What is the goal of the SAFe House of lean?

SAFe® House of Lean was inspired by houses of Lean from Toyota and it illustrates core tenets of Lean thinking.

Per definition, a mindset is a collection of thoughts and beliefs that shape our thought habits. These affect how we think, feel, what we do, and how we make sense of the world. In SAFe® (Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprises®), Lean-Agile Mindset is the combination of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and actions of SAFe leaders and practitioners who embrace the concepts of the Agile Manifesto, Lean-Agile Principles and Lean thinking. It represents the basis of a new management approach and an enhanced company culture that enables Business Agility. At the same time, Lean-Agile Mindset provides leadership with the tools needed to drive a successful SAFe transformation, helping individuals and the entire enterprise achieve their goals.

SAFe House of Lean identifies five main factors that must be mastered in order for the business to be efficient and successful in achieving Business Agility. These factors are illustrated in a form of a house, to show their order and priority. At the foundation of the house comes Leadership. Out of the foundation grow the four pillars, that focus on Respect for people and culture, Flow, Innovation and Relentless Improvement. In the end, the roof depicts the goal – value.

SAFe House of Lean explained

This is how SAFe explains its House of Lean.

The Goal – Value

The goal of Lean is to deliver the maximum customer value in the shortest sustainable lead-time while providing the highest possible quality to customers and society as a whole. High morale, safety, and customer delight are additional goals and benefits.

Pillar 1 – Respect for People and Culture

A Lean-Agile approach doesn’t implement itself or perform any real work – people do. Respect for people and culture is a basic human need. When treated with respect, people are empowered to evolve their practices and improve. Management challenges people to change and may steer them toward better ways of working. However, it’s the teams and individuals who learn problem-solving and reflection skills and are accountable for making the appropriate improvements.

The driving force behind this new behavior is a generative culture, which is characterized by a positive, safe, performance-centric environment. Achieving this culture requires the enterprise and its leaders to change first. The principle of respect for people and culture also extends to relationships with Suppliers, partners, customers, and the broader community that supports the Enterprise.

When there’s an urgency for positive change, transforming culture is possible. First, understand and implement the SAFe values and principles. Second, deliver winning results. The culture will change naturally over time.

Pillar 2 – Flow

The key to successfully executing SAFe is to establish a continuous flow of work that supports incremental value delivery based on constant feedback and adjustment. Continuous flow enables faster sustainable value delivery, effective Built-In Quality practices, relentless improvement, and evidence-based governance based on working components of the solution.

The principles of flow are an essential part of the Lean-Agile mindset. These include understanding the full Development Value Stream, visualizing, and limiting Work in Process (WIP), and reducing batch sizes and managing queue lengths. Additionally, Lean focus on identifying and continuously removing delays and waste (non-value-added activities). One critical move that organizations must address to achieve flow is the shift from a start-stop-start project management process to an agile product management approach aligned to long-lived development value streams.

Lean-Agile principles provide a better understanding of the system development process by incorporating new thinking, tools, and techniques. Leaders and teams can use them to move from a phase-gated approach to a DevOps approach with a Continuous Delivery Pipeline that extends flow to the entire value delivery process.

Pillar 3 – Innovation

Flow builds a solid foundation for value delivery. But without innovation, both product and process will steadily decline. To support this critical part of the SAFe House of Lean, Lean-Agile Leaders engage in the following practices:

• Hire, coach, and mentor innovation and entrepreneurship in the organization’s workforce
• Go see…get out of the office and into the actual workplace where the value is produced, and products are created and used (known as gemba). As Taiichi Ohno put it, “No useful improvement was ever invented at a desk.”
• Provide time and space for people to be creative to enable purposeful innovation. This can rarely occur in the presence of 100 percent utilization and daily firefighting. SAFe’s Innovation and Planning Iteration is one such opportunity.
• Apply Continuous Exploration, the process of constantly exploring the market and user needs, getting fast feedback on experiments, and defining a Vision, Roadmap, and set of Features that bring the most promising innovations to market.
• Validate the innovation with customers, then pivot without mercy or guilt when the hypothesis needs to change.
• Engage both top-down strategic thinking with organic team-based innovations to create a synergistic ‘innovation riptide’ that powers a tidal wave of new products, services, and capabilities.

Pillar 4 – Relentless Improvement

The fourth pillar, relentless improvement, encourages learning and growth through continuous reflection and process enhancements. A constant sense of competitive danger drives the company to pursue improvement opportunities aggressively. Leaders and teams do the following:

• Optimize the whole, not the parts, of both the organization and the development process
• Reinforce the problem-solving mindset throughout the organization, where all are empowered to engage in daily improvements to the work
• Reflect at key milestones to openly identify and address the shortcomings of the process at all levels
• Apply Lean tools and techniques to determine the fact-based root cause of inefficiencies and apply effective countermeasures rapidly

Additional guidance on the importance of innovation and relentless improvement in achieving business agility can be found in the Continuous Learning Culture competency article.

Foundation – Leadership

The foundation of Lean is leadership, a key enabler for team success. Leaders are ultimately responsible for the successful adoption of the Lean-Agile approach. According to management consultant and efficiency expert W. Edwards Deming, “Such a responsibility cannot be delegated” to direct reports, Lean-Agile champions, working groups, a Program Management Office (PMO), process teams, outside consultants, or any other party. Therefore, leaders must be trained in these new and innovative ways of thinking and exhibit the principles and behaviors of Lean-Agile leadership.

From a leadership perspective, Lean is different than Agile. Agile was developed as a team-based process for a small group of cross-functional, dedicated individuals who were empowered, skilled, and needed to build working functionality in a short time box. Management was not part of this definition. But excluding management from the way of working doesn’t scale in an enterprise. By contrast, in Lean, managers are leaders who embrace the values of Lean, are competent in the basic practices, and teach these practices to others. They proactively eliminate impediments and take an active role in driving organizational change and facilitating relentless improvement (Source: Scaled Agile).

The original article can be found here.
© Scaled Agile, Inc.
SAFe and Scaled Agile Framework are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.

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