For some time, we’ve been stuck in a bit of a hole with our historical definition of Epics in SAFe. Perhaps the easiest explanation of the hole comes from the following question we get from SPCs:
“ We see the Epics are defined solely at the portfolio level to be big and cross-cutting, i.e. effecting multiple trains. And there is a nice Kanban system for those, which provides for reasoning about big things in a responsible way. And yet, often within the context of a single train, we have large initiatives that deserve similar analysis, are clearly way bigger than a feature, and probably even require approval of the investment we are about to make, even though we have an overall budget established for the train. How does SAFe handle that?”.
While we had pretty good answers, it was clear that SAFe didn’t address a situation that was common in the Lean|Agile Enterprise.
To that end, we’ve extended the definition in SAFe to be as follows.
“Epics are enterprise initiatives that are sufficiently substantial in scope so as to warrant analysis and understanding of potential ROI. Epics typically require a lightweight business case that elaborates business and technology impact and implementation strategies. Epics are typically cross-cutting and effect multiple organizations, budgets, release trains and occur over multiple PSIs. Portfolio Epics affect multiple release trains; Program Epics are contained to a single train.”
With this subtle change, we hopefully clarified the fact that:
- Epics are typically cross-cutting across programs, but not always
- If it’s a big enough investment to be of financial interest to the portfolio level, it should probably appear there for visibility, analysis and consideration before investment
- There is no reason to create a separate Kanban system to do this
While this is a subtle change in a way, it was somewhat pervasive as we’ve updated the Glossary, Epics, Portfolio Vision, Portfolio Backlog, Business Epic, Architecture Epic, and the Business Epic Kanban and Architecture Epic Kanban Systems.
Hopefully that fixes a small hole in SAFe (and one that was not of epic proportions).