Business Owner of SAFe

Business owners can be said as key stakeholders of the business. There are many Business owners in an ART. They are responsible for determining and making sure how with help of them the ART achieves the overall business outcomes and goals. In this article, we will learn about the Business Owner role in SAFe and know how they are helping to achieve business objectives or business outcomes. To be a business owner they have some basics to be involved in which are as follows:

1) Vision- The individual must be involved in understanding the overall business vision of the organization. How that vision is defined and how that business is crystalized into a vision before the agile release train.

2) Roadmap- They must be involved in the overall roadmap for the business, for the agile release train, and also for the PI.

3) Strategic Theme- They must be involved in the development of the strategic themes. Strategic themes are guidance that is given to overall projects and the programs that are running underneath the portfolio. It gives flavor or color to the business. For example, a gaming company working on a strategic theme of virtual reality.

The responsibilities a business owner fulfills are:

Before PI planning

• Deliver input to backlog improvement activities

• Contribute in Pre-PI Planning as per requirement

• Ensuring the acceptance of business objectives by key stakeholders including, RTE, Product management, and system architects.

• Formulate business framework communications, with Milestones and significant external dependencies.

During PI planning

• Give relevant elements to business context for shaping PI planning program time box.

• Available for important activities like the staging of vision, draft plan evaluation, allocating business value within team PI objectives, and approving final plans.

• Observe external commitments and dependencies.

• Review draft plan and understand either it satisfy the business objective by understanding the whole scenario and its planning process if taken together.

• Ensure key objectives of the train be circulated to teams during planning and maintaining agreement and alignment within stakeholders.

• Participate in all the events within ART entailing management tasks.

Allocating Business Value

Pi planning is an event where business owners and the team gets a chance to develop the personal relationship with each other. Here, a business owner can use the opportunity and understand common concerns requiring mutual commitments, business values, and objectives. Even though the addition of feature is business owners take but during Pi they can discuss with team and architecture to know technical aspects and increase the business value.

During Inspect and Adapt

It helps the team to reflect on their progress and impediments which can be addressed completely with help of business owners. The business owner needs to attend inspect and adapt supporting the team for further path in achieving actual values.

At PI execution

• Planning is not the only responsibility of the business owner and is ideal during execution. Even during execution they also have to perform the below activities.

• Participate in system demo for reviewing progress and providing feedback over it.

• Participate in Iteration Planning and Iteration Retrospective events.

• Attend Release Management events aiming at the scope, quality, distribution options, releases, and market concerns.

• Help in managing business and development alignment as importance and scope inescapably change.

• Validating Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) for program epics and lead pivot or persevere decision.

Other than these responsibilities business owners also have to fulfill these roles

• Guide organization initiatives by being an epic owner.

• Drive investment in the continuous delivery pipeline for updating responses of ART and the quality of the solution.

• Create a DevOps culture of combining responsibilities by breaking the traditional ways

• While in pre and post-PI planning guide the ART for adjusting and solution.

• Give feedback about capabilities and built subsystems based on the solution demo.

• Actively participate in lean portfolio management, product management, and system architecture, and other events.

• Actively pinpoint weaknesses mostly that increase further than the authority of the stakeholders on the train.

By most of the responsibilities mentioned above of business owner, you can get the idea that this role doesn’t represent an individual specifically as other roles mentioned but it represents the group of people who are required for the indispensable good advancement of project and organization. About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.