Measuring the Business Benefits of SAFe - Defining Outcomes that Matter

In this edition of the SAFe Australia Online Meetup, we had the pleasure of hosting Marx Rix from Scaled Agile, Inc.

Marc is one of Scaled Agile’s foremost thought leaders and executive advisors. In addition to co-authoring SAFe’s core knowledge base as a member of the Framework team, he consults, trains, and speaks internationally on the most challenging topics facing today’s technology leaders. Marc specialises in the practical application of Lean-Agile methods that produce the fastest, most compelling business and mission outcomes.

Marc Rix's session on "Measuring the Business Benefits of SAFe" addresses the challenge of articulating and achieving measurable business outcomes through SAFe. Drawing on over two years of research and fieldwork, Marc emphasises the need to shift the narrative from traditional IT-centric metrics, such as time-to-market and quality, to outcomes that resonate with business leaders, including revenue growth, cost reduction, risk management, and customer satisfaction. He highlights the importance of engaging business leaders in their own language, framing SAFe’s value around their priorities rather than using technical jargon.

Marc introduces a structured, four-step approach to measuring business benefits. The process begins with understanding the business context, focusing on the organisation’s purpose, customers, and success metrics. Meaningful conversations with senior leaders help identify business objectives that SAFe can support. 

The next step involves creating transformation objectives that align IT and operational goals with business priorities. Using tools like the SAFe transformation canvas, Marc demonstrates how to map SAFe’s leading indicators—such as improved productivity and engagement—to key business outcomes like revenue growth and market share.

The session also explores the power of storytelling in communicating transformation strategies. Marc shares how to translate data from tools like the canvas into compelling narratives that inspire buy-in across organisational levels. He underscores the importance of tracking progress, using SAFe’s cadences to validate and refine outcomes, and fostering continuous alignment between business and technology.

With practical examples and a strong emphasis on collaboration, the session provides a clear framework for SAFe practitioners to elevate their conversations with business leaders and demonstrate the tangible value of SAFe. The workshop and tools Marc references offer actionable steps for organisations looking to bridge the gap between agile practices and measurable business success.

View the full session, download the slides or review the transcript below.

Presentation Slides

Transcript

Em Campbell-Pretty: Afternoon, folks. Welcome to the SAFe Australia online meetup. I'm really excited to have Marc Rix here talking about the Business Benefits of SAFe. 

This content is awesome. I spent a day in Berlin with Marc running through the detailed version of this back in April, and I'm certainly excited to let him share the condensed version with you today, which might interest you in a longer conversation at a later date. Marc will be familiar to many of you: this is his third or fourth visit to this meetup.

Anyway, on that note, I'm going to hand it over to Marc. They're all yours.

Marc Rix: Fantastic. Thanks, Em. Thanks, Adrienne. Hello, everybody. It's great to be here. It's great to be back. I love hanging out with Em and Adrienne. They’re fantastic members of the community. We learn so much from them, and so it's always great to connect. 

Now, we're here to talk about measuring the business benefits of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Thank you for having me. I'm very honoured to be here. 

Let's have some fun. Let's talk about measuring the business benefits of SAFe, which is a hot topic and an area of serious conversation among Scaled Agile and our community, our partners, our enterprises, and customers.

I've been leading a research and development effort on this front for probably two and a half years now. I've spent a lot of time in the field learning about what's working and not working from a benefit standpoint and a business value standpoint and attaching that to the value of SAFe.

What you're going to see here reflects the latest thinking, which is a blend of my thinking and the framework's thinking and the company's thinking, but all informed primarily by people out on the field, such as yourselves, who have been experimenting with these kinds of concepts and who have told us their stories and taught us about how they're measuring the business benefits of SAFe and getting through some very difficult conversations with their senior leadership. Hope you find it useful.

We're going to go through the process and work on defining outcomes that matter because outcomes do matter, right? Here we go. I want to pose the question back to you. Let’s baseline this a little bit. Let's talk about how SAFe benefits the business. I'd really like to understand your points of view.

How does SAFe benefit the business? 

Whether you want to shout it out or put it in chat, what are your thoughts? How would you answer this question, or how do you envision senior leaders in your organisation, whether they're on the IT side or on the business side somewhere, answering this question?

Imagine yourself in that scenario, either reflecting yourself or having a conversation with a senior business leader in your organisation, asking this question, what are some of the responses that you can envision popping up? 

Attendee 1:  SAFe helps to increase the flow of value. The context is understanding firstly what the organisation delivers in terms of value. That conversation, at least in a government context, is often a bit tricky. Getting a handle on what value they actually deliver and then how to make it flow in an uninterrupted way is a key benefit I see.

Marc Rix: Great. How about others?

Attendee 2: I think having everyone in the company engaged in that conversation and having that common focus provides that focus of benefits, I guess.

Marc Rix: It traces to a common language, a common way of working.

Attendee 2: Yes, I think language is very important because if you're trying to bring different, say, departments along for the journey, everyone has their own definitions of things, and I think it's really important to have everyone speaking the same or meaning the same things when they're engaged in conversation.

Marc Rix: Great. Thanks, Kevin. Other ideas?

Attendee 3: Yes, I think it's more of bringing together a group of people with the same mindset and obviously working together in a trance to deliver in case of IT, can be any IT solution or any IT services, for example. Obviously, which adds value to the customer.

Marc Rix: Great. All very positive so far. Is anybody encountering any difficulty with answering this question? Let's be honest with ourselves. Sometimes I ask this question, I pose this question to either people, customers or, partners or in interesting situations, and I get very candid responses back that are not as rosy as the ones that you've shared. I just wanted to get the juices flowing there with that question.

It's important for us to all reflect on how we would answer this question versus how we think others who are influential in the organisation would answer the question. Whether we have alignment, whether we have agreement or disagreement among the people who really need to be bought into this way of working in order to make it succeed. At the end of the day, we're trying to build business agility, which takes a lot of effort and crosses organisational boundaries. 

If we don't have support and buy-in and active sponsorship and continued sponsorship and partnership and buy-in, then it can be very hard to do what we need to do over time because transformations don't happen overnight in order to achieve business agility and the business results that we're going after. Great. 

Sometimes, there are good answers to this question, and sometimes, you pose the question, and you get back funny looks or arms crossed or some people who just say, I don't see it. How does SAFe benefit the business? It doesn't. From my point of view, it doesn't. We need to be able to address that honestly, too. That's what we're seeing in the field, and that's what's driving the need to have this conversation, and why we've put this guidance together, and essentially, why I'm here today. 

Typical SAFe Business Results

Here's how we've always thought about it internally, and many of our community members, Em and Adrienne and our other SPCTs and Fellows, are very familiar with this concept and this graphic. These are typical results reported by SAFe customers over the lifetime of Scaled Agile. 

For over a decade, we've been getting customer stories and anecdotes, data, both quantitative and qualitative, about how SAFe is benefiting enterprises and governments by the way. We've rolled all of those stories and all of those anecdotes up into these major categories. These aren't the only benefits that organisations are seeing, but by and large, these are the most common.

Folks who are implementing SAFe tend to experience faster time to market, higher product quality, higher organisational productivity and higher workforce engagement. Whether that workforce is your own employees or partners and suppliers and vendors that you work with too, contract workers fit in there as well. These are some of the benefits, sort of the classic benefits, that people have been seeing year-over-year, implementation over implementation, industry to industry over the years with SAFe.

This is great, and this used to be enough, but today, we're finding that some leaders care deeply about these kinds of results when other leaders, especially on the business side, outside of technology, outside of product development, outside of IT, may appreciate these kinds of results, but these aren't the results that keep them up at night. 

We need to have a slightly different conversation with them. These may be good, but if we were to ask them, “What are the business benefits of SAFe?”  They might not come up with these things. Or, “What is really keeping you up at night?” They might have a different story to tell.

That's where a lot of us in the community are having difficulty right now. We approach senior leaders in the enterprise because now, we want the Chief Marketing Officer to be involved. We want the Chief Product Officer and, the CIO, and the Chief Information Security Officer, and the Chief Financial Officer to be involved. 

We seek their buy-in, and we seek their support and their active involvement, so we approach them, and we try to have a conversation. We say, hey, let's talk about the benefits of SAFe. Well, what kinds of reactions do we typically get back from them?

If you've done this, then maybe your experiences reflect the reactions that we see here. I know this has happened to me on a number of occasions. We approach people who we want to be champions, and we want to be on board; we want to be active participants, and they're just not having it. There's always that random guy somewhere in the organisation who was a very influential player but just never wants to play ball. We can never really crack the code on who that person is and why they're so influential, but we have to think about them, too.

They may not have the elevated title, but they're influences and leaders all through the organisation that we need to think about articulating the value of SAFe too at the right times. What we found is that more often than not, when this is happening, it's not because of what we're talking about. It's not necessarily because of SAFe or the content or the topic; it's because of how we're talking about it. It's because of how we're approaching the conversation. Lovetta, to your point, many times, this traces back to we're using the wrong language. We're using the wrong words.

Sometimes, they don't want to hear “SAFe”. We can't utter that word because they don't want to hear it. It may not be because they have an inherent bias against SAFe because they know it so well and they've experienced it, and they know unequivocally that it won't work for them; maybe they just have preconceived notions about what that means, or it's not part of their day-to-day language. It's not part of their world. Right.

We live in a technology-based world with our jargon, with our agile words, our SAFe words, our lean words, our DevOps words, our engineering words, our software development words, our product management words, our compliance words. We live in this world and this SAFe language and terminology just comes naturally to us. It's where we live and breathe. For them, it's not their world; it's not their language. To approach them with this language, and this topic can be an immediate non-starter.

In order to break through to them (and we have to break through to them), we need to be able to connect with these people if we're going to deliver measurable business benefits with SAFe. We need to make that connection, but that requires a different kind of conversation in a different language. We need to be fluent not only in our technical language, but we need to be fluent in their language too, which is the language of the business.

When we can come to them with business language and terminology that is more in tune with their day-to-day activities, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for connecting and building relationships and aligning and partnering not only with SAFe and with transformations but in other ways as well. We want to be able to knock on their door and be invited in. What we're finding is that this is not just working for those of us in the SAFe space who are trying to have these kinds of conversations, but it's actually pretty widespread.

Here's one research report from the DevOps Enterprise Journal from last year that was written largely about this topic, and this is a snippet from that study. What we're finding is that tech leaders who are fluent in both the language of business performance and the language of technology, and I will add, and the language of transformation and organisational change, deliver the best results. It's not just about technology; it's not just about SAFe. It's not just about agile language; it's not just about being lean.

It's not just about the technical jargon and the practises and the mechanics of practising this new way of working; we need to be able to connect with everybody across the business in business language. That is the common language. Back to your comment earlier, a lot of the benefits of SAFe have to do with a common way of working,  a common language. We can agree on terminology; now we have a canonical representation of a user story and, what a team is, and what these roles are. This is a product manager versus not a product manager. We can agree on these things.

In a lot of ways, SAFe provides that common language, but still, at the end of the day, SAFe is not a business language. There is a more universal language that we could be speaking that we should be able to plug SAFe into. That's business, and that's the language that we need to learn. We need to change the conversation. When we change the conversation, we change the mood. I've experienced this firsthand. Instead of asking our business leaders to talk to us about what we think is important in our language, what if we invited them to talk about what they think is important in their language?

Now, in their eyes, we're listening rather than preaching. We're inviting them in and we're taking more of a listening position, a learning position, and we're caring deeply about the things that they care deeply about. More often than not, in my experience and from the experiences that I hear from other people, is that this totally reverses their mood, and they're usually more than happy to tell you everything about their world, if you ask them. Has anybody else experienced this? 

Ask a business leader about their business and they will not stop talking to you about their business. They'll tell you about their vision, their goals, their strengths, their weaknesses, challenges that they're having in the organisation, the history of the organisation. They love to talk about their business and they'd love to talk about it in their language. 

If you approach them with an invitation for them to talk about your business and you offer to listen, chances are they will more than happily sit down with you and talk about it. That's great. We're not talking about SAFe yet or agility or transformation, but that's great.

But this is a golden opportunity, now that we have a foot in the door and we have a seat at the table to listen intently and soak it all in. There's so much that we can learn about the business by just having a conversation, inviting them in to talk about their business and sitting down and listening. It all starts there. 

Measuring the business benefits of SAFe and achieving measurable, compelling business benefits with SAFe starts with a conversation with the right people in the right language, [a] conversation where you're doing more listening than talking. That's where it all starts.

Okay. Then, you can start to dovetail in how we might be able to help. We go from talking about SAFe as a solution to a problem they don't have to understand their needs and then working to position SAFe in a way that directly fulfils their needs or supports their needs, supports their goals, or enables their goals. We start with the business. What we're doing is we're turning the conversation in our approach inside out. We're not starting with the IT perspective or, the technology perspective, or the SAFe perspective and then expecting people to join us.

We're turning the entire proposition outside in, starting with the business and working back inward toward what we can do to help them. Back to the benefits and back to the left-hand side of this versus the right-hand side. The right-hand side of this slide is new. 

Back to the left-hand side, just for a second. Again, these business leaders might appreciate faster time to market, higher quality, higher productivity, and higher workforce engagement. I don't think there's a business leader in the world who would say, "We don't care about those things, or we don't want those things." It just may not be top of mind. It may not be enough to sell them on the proposition of committing their time and energy and, in a lot of cases, their budget to a big transformation. These aren't the things that keep them up at night. 

Now, shift your focus to the right-hand side of the slide. These are more in tune with the things that do keep them up at night.

• How are we going to capture revenue? 

• How are we going to grow the business? 

• How are we going to manage costs or, lower costs, or cut costs or manage expenses? 

• How are we going to lower risk, or mitigate risk, or reduce our risk profile? 

• How are we going to attract and retain happy customers, and other things that link more directly to business performance and measurable financial outcomes.

Our business leaders, the ones that we most aspire to have actively involved in our SAFe transformations, the ones that we really want in our corner, who can give our transformations the most thrust and the most acceleration, tend to care more about the outcomes on the right of this slide than the outcomes on [the] left. We need to appreciate that. I'll come back to you in just a second, Gavin. The good news here is that these two, the left and the right, are connected.

What we're finding is that there is a correlation between the typical SAFe outcomes on the left and the outcomes on the right. In fact, accelerating time to market, increasing product quality, increasing organisational productivity and increasing workforce engagement are all leading indicators of the things on the right. In other words, if we can do the things on the left, then chances are we can enable the business to accomplish things on the right.

We're part of the game, and we can show that by implementing SAFe, we're tracking leading indicators of business performance and business success. Now we have a story to tell and now we have a way to invite them into the conversation in a way that they're more likely to want to participate in. Okay. did you have a question or comment?

Attendee 1: Yes, Marc, I was just interested [in] why the workforce is not represented on the right-hand side. Attracting talent or retaining talent. I mean, transformation obviously comes about from an engaged workforce, so wondering whether that was a reflection that you might've had. It's definitely one of the benefits of having an aligned workforce and having them engaged in a chosen framework.

Marc Rix: Right. Yes, absolutely. This is just a model, and these are not the only eight outcomes that matter in any organisation. What we're finding is that, by and large, a SAFe transformation will deliver the outcomes on the left pretty regularly and pretty reliably. What we're finding is that, fairly universally, business leaders across the world, regardless of industry, tend to care about revenue, cost, risk, and customer happiness above other factors. 

Now, things like attrition, workforce engagement, workforce retention is definitely top of mind. Yes, so that's why we need to have a conversation and not just apply a model, right? 

Start by sitting down with your senior leaders and understanding what they're trying to accomplish with their business and what challenges they're facing. If one of their challenges they're facing and something that's keeping them up at night is how do we attract and retain the right people? If we're not able to do that, then we can't meet our business objectives. Then, that should show up on the right-hand side of your version of this model.

Yes, this certainly is just a model. This represents the sweet spot, the most common areas, the most universally recognisable, at least in the research, the big clusters that come up. But the results are going to vary from organisation to organisation. Okay, so now we have a link there. SAFe outcomes can be leading indicators of business performance success. 

Linking SAFe Outcomes to Business Outcomes

Okay, if we unpack that, what might that look like? Here, we start to get into more of the nuts and bolts of what that could look like, moving from left to right.

Here, I just wanted to take you through a logic exercise, moving from the left-hand side of the slide to the right-hand slide, one row at a time. Let's take time to market, for example. Could you imagine, or does it make sense, that if we were to use SAFe to improve product time to market, that we could, from a business perspective, capture revenue sooner? If we could speed our time to market, then we could lower our inventory holding costs because we wouldn't be holding onto that inventory and those expenses for as long.

Or if we were to increase or accelerate our time to market, then there's a chance that we could improve customer loyalty because they would have high-quality, in-demand, delightful solutions faster. If we were to give our customers what they need more regularly, more reliably, and faster than the competition, might they be more loyal and might not produce more revenue? I'm seeing some nods, so we can draw logical connections from there. 

What about quality? Let's just do one more gut-level check here. If we were to apply SAFe to build quality in and improve product and, solution, and service quality through our development value streams, then could that potentially lead to higher pricing or premium pricing? Could we charge more for our products and services if there's more quality built-in? Or if there's more quality built in, could that potentially lower the cost of rework? Would there be less churn? Would there be less in the backlog? Would there be less maintenance and tech debt to manage? Wouldn't that show up in some of our bottom-line reports? 

And higher customer engagement. If we were to increase the quality of our products and services, could that potentially lead to more engaged customers? 

These are the associations that we're starting to make at an outcomes level, bridging SAFe and business outcomes. I hope that for you guys, you can see a logical flow from the items on the left to the items on the right, and imagine having these kinds of conversations and this sort of dialogue with some of your business leaders.

This is the kind of connection that we need to make in order to establish the goals that we need to have baked into our transformations for delivering measurable business benefits. The measurable business benefits that our SAFe transformations need to be able to prove, come from the kind of language that's here on the right-hand side of the slide. We need to get out of the mode of thinking about business benefits and business outcomes and compelling business results in terms of time-to-market, quality, productivity, and engagement and, in general, think more in terms of revenue, cost, customer loyalty, capacity, inventory, more business language.

The more we can draw a connection between our everyday language and the everyday language of the business, the tighter [the] connection we can make and the easier we can bake that into our transformation efforts. Okay, so all of this sounds good in theory, right? Hopefully, the logic checks out for you at this level, but our business leaders are going to want to see the maths and they're going to want to see the proof. We need to take the next step. 

That's what I'm going to do here. For the rest of this session, I'm going to walk through how to measure the business benefits of SAFe in four steps. I won't call them easy steps. They're simple steps, not necessarily easy, four simple but not necessarily easy steps to measure and achieve business benefits with SAFe in any organisation, anywhere. 

What this will do is produce a transformation strategy that aligns business, technology, and transformation leaders across the business. When we can do that, we can achieve extraordinary business outcomes, not just the IT outcomes, product delivery outcomes that matter to us, but real compelling business outcomes that matter to the entire organisation.

The SAFe Transformation Canvas

Okay. We're going to capture all that as part of a strategy. Oh, by the way, now there's a transformation canvas for that. I'll be walking through some examples of the SAFe transformation canvas, and I know it's very small. It's a little bit of an eye chart, but you'll have copies of this. Em and Adrienne, I'll make sure that you have the latest copy of this so you can distribute it out. I have no problem sharing this, and you'll have copies of all of these slides, so you can go back into these examples and look at them with a magnifying glass when you need to.

Okay, so let's get into [the canvas]. 

Step 1: Know the Business Context

Step one, the first thing we need to do is know the business context, not the technology context, but the business context. Again, we're turning this outside in, thinking business first. We really need to understand that business context through a business lens in business language. That's going to force us to understand the answers to these questions or go seek the answers to these questions. Who are we and, what is our purpose and, who do we serve, and how will we succeed?

But remember, from a business lens, who we are comes from “What is our line of business?” Not just our product development arm or, our technology arm, or our IT arm, but who do we serve? What bigger system are we a part of? What bigger organisation? Maybe that's the line of business or the division or the business unit or something else. What's our purpose? Well, what's our commercial purpose? What are our products? What are our core services? What brings in the money? How do we sustain business? What is our business model and, what is our business mission, and what is our core value proposition out to our markets and customers?

Let's understand that so we can build a transformation in support of it. Who do we serve? This isn't our boss, this isn't our VP, this isn't our CIO, it's not anybody in the executive ranks. It's not necessarily our board, either. If we're a commercial company, a for-profit company, we serve customers and markets and segments and geographies. Let's understand that. Where do our products end up at the end of the day? Who's consuming our goods? Who's consuming our technology, or who is consuming the result of our technology and how does that help the business?

Then, eventually, how will we succeed? What's the vision for the future of the organisation, not just our technology division, but the bigger organisation? The slice of the enterprise that we're a part of that we're enabling and supporting. On the canvas, that shows up in that top horizontal region. The first part of the conversation is to go get that information. This is an opportunity to have really interesting and insightful conversations with the business leaders who own these areas. Who will tell us things like who we are?

In this particular example, this is taken directly from our course material and workshop material. We use Terrific Transport Corporation as an example. Hopefully, some of you are familiar with this context. TTC is a fictitious company that is getting into the autonomous vehicle parcel delivery market. Point-to-point delivery on commercial streets from merchants to recipients, using little autonomous vehicles to do the deliveries. Okay, so in that kind of environment, there's a business context, right?

I won't go through all of the elements of this slide, I'll let you scan them, but if we read across that top business row, who we are from a business standpoint is autonomous vehicle delivery operations. A lot of times, this naturally equates to the operational value stream or set of operational value streams that we're supporting with SAFe. Who's consuming our things? Who are our direct internal customers or stakeholders, and what are they in business to do? What's their purpose? Well, here, their purpose is to enable point-to-point, light-load parcel deliveries, right?

They have a very market-oriented perspective, et cetera. How are they going to achieve success way over on the right? This division needs to capture [a] dominant market share in emerging regions. Great. We're out for market dominance. We see an opportunity, we're going to go after it and we're going to achieve a dominant market share in our emerging regions. Great. From a business perspective. Okay. What does that have to do with technology?

Well, the business isn't going to be able to achieve that; the operational value stream is not going to be able to do that without the support of the technologists in the organisation. Let's go through the same exercise with the technology division. Who are we? Well, we're autonomous vehicle engineering and we support autonomous vehicle delivery operations. Now we're seeing the connection between the technology world and the business world, what we need from each other and how we support and align each other through this business context.

Establishing this business context is really important because it gives us a sense for where we exist in the system and how we need to support and enable business results. 

Step 2: Identify Business Objectives 

Let's move on to step two. 

Once we have that, we can start to identify the tangible business objectives that are driving success, and we'll ask these kinds of questions. What business goals are driving the change? If we're in this scenario where we need to achieve significant market share, well, we could ask why? Why are we doing that versus investing in another part of the business?

Doesn't that mean that we're potentially shifting budget, energy, other kinds of resources, staffing from one area of the business to another? Well, it may be important to know that. What are the business goals that are driving this change? How does that trace back to enterprise strategy vision for the company and strategic themes that are driving this market need? We should be able to tell our transformation story in terms of these business goals and these business drivers. Also, what are the desired business outcomes?

Now, let's get down to what specific goals the business is trying to achieve and how success will be measured. Maybe there are OKRs that are already in place. Maybe there are other types of goals and capabilities, metrics that are defined, but we need to get this information from the business so that we understand what they're driving toward, what the business vision is, what success looks like, and how success is going to be measured through a business lens.

We capture all that as part of the business context, and only then can we start to think about how we're going to craft our transformation in support of these. We need to have this business context and a really solid understanding of the business objectives that our business leaders are driving toward in order for us to support those efforts and show that we can apply SAFe to deliver measurable outcomes. Okay, identify the business objective. What does that look like? Well, it could look like this. It could look like an OKR (Objective and Key Results). It could look like something that looks like an OKR, as long as it has these kinds of elements.

What is a description of the objective that we're trying to achieve? Well, achieve a dominant position within the autonomous vehicle delivery market. Okay, great. How are we going to measure that? Well, in this case, we're going to measure that in terms of increased market share, increased net promoter score, improvement in our repeat business rates, and new customer acquisitions. Great. It's great to know that these are the things that the business is focusing on to achieve success, and it's very obvious that those key results map logically to some of the things that we've talked about as business results. 

The most common business results that senior leaders are after. Yep, sure enough, we see revenue in there a couple of times. We see customer happiness, and there's a new one in there, market share, that wasn't in our original list of four. Gavin, here's an example of where we've had a conversation with the business, and they've told us that revenue and customer happiness matter, and we can appreciate risk and we can appreciate cost reduction, but right now, from where we are with the business today and what we're trying to accomplish in the near term horizon, we really need to build market share. That wasn't on the list, but we need to add it to the list.

Just like maybe we need to add to the list, employee retention or workforce retention because it really matters more than anything else today. We didn't have those outcomes. Revenue, cost, risk, customer happiness. It could be market share, it could be employee retention, it could be predictability, it could be sustainability. Whatever matters to the business, we need to capture it and get in their language what the metrics are that are being used to measure success. By the way, I wanted to point out here that these tend to be lagging indicators.

You scan these key results, increase the service pool, market share, increase net promoter score; these are rearview mirror kinds of metrics, right? It's going to take a while to establish these. These are more lagging indicators, which are very important, but that's an opportunity for us to help position SAFe and our transformation efforts and what we're doing from a way of working perspective to generate leading indicators that snap into these. 

If we can show that what we're doing is producing leading indicators of these kinds of results, then we'll have the business interested in knowing about the data that we're collecting. Iteration over iteration, PI over PI that snap into their objectives, to give them an early indication of some predictors of success at their level. Great opportunity for us to position the power of SAFe and lean and DevOps and agile thinking in ways of working to help them achieve their tangible goals. Okay, that's steps one and two. Once we have that business context, now we can start thinking about the transformation context.

Step 3: Align the Transformation Objective

Now, we can start to think about transformation objectives and how product development or IT or our development value streams, our way of working, how we build and, validate and deliver digitally-enabled, technology-enabled solutions fits into that big picture. What is our vision for change and, what is our purpose, and what's the urgency in the scope of the transformation? What are our desired transformation outcomes in terms of time to market, quality, engagement? We need to be thinking about this in terms of the effect this will have on business outcomes and the business context.

Now, we have a framework to think about our outcomes and how to define them. We're not just going to invent them and we're not going to base them on outcomes and measurements that we think are good and only we care about. We're going to use the business context and the business outcomes and their definitions of success to frame how we think about time to market, quality, engagement and whatever other metrics and outcomes we think are important. Okay, and we're going to use key results, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), delivery performance metrics to define these as well.

We're going to come up with our own view of what that looks like. These are the outcomes that we have direct control over that we're going to use to support the business objectives. What this is is a Transformation OKR. In SAFe, there is a thing called a transformation OKR, which has the same structure and, look and feel of any other OKR, but it's a specific kind of OKR that has been crafted specifically for changing the way of working, not changing a particular product or a service. It's not about delivering epics or delivering features or building a solution; it's about building the agile environment that it will take to achieve business objectives.

Here's an example: transformation objective. We see some of the same language that we saw in the business objective, right? We are in business from a technology perspective or an autonomous vehicle engineering perspective to build a world-class innovation hub for market-leading autonomous vehicle technology. We're going to do that because that's what the business needs from us. That is our transformation objective. We need to go from where we are today. We're kind of clunky; we're kind of projects, we're waterfally.

We don't have a great relationship with the business. They can't rely on us to deliver effectively. We don't have the way of working we need; we don't have the efficiency and the quality that we need in the time to market, the delivery speed built into our system, our way of working that we need in order to really fulfil or help the business fulfil their needs. Therefore, our vision for how we need to operate as a technology organisation is to evolve from where we are now into a world-class innovation hub so that we can support our business and our business goals.

All of that is informed by what we know about the business context and what the business is trying to achieve. Here's how we're going to measure that. It's going to be important, in this scenario, in this example, to focus on time to market, workforce engagement, increasing productivity and increasing quality in these measurable ways. Because we've worked with our business partners, we've had the conversations, and we believe that these will produce the results that we need to serve as leading indicators of business performance success.

In other words, these key results, when we achieve them, will help us achieve the key results on the business side, and there's a direct link between the two. Let me show you what that direct link looks like. It looks like the bottom portion of the canvas. Here's the fully worked canvas with all those examples now plugged into the boxes. What we're seeing here in the bottom half of the canvas is the transformation key results on the left in blue, mapped directly to the business key results on the right. The arrows there in the middle, in the alignment section, show the leading indicator [and] lagging indicator relationship between the two.

All of this together represents a transformation strategy and a story that we can tell anywhere in the organisation to anybody at any level about what we're doing and why it matters from a business perspective. We can start anywhere on the canvas and work through it clockwise, counterclockwise, up, down, diagonally, bottom to top, however, we want to tell the story, all the analysis, all of the information is here. It all connects, and it all rolls up to the business context. In the top right-hand corner, everything flows back to how we are going to work together across business, technology, and transformation to succeed. Here's how we're going to do it. This is a story with the concepts and with the measurements that are going to matter. 

Okay, one more step to go. 

Step 4:  Deliver the Results

Now, we've got to deliver. We have the plan, and we have to deliver, right? Now, it's “show me the money” time. It's proof. We have to go get the results. But to get the results, we have to put this strategy into play because not everybody in the organisation is probably going to be involved in these conversations, right?

This is more of a leadership-level conversation that happens first, but then the information needs to get disseminated out into the broader organisation where we can then work together, sprint over sprint, iteration over iteration, PI over PI, maybe quarter over quarter across business technology and transformation and everybody involved in order to make it happen. We need to communicate, but what we're not going to do is communicate this [canvas] directly because this is very hard to absorb.

We're going to turn this into a story because people love storytelling, and stories and anecdotes resonate and stick much better with people than raw data and analysis does. Through the power of storytelling, we're going to inspire and motivate the organisation and potentially other senior leaders who we need to gain buy-in from, and then put it into play, and then we're going to attract progress as we move along. Here's an example of what that value message could look like. Here's an example of a pitch or a message crafted in business language, natural language, that tells the story of the canvas in words.

I'll just let you scan that really quickly. Won't read it, and you'll have this in your handouts once you get them. But I wanted to show you this because this is an example of how we can move from that canvas, which is packed with really great information but is not friendly from a communication standpoint. It's not a communication tool. It's really an alignment tool. But we need to somehow take that information and coalesce it into a simple, engaging story that we can tell to anybody in the organisation, or at least craft in multiple ways so that we can tell the story to the right people at the right times in natural language.

Here's just an example of how we do that. The underlying parts are pieces of information that are taken directly from the canvas. It's sort of a fill-in-the-blank scenario. You can start with a blank script and just move in bits and pieces from the canvas to fill in the blanks, check the story, and then refine as needed. Okay, so storytelling is a big part of moving forward with the plan, and then, of course, tracking and adjusting transformation outcomes.

Very important to not only put together the strategy and get the organisation mobilised, but you got to follow through, right? Measuring the business benefits of SAFe and achieving measurable business benefits with SAFe in partnership with the business requires not only good planning but good execution, too. We've done all of this great work to set it up; now we've got to follow through and check and adjust ourselves along the way. Here's an example of a scorecard, if you will, that we can use to track progress along the way, quarter over quarter or PI over PI, or on whatever cadence makes sense in the context.

Then, keep the conversation open and then use events in SAFe in our natural way of working to bring this information to light. Could be through system demos, could be through ART Syncs or PO syncs, portfolio-level conversations, strategic portfolio reviews and portfolio syncs. Lots of opportunities to bring this information out into the open so it gets tracked and, remembered and talked about and celebrated on a regular basis. 

Okay, so when can we do that? This is the closing.

We can not only meet business expectations and deliver business results, but we can exceed all business expectations and we can really go farther than we ever thought imaginable, individually or within IT, or even with initial perceptions about the power of people working together with a common purpose, pooling their efforts and tracking and adjusting in partnership and on cadence that really delivers those compelling results.

Then maybe we can get our business leaders to say things like this about us and the transformation, so that we don't have to. These are real quotes from real people and real organisations across the world who have implemented SAFe and the results are being seen at senior executive levels, and it's no longer the transformation experts. It's no longer the SPCTs or the LACE leaders or the business owners, the people who are day-to-day involved in SAFe, who are trying to sell SAFe and championing it; it's really now the executives who were publicly speaking out about this. Not just talking about this internally, although they are talking about this in all hands and their staff meetings and those kinds of things, but they're also talking about it very publicly at SAFe Summits. They're writing customer stories, they're active on social media, and these stories and anecdotes and these proof points are even making their way into annual reports and earnings calls. That's the kind of outcomes that we want to see and the kind of participation and buy-in that we'd like to see from executives and business leaders.

This is how we've seen many organisations who are SAFe customers and pioneers in pushing the boundaries and getting adoption of SAFe and buy-in for SAFe, where it's typically been a struggle that we've learned from. Okay, so that's it. But Em and Adrienne, I'll turn it over to you.

Em Campbell-Pretty: Thank you so much, Marc. That was awesome as always, and great to revisit the content we were looking at in Berlin. 

Marc Rix: I'd love to hear any thoughts you have about what you liked, what you disliked, anything at all.

Attendee 1: Marc, I've got a question around the level that you pitch those framework maps at. Clearly, working as I've done historically from a bottom-up perspective, we see the value in the transformation of the way of working. We've made the mistake in the past of not getting that connection that you've articulated to the business context and the business outcomes. Do you aim for as high a level of engagement as you possibly can or do you just work within the scope of the leaders who'll engage?

Marc Rix: Really great question, and I've experimented a lot with this in different organisations. There's a workshop that takes you through the mechanics of building this canvas with leaders, right? We have an approach, and as we've tested this approach out in the workshop setting, I've seen how that strategy plays out. Where people go next with the canvas? Do they go out into the organisation? Do they go up the organisation? If they go up, how far up do they go? Some go directly to the CEO, some have chosen to do that. Some go out into the organisation and implement proof points before they start to go up the chain because they know that their next-level leader will need proof points and will need to see actions from the organisation in order to be convinced. 

I guess what I believe right now is, what is your shortest path to proof or shortest path to next-level success?

A lot of times, I think that if we're talking about who to approach in the chain of command, I would choose the nearest neighbour. Go to your nearest neighbour first, next level up, get their buy-in. Even if you think you could go directly to the CEO, don't do an end run; don't skip levels. Build a coalition systematically level by level, getting more and more buy-in along the way. The higher you get up to the top, of course, the more span of control you can have. But then, of course, the higher you go up, it's likely that the more expectations there will be to deliver on bigger and bigger results. Does that help?

Attendee 1: It does. We were probably guilty. We had a bit of turnover in our champions, that next level that were supporting us, they kind of transitioned into other roles, and we probably didn't have that discussion or that framework or that canvas basically captured in a way that we could articulate while when the new person joins us, here's what we've done historically. Having an artefact or set of artefacts that can substantiate the reasons why we're doing what we're doing is probably a mistake that we made as well. Yes. Thanks for the presentation.

Marc Rix: Thank you. I appreciate that. It means a lot.

Em Campbell-Pretty: Marc, there are a couple of questions about whether the canvas is in SAFe Studio or in one of the toolkits.

Marc Rix: The canvas is currently bundled with the workshop. No, it's not available as a standalone artefact at this time. But Em and Adrienne as enabled partners, you have access to the workshop. That's one source, but yet I have to say, as far as direct studio access, that's TBD.

Em Campbell-Pretty: Thanks for that, Marc. Any last questions before we let Marc go? Okay, folks, thank you so much for coming along. Thank you, Marc, for sharing that content with us. As Marc said, Adrienne and I and the Pretty Agile team have access to the workshop and would be happy to talk to folks about running that.

Enjoy your afternoon, folks.

Marc Rix: Thanks, everyone. I really appreciate the time.