What Are The 3 Main Types Of SAFe® Milestones?

 

Building large systems today requires large investments that can reach million/billion dollars. Customers, agile teams, and other stakeholders have together shared a fiduciary responsibility for ensuring that investing in new solutions creates appropriate business value. It is clear that active stakeholder involvement throughout the system development process is needed to ensure the intended economic benefits realization, and simply rely on a willingness to make things happen in the end.

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Milestones

Milestones in SAFe are used for tracking the progress of a goal/event. There are three kinds of SAFe milestones:

1.      Program Increment (PI) Milestones

2.      Fixed-date Milestones

3.      Learning Milestones

Milestones are specific points in time that help you assess and monitor product development. They can also help you identify risks and make decisions for the product. In the past, many people have used phase gates to measure progress. However, the SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) uses fixed periods of time called PI’s (Program Increments) and iterations to measure and track progress.

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Overview On Types Of SAFe® Milestones

·       Program Increment (PI) Milestones

 

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) offers many resources for problem addressing. SAFe principle #4 - Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles, especially when combined with set-based design, provides the solution elements.

Using this method, the system is developed in stages, each of which is a point of integration and knowledge proving the rightness of the solution. In addition, these objective assessments are performed on a cadence of PI, which supports the field necessary to ensure regular availability, evaluation, as well as predetermined timelines that can be used to subdivide the field with less appropriate options.

 

·       Fixed-date Milestones

Every Lean and Agile company wants to operate with minimal restrictions. Part of that is agility. But the real world has other concerns, and fixed-date milestone is common in both traditional & Lean and Agile development.

In lean words, fixed dates have non-linear delay costs. This means that the required system features have a much higher priority as the deadline approaches, as not following the steps has adverse economic concerns. It is directly involved in prioritizing the solution and product backlogs through WSJF; The time-sensitive parameter increases as the fixed date gets closer, increasing the WSJF priority for items that depend on that date. Fixed dates should always be indicated on the relevant Agile Release Train (ART) so that all participants can prepare and react accordingly.

 

·       Learning Milestones

 

In addition to Program Increment, other learning phases can be used to help achieve the ultimate goal of creating a solution that meets customer needs and creates business value. It is essential that the proposed value of a new solution or a large initiative is treated as a hypothesis that needs to be conceptualized and verified considering real market scenarios. Turning a hypothesis into a business problem is the art of Lean and Agile product management. There is much indirect organizational training. The learning stages can assist with.

 

Conclusion

Successful milestones execution requires measures to define what "success" means, so it can be helpful to link specific metrics and actions to milestones.

Consider an example, earning X% market share may require insight into revenue or utilization rates.

The learning milestone from "a search engine that can reliably identify the names of people on a website" can be supported by a finite number of false positives on the pages of the "internet gold collection dataset". In any case, well-thought-out measures lead to more momentous milestones.

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