Maximize business outcomes from SAFe®

The majority of Fortune 500 companies leverage the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) to enhance operational efficiency and agility, but adoption alone isn’t enough. To avoid stagnation, organizations need to measure impact.

So, how can technology leaders measure and accelerate better outcomes that align with strategy and optimize costs?

The answer is with Flow Metrics.

Learn about Flow Metrics

End-to-end visibility for leaders, actionable insights for teams

End-to-end visibility for leaders, actionable insights for teams

Enterprises lacking the essential tools to measure and accelerate their flow of value delivery face a considerable challenge when it comes to driving substantial impact. To solve this, SAFe recommends using Value Stream Management and Flow Metrics.

By utilizing these tools adeptly, enterprises can accelerate time-to-market, minimize waste, and prioritize tasks that directly contribute to achieving their business objectives.

Learn how to use Flow Metrics in the SAFe Cadence

Flow Metrics empower you to make data-driven decisions to achieve strategic business outcomes

  • Accelerating time-to-value is crucial for maximizing customer satisfaction and revenue. It not only enhances the customer experience but also enables organizations to outpace competitors by delivering market solutions faster. Flow Metrics give insight into:

    • Revenue and market share

      Flow Metrics provide valuable insights into top-line growth indicators like revenue, market share, and adoption by offering a clear picture of how efficiently value is delivered to customers and how smoothly the processes operate within the organization.

    • Time-to-market

      Organizations can gain deep insights into their value delivery process and identify opportunities for improvement. Flow Metrics help teams identify bottlenecks, optimize workflows, and increase overall efficiency, all of which contribute to reducing the time to market for new products and features.

    • Throughput

      Throughput quantifies the pace at which value reaches customers. Flow Metrics can be used to increase throughput by identifying where waste and wait states are holding up value delivery. By enhancing throughput, the organization can achieve more frequent releases of updates and new products, thereby diminishing time to market.

    • Customer NPS and retention

      Flow Metrics offer insights into customer NPS and retention by understanding the efficiency of value delivery. By increasing the value delivery rate, customer needs can be met in a timely manner, resulting in higher satisfaction and improved loyalty.

  • By addressing collaboration challenges, reducing waste, and enhancing predictability, efficient software delivery enables teams to meet their commitments, deliver high-quality products, and increase customer satisfaction. Flow Metrics give insight into:

    • Efficiency and productivity

      Bottlenecks and dependencies can be identified throughout the value delivery process, enabling teams to address these obstacles, streamline workflows, and optimize resource allocation. As a result, wasted efforts are minimized, and untapped capacity is unlocked from existing resources.

    • Profitability (cost-to-income ratio)

      Flow Metrics enable organizations to optimize their value delivery process, streamline workflows, reduce operational costs, and enhance customer satisfaction – all of which play pivotal roles in improving profitability. Leaders have the data they need to make strategic adjustments and investments that lead to long-term financial success.

    • Quality metrics

      Insights from Flow Metrics can reduce the time and effort required to address defects, implement changes successfully, and respond to incidents. As a result, the escaped defect ratio, reopen rates, change failure rates, and the number of incidents are all positively impacted.

    • Employee engagement scores

      By providing visibility into the end-to-end value delivery process, Flow Metrics allow employees to see the progress of their work, understand how it fits into the larger workflow, and maintain strategic alignment. Employees have a clear view of their contributions and the impact they have on business outcomes.

  • Visibility into technical debt and risk is vital for compliance as it helps identify vulnerabilities, assess impacts, and mitigate risks, ensuring adherence to regulations, data security, and overall operational integrity. Flow Metrics give insight into:

    • Risk resolution time

      High Flow Efficiency accelerates risk resolution, reducing the time needed to address potential risks effectively. Tracking risk resolution throughput assesses the overall rate of risk addressing, offering a comprehensive view of risk management performance.

    • Allocation of work

      Flow Metrics provide insights into appropriate work allocation, ensuring a balanced mix of tasks to address risk and technical debt. By analyzing Flow Distribution, teams can shift to a healthier mix of work, delivering features while addressing technical debt effectively.

    • Technology release frequency

      Technology release frequency can be increased by identifying tech debt and risk for proactive resolution and optimization. By tracking throughput and Flow Efficiency, teams identify high-risk areas in the release cycle and proactively allocate resources to mitigate potential issues, ensuring smoother and more frequent releases.

  • Darrell Fernandes

    TIAA, Technology IFS Technology & Operations Head of Client Services

    Rebecca Davis

    Scaled Agile, Inc, SAFe Methodologist

Unlock insights with visualized Flow Metrics

Unlock insights with visualized Flow Metrics

Planview Viz® empowers Fortune 500 enterprises with data-driven insights to address strategic objectives and drive impact.

As a turnkey value stream analytics platform, Planview Viz utilizes Flow Metrics to optimize value delivery at the Portfolio, ART, Solution Train, and Team levels within SAFe.

View on-demand demo

“The flow measurement domain has been heavily influenced by the work of (Dr.) Mik Kersten. His Flow Framework provides five metrics that can be used to measure different aspects of flow. As SAFe is a flow-based system, each of these metrics is directly applicable and are now incorporated into the SAFe body of knowledge.”


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TUI Group

“Planview Viz is there to help us be proactive, to be more predictive. It shows us the trends and where things will happen before they occur.”

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Pieter Jordaan

Chief Technology Officer

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Bank of New Zealand

“It’s early in our journey but we’re already seeing value. The teams are committed, excited, and engaged and we’re seeing culture improvements because every engineer can now see how their work impacts business delivery and helps support an effective DevOps culture.”

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Paul Littlefair

Chief Technology Officer

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Anaplan

“When you can illustrate that developing a feature takes 25 days in an old system versus two days in a new system, leadership can quickly see the ROI.”

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Vince Butera

Head of Portfolio Operations

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