ServiceNow SAFe supports two configurations - Essential SAFe and Portfolio SAFe. Both configurations are part of the industry-standard Scaled Agile Framework. Essential SAFe works at the team member and product manager levels, while Portfolio SAFe works only at the product manager level.
At the portfolio level, portfolio managers can prioritize and manage epics. Epics are the largest unit of work that have one shared objective, like a customer request or business requirement. An ART is a group of SAFe teams working towards a single solution.
Product managers at the ART Level can break down epics into features and prioritize them for their teams. Epics can also break down further into stories, which are the smallest units of work. At the team level, members can implement the assigned stories.
At the Portfolio level, portfolio managers can oversee epics using a Backlog list view or a Kanban board view. Back at the ART level, product and program managers can plan and track features or stories that were created from epics. At the team level, members can review and track their work on the SAFe stories that came from epics or features.
The SAFe board at each of these levels shows SAFe epics, features, and stories in the form of cards and lanes that represent various stages of development. Users can track these stages by moving the cards from one lane to another. The Backlog tab shows an overview of the work pipeline.
Each SAFe epic and feature has an assigned WSJF score that helps determine its priority. The item with the highest WSJF score usually has the highest priority. WSJF scores are organized with the highest scores on top.
There are four scores that are used to determine the WSJF: User-business value, Time criticality, Risk reduction, and Job size. You can also adjust the priority of features by rearranging them on the board. Features and Stories are planned in program increments, or PIs.
You can create a PI in SAFe by selecting a sprint length and the number of sprints. In the PI you can also add features, stories, and teams. Finally, let's look at bigroom planning.
Bigroom planning is a centralized board in SAFe that is used to plan PIs for an ART. You can create stories and assign them to teams, add and view story dependencies, track stories by sprints, and re-plan these stories all from one place. Here, you can select the ART and PI you want to plan.
You can also assign stories to a team's backlog or sprint. To change the scheduling or to assign the story to a different team, move the story card to the appropriate lane. The sprint capacity bars show each team's workload for each sprint.
You can define dependencies between stories to make sure they're implemented in the right order. To do that, we open the story, edit the dependent stories list, choose the dependent story, save, and update. And here's our new dependency.
We can see the results of our planning at the Team level. And in the Backlog tab, we can see the sprints we planned for our teams, so that when we start a sprint, associated stories appear on the Sprint Tracking board. For more information, please see our product documentation, knowledge base, or podcast.
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