Many studies suggest that up to 70% of strategic initiatives fail to deliver their intended outcomes. For organisations, this isn’t just about missed deadlines—it’s about losing competitive advantage, wasting resources, and slowing innovation.
Consider this scenario: your organisation sets a bold goal to increase market share by 25%. Teams dive into execution, but progress stalls. Silos emerge, priorities clash, and projects fail to deliver measurable results.
The issue isn’t the strategy—it’s the gap between strategy and execution.
To address this challenge, organisations worldwide are turning to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and its Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) principles to create alignment, drive agility, and deliver measurable outcomes.
Why Leaders Struggle with Strategy Execution
Leadership teams often encounter these challenges:
- Misaligned Priorities: Are your teams working on initiatives that truly align with your strategic goals?
- Resource Inefficiency: Are valuable resources tied up in low-impact projects?
- Limited Agility: Can your organisation pivot quickly to respond to market changes?
- Lack of Visibility: Do you have real-time data to make informed, proactive decisions?
SAFe’s Lean Portfolio Management bridges these gaps, ensuring leadership priorities translate into measurable results.
How SAFe’s Lean Portfolio Management Delivers Strategic Results
SAFe’s LPM connects strategy to execution, providing leaders with the tools to align teams, optimise resources, and adapt to change. Here’s how it works:
1. Strategic Themes: Translating Vision into Action
Strategic Themes define the organisation’s highest priorities, ensuring all efforts align with leadership goals.
Case Study: Johnson Controls
Challenge: Securing leadership buy-in and ensuring executives understood SAFe’s value.
Leadership Actions:
- The Director of Engineering articulated how SAFe would directly impact key business goals, such as reducing product time-to-market.
- Leaders invested in comprehensive training to align stakeholders on SAFe principles.
Outcome:
- Leadership buy-in empowered teams to adopt SAFe successfully.
- Improved alignment across departments accelerated decision-making and execution (Scaled Agile, Inc., n.d.-a).
2. Prioritisation: Maximising ROI with WSJF
Using Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), SAFe helps leaders prioritise initiatives based on value, urgency, and effort, ensuring resources are allocated where they deliver the highest impact.
Case Study: Telecom Provider
Challenge: Resource inefficiencies delayed the 5G rollout.
Leadership Actions:
- Leaders adopted WSJF to objectively rank initiatives, prioritising projects with the highest strategic value.
- Resources were reallocated to critical initiatives, like network optimisation.
Outcome:
- £4M annual savings.
- Accelerated 5G deployment, achieving a 15% market share boost (Scaled Agile, Inc., n.d.-b).
3. Agile Release Trains: Breaking Silos, Driving Collaboration
Agile Release Trains (ARTs) align cross-functional teams to deliver value incrementally, reducing delays caused by silos.
Case Study: Standard Bank
Challenge: Silos between IT, operations, and customer service caused inefficiencies.
Leadership Actions:
- ARTs were introduced to align all teams around shared goals.
- Leaders championed regular check-ins to maintain alignment and accountability.
Outcome:
- Productivity increased by 50%.
- Customer satisfaction scores improved by 18% due to faster delivery of customer-centric solutions (Scaled Agile, Inc., n.d.-a).
4. Real-Time Dashboards: Empowering Proactive Decisions
SAFe’s real-time dashboards provide leaders with actionable insights into progress, resource allocation, and value delivery.
Case Study: Air France – KLM
Challenge: Managing Agile adoption across 11 business domains while maintaining flexibility for each domain’s unique needs.
Leadership Actions:
- Created an Agile Release Plane (ARP) to oversee adoption at the enterprise level.
- Empowered individual domains to customise Agile practices while maintaining alignment.
Outcome:
- Enhanced cross-domain collaboration and faster delivery of initiatives (Scaled Agile, Inc., n.d.-c).
Why Business Leaders Choose SAFe: Strategic Benefits
SAFe delivers measurable results that matter to executives:
- Accelerated Time-to-Market: Organisations report delivering products 30% faster after adopting SAFe.
- Resource Optimisation: WSJF eliminates inefficiencies, ensuring resources focus on high-impact initiatives.
- Improved Agility: Pivot faster in response to market changes without losing momentum.
- Enhanced Transparency: Real-time dashboards empower leaders to make proactive, data-driven decisions.
If your organisation is struggling to align strategy and execution, it’s time to take action. Start by identifying your strategic themes, prioritising initiatives, and embracing a framework like SAFe to guide the journey.
References
Scaled Agile, Inc. (n.d.-a). Standard Bank – Using SAFe and DevOps for Agility. Retrieved from https://scaledagile.com/case_study/standard-bank/
Scaled Agile, Inc. (n.d.-b). FedEx Drives Innovation and Growth with SAFe and Agility. Retrieved from https://scaledagile.com/case_study/fedex/
Scaled Agile, Inc. (n.d.-c). Air France – KLM – Agile Adoption with SAFe. Retrieved from https://scaledagile.com/case_study/air-france-klm/
