The Most Expensive Words in SAFe: Participatory Budgeting

Every time I debrief the Participatory Budgeting activity in the training room, someone tells me it sounds great in theory, but it would never work in their organisation. My theory is they think their leaders would not be willing to relinquish control of their budgets. Because let's face it - no matter which way you skin it, the term Participatory Budgeting more than implies you are going to give others a voice in your budget decisions.

By way of context, Participatory Budgeting (PB) in Core SAFe is a twice-a-year portfolio event where a cross-section of business, technology, and operational leaders work through how the portfolio's money should be spent. Groups of five to eight are each given the whole portfolio budget and asked to fund the solutions already running (baseline solution investments, or BSIs) and the epics competing for new money (proposed solution initiatives, or PSIs). The pattern across the groups shows leadership where there is agreement and where there is not.

The bit people seem to miss is that giving people a voice does not mean giving up decision rights. As I always tell my classes, the decision makers are the decision makers. Participatory Budgeting doesn’t have to change that. In fact, I have always found PB to be a low-cost, generally successful experiment. The executive gains a room full of stakeholders telling them which things everyone agrees to fund, which things nobody will defend, and which handful are genuinely contested. At a minimum, the list of items competing for funds will be shorter at the end of a PB session than it was at the start. 

The real risk is that the executive does not listen and the whole exercise gets ignored. I fear that would be soul-destroying.

Introducing Strategic Investment Planning

In April 2026, Scaled Agile revised the guidance article on Participatory Budgeting and renamed the event Strategic Investment Planning (SIP). My sense is this was a wise decision. Participatory Budgeting never resonated with senior executives. Strategic Investment Planning sounds like something an executive would want to participate in (see what I did there?!). It also speaks to what the event actually is: a structured conversation about where to put the portfolio's money.

The forums are an input, not a decision

While I have always taught that the output from Participatory Budgeting was a recommendation to the executive, the framework was less definitive. The PB article stated the purpose of PB was to get feedback from key stakeholders "and determine how to allocate the budget best." It also said the results "do not directly determine the budget allocations for the value streams." 

The SIP article now makes it explicit: portfolio leaders may or may not make all funding decisions during the event. They may instead use the forum feedback in a soon-to-be-held Strategic Portfolio Review. The forums surface what the organisation values and where the tensions are, and can be an explicit input to a Strategic Portfolio Review where portfolio leadership acts on what they have heard. (This approach does make it harder for the exercise to be quietly ignored.)

The updated agenda carries the same instinct in a smaller way by noting that sending epic and solution briefings to attendees ahead of the event can help generate more thoughtful discussions during the timebox. (Surely people were already doing this? Maybe some weren't?)

From LPM to Portfolio Leadership

The definition of Participatory Budgeting was not the only point of confusion for  SAFe Lean Portfolio Managers. I think the most popular LPM question I have been asked over the years is: “Who is LPM?"

It's a fair question. SAFe is full of sentences where Lean Portfolio Management does something: LPM provides, LPM aligns, LPM allocates. It's not always obvious who that actually refers to. When it comes up in class, I explain that it depends on the organisational context: in a smaller portfolio, it is typically the executive team; in a larger one, a group of senior leaders across business, technology, and finance who are empowered to make portfolio decisions. It was a good answer (if I do say so myself!), just not one I could easily point to in the framework.

This changed in October 2024, when Scaled Agile introduced the Portfolio Leadership role and icon on the big picture as part of the Reimagining SAFe initiative. Portfolio Leadership names real people, with real authority, who are accountable for the outcome. 

In the change from PB to SIP, references to LPM, such as "LPM allocates the portfolio budget," and "the LPM team makes final determinations," have been replaced with "Portfolio Leadership allocates the portfolio budget" and "Portfolio Leadership makes final determinations."

This change was not a simple find-and-replace. If you read the guidance, you will find that LPM still does the costing and the analysis: it allocates the baseline solution investments for the budgeting period, treats previous investments as sunk costs, and analyses the results of the forums. But Portfolio Leadership turns up wherever funding decisions get made. 

Scaled Agile says as much in a note at the top of the SIP article, stating that the update preserves the collaborative forums of PB "while establishing stronger financial accountability for Portfolio Leadership and executive fiduciaries."

The Value Management Office (VMO) is also named as having a specific role in the event, further disambiguating the generic LPM guidance. It helps Portfolio Leadership calculate the baseline solution investments, and may present the forum results.

What does not change

The mechanics are unchanged. Four steps: prepare content, assemble participants, conduct forums, analyse results. Groups of five to eight. The BSI and PSI structure: what you spend to keep the lights on versus what you spend on new epics. The budget allocation method. If you have run a PB event, you already know how to run a SIP event. And if your leaders have been making the call in the room, nothing says they have to stop. May or may not is the point, and that choice sits with them too.

The courseware will catch up eventually. It always does. In the meantime, if you are implementing LPM, you have clearer language for the accountability conversation with your leaders. And when someone asks me who LPM is, I can finally point at the framework rather than answering from experience.