SAFe 4.5 Reference Guide: Scaled Agile Framework for Lean Enterprises, Second edition

Create the Implementation Plan

The more detailed we made our plans, the longer our cycle times became.

—Don Reinertsen

In this chapter, we discuss the next ‘critical move’ in the SAFe Implementation Roadmap: Create the implementation plan.

It’s a big deal to implement organizational change of this magnitude, and some strategizing and planning help. But Reinertsen’s quote reminds us not to overthink the problem. It’s far better to plan a bit, execute a bit, and learn a bit. Then repeat. In other words, we need to take an Agile, incremental approach to implementation—just as we do with solution development.

We’ll do that by picking one Value Stream ...