Customer value is delivered at point-of-sale, not point-of-plan.
—Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management [1]
As part of the work to reimagine SAFe and create a framework that is more adaptable to specific business problems and supports individuals and organizations to achieve mastery, we have evolved the way in which we think about competencies. We recommend navigating to the Large Solution Integration and Delivery article which contains the latest thinking on this critical topic alongside an expanded set of competencies.
Enterprise Solution Delivery
Definition: Large Solution Integration and Delivery describes the practices necessary to apply SAFe principles and practices to the specification, development, operation, and evolution of the world’s largest and most sophisticated software applications, networks, and cyber-physical systems. This was formerly called Enterprise Solution Delivery across SAFe.
Enterprise Solution Delivery (ESD) is one of the seven core competencies for Business Agility, each of which is essential to achieving it. Each competency is supported by a specific assessment, which enables the enterprise to assess its proficiency. The Measure and Grow article provides these core competency assessments and recommended improvement opportunities.
Why Enterprise Solution Delivery?
Building and evolving large enterprise solutions is a monumental effort. These systems require hundreds or thousands of engineers and are subject to significant regulatory and compliance constraints. Large software systems may host complex user journeys and experiences that cross multiple products and lines of business. Cyber-physical systems require a broad range of engineering disciplines and utilize hardware and other long lead-time items. As such, they demand sophisticated, rigorous practices for engineering, operations, and evolution.
NOTE: See the Applying SAFe to Hardware Development article for more details on applying SAFe’s Lean-Agile practices to the hardware domain.
While maintaining the same levels of quality and compliance, enterprises must now deliver solutions faster than ever. Many large solution builders apply the well-known ‘V’ model [2] that encourages large batches of specification and design activities with handoffs between them. Unfortunately, this slows development and delays feedback. When building systems with significant technical, user, and market uncertainty, delayed feedback often results in missed deadlines, cost overruns, and poor business outcomes.