three critical roles that fulfill the responsibilities of content authority, technical authority, and value delivery. For example, Product Management, System Architect, and Release Train Engineer fill these roles on an Agile Release Train. These roles collaborate, guide, and lead the development and connection to vision and strategy. When developing large solutions, these roles require even more intentional connection and clear communication. The representative authority, regardless of the role name, is shown in Figure 1. Together, they form the leadership that works together to assume responsibility for the success of building the large integrated solution.

Organizations that stick to traditional methods—like detailed upfront specifications and designs based on an assumed final outcome—may struggle to keep up. They miss out on opportunities to innovate and create leading-edge solutions by not applying methods that leverage the brain power of their large number of solution developers. The remainder of this article provides a more detailed description of the emerging methods for generating innovative solutions with large solution integration and delivery.

Competencies of the Large Solution Integration and Delivery Discipline

Each competency below describes a set of knowledge, skills, and techniques required to achieve mastery in an area of large solution integration and delivery. They provide the necessary information, learning resources, and practical application guidance needed to support success. Together, the competencies represent the most up-to-date understanding of this discipline. However, over time, as new ways of working emerge, the competencies themselves will evolve.

Selecting one or more competencies to focus on at a particular time will depend on organizational context, individual experience and knowledge, and the current opportunities or gaps within the current approaches to large solution development. Click on the competency below that you wish to explore.

NOTE: To accelerate value delivery, the competencies of each SAFe discipline will be released in small batches. All those accessible as a ‘blue box’ are currently available, with the remaining ‘greyed out’ competencies to be released incrementally.

Assessing the Large Solution Integration and Delivery Discipline

The Large Solution Integration and Delivery assessment can be useful in measuring levels of proficiency. The results can help guide the organization on its journey through the competencies and identify which competencies may need the most focus at any given time.

The Measure and Grow article offers guidance on facilitating the SAFe assessments, as well as best practices for collecting and interpreting data. The Lean Portfolio Management assessment is available as either a downloadable spreadsheet or online through SAFe Studio, via our partner Comparative Agility.

The Comparative Agility platform, which includes integrated SAFe CoPilot functionality, offers additional data collection, AI-driven analysis, comparison, and trending capabilities to enhance your results. Access the online assessment from the Measure and Grow SAFe Studio page or from this link directly.

Large Solution Integration and Delivery Overview

Below is a more detailed overview of the elements, processes, and outcomes of the Large Solution Integration and Delivery Discipline.

Organize to Efficiently Deliver Large Solutions

Development value streams are essential for delivering value to customers, so their efficient operation is crucial for success. Ideally, every value stream functions independently, containing all the necessary people and authority to define, build, and deliver a solution. However, at a large scale, two other value stream scenarios are critical to an organization’s overall value delivery, illustrated in Figure 2:

Nested value streams – multiple development value streams that must collaborate to deliver a single integrated solution

Networked value streams – multiple development value streams that must maintain alignment to deliver various related solutions

Organizations need to focus on delivering overall value instead of optimizing local operations. To achieve this, they must first identify the solutions and value streams that contribute to their goals and understand how these parts work together. They should create a shared vision across these value streams and organize their execution to realize the vision.

To achieve this in a lean way, it’s important to design solutions as separate components that can interact easily. This way, these components can grow and change independently, which helps reduce reliance between different value streams and makes everything easier to manage. Through this approach, organizations can improve collaboration and ultimately enhance their overall performance and value delivery.

Drive Large Solution Delivery with Vision and Roadmaps

Large solution development has significant uncertainty and risks. While fixing requirements and design decisions early feels like it reduces uncertainty, it instead creates false positive feasibility. It provides the appearance of being on track without validating the decisions made, leading to increased long-term risk.

In contrast, Agile leaders start with a vision that describes the problem to be solved and a roadmap that forecasts the work required to accomplish it. This approach provides teams with direction and the flexibility to innovate and discover the best approach to meeting the goal.

As shown in Figure 1 above, the vision provides a clear and motivating description of the future to inspire and align all solution builders across many value streams. It aligns all development and informs the roadmaps, backlogs, and intent at each level. At large scale, roadmaps are connected to create alignment across nested and networked value streams. At any level, a value stream’s roadmap is driven by local content to deliver its value and also by a larger context to deliver overall value.

As shown in Figure 3, roadmaps help leaders and value streams maintain alignment in many ways:

• Communicating the work each value stream plans to perform to deliver their part of the overall value.
• Illustrating the dependencies between value streams and the larger integrated solution roadmap (shown by the red lines in the figure).
• Ensuring value streams have the capacity to deliver for their local customers and the customers of the larger integrated solution
• Discussing trade-off decisions to ensure the organization is maximizing value across all value streams

Roadmaps also let teams know where they may need to innovate and reorganize to maximize value delivery. People will move within and even across value streams as work within each value stream changes over time.

Coordinate Large Solution Development with Roles and Events

Alignment is not a natural state. When building large solutions, every day lost represents significant financial waste and negative business impact. The traditional approach to achieving better alignment is to add additional details to specifications and schedules. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t solve the problem; instead, it constrained innovation and prevented adjustment from feedback and learning.

Maintaining alignment during execution is both challenging and necessary at a large scale. Each value stream is led by roles responsible for:

Content authority – defining desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable solutions that meet customers’ needs

Technical authority – creating a shared technical and architectural vision for the solutions

Value delivery – coordinating and supporting the execution and accelerating flow

Product and Solution fulfill the responsibilities of content authority for ARTs and Solution Trains. In larger solutions, this role focuses more on coordinating value stream delivery and less on team and ART execution. This comparison also applies to System and Solution Architects for technical authority and to Release and Solution Train Engineers for value delivery.

These roles frequently collaborate as required by dependencies across nested and networked value streams to ensure their visions, roadmaps, backlogs, and intent align to maximize overall value delivery. At the ART and Solution Train levels, these roles help teams execute and deliver. At higher levels, they provide coordination across the nested value stream to maintain the connection to the broader vision and large solution roadmap.

Applying a common cadence across all value streams simplifies communication and creates clarity. It provides synchronization points for integrating the large solution, evaluating it, and communicating any adjustments to all affected value streams. The necessary events (e.g., solution demos, cross-ART planning) needed to develop the large solution should be determined. These events are also run on a cadence and should be used to ensure integration and communication between the teams, ARTs, and suppliers who are building the large solution.

Build Specifications Incrementally Alongside the Solution

Large solution builders use specifications to manage requirements and designs, as well as support compliance. In Agile development, however, solution development begins with a vision and roadmap to address uncertainty and risk, not with specification. Figure 4 illustrates this approach. The vision and roadmap drive the teams’ work. As the teams incrementally evolve the solution, they also evolve the specification in the solution intent. Development begins with some fixed requirements but also many questions and assumptions. Those questions and assumptions become requirements and design decisions based on validated learning as the solution is built.

This approach allows teams to innovate, address uncertainty and risks, and arrive at the optimal solution for the customer. Early specifications are written in the language of intent, describing the solution’s future state without overly constraining how it is delivered. Each increment validates a set of assumptions that results in a new, small, vertical slice of the system’s requirements, designs, implementations, and tests.

Architect Large Solutions for Change

Large solutions were traditionally designed to be delivered once. Any modification required a separate ‘modernization’ initiative. Lean-Agile organizations deliver early to learn, gain feedback, and adjust. Modifications are delivered frequently and, ideally, become continuous. Solution architectures must support fast and reliable changes. Good engineering practices ensure solutions are decoupled and their components interact through managed interfaces.

Large solutions often require other solutions to design, test, deploy, manufacture, and operate them. For example, cyber-physical systems often require significant testing and manufacturing equipment to be built alongside the solution. Large IT systems also require significant infrastructure to operate. The solution context, shown in Figure 5, illustrates these considerations The environment in which a solution operates impacts all elements of solution development, including solution intent and design, development priorities, solution implementation and testing, release governance, and more.

Summary

Building large solutions is challenging. SAFe’s LSID discipline provides organizations with the practices needed to scale Lean-Agile and SAFe methods to coordinate the delivery of some of the world’s most significant systems. Doing this requires new ways of working and a change in mindset:

Traditional	LSID
Driven by outputs (e.g., deliver a list of features)	Driven by outcomes (e.g., change user’s behavior)
Establish a fixed schedule early and strive to meet it	Forecast delivery using roadmaps and adjust based on learning
Commit early to a set of detailed specifications	Specify the solution incrementally with clear intent
Communicate via initial specifications and documentation	Communicate via face-to-face, cadence-based events, evolving specification and documentation throughout the delivery
Perform regulatory and quality testing at the end with expensive big batch changes	Continually address regulatory and quality concerns based on frequent integration of systems and components
Deliver once, modernize with a future investment	Deliver early and evolve live solutions

Last update: 1 April 2025