Transform strategic initiatives for agile execution

The use case Agile Transformation helps organizations plan, prioritize, and execute strategic initiatives effectively at enterprise scale. Aligned with Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®), it provides a structured yet flexible approach to translating strategy into execution while managing the complexity of large, interconnected systems.

Agile transformation centers on understanding and managing the enterprise’s value streams, which represent how value is delivered and enabled across the organization. Operational value streams describe how the business delivers value to customers through real-world, end-to-end workflows such as order fulfillment, claims processing, or service delivery. Understanding operational value streams helps organizations visualize how value flows to customers and identify delays, dependencies, or inefficiencies. Development value streams describe how the organization builds and evolves the systems and solutions that support the operational value streams. These streams typically involve iterative cycles of designing, developing, testing, and releasing products and capabilities.

As part of agile transformation, organizations also assess the applications and components that support each step of a value stream. This includes evaluating whether solutions are well integrated or fragmented across multiple systems in order to decrease complexity, cost, and operational risk, while identifying consolidation opportunities to help streamline architecture and improve overall value delivery.

• An operational value steam describes the sequence of value stream steps that an organization performs to deliver a product or service that provides a continued flow of value to the company. Value streams allow 'value' in terms of the usefulness, advantage, or benefit of IT solutions to be articulated and measured in the business architecture. Non-monetary examples of value are, for example, the successful delivery of a product or service or access to up-to-date information to make better business decisions. The operational value stream includes all steps from the initial request to the final fulfillment and support and captures how value flows through day-to-day business operations.
• An development value steam is the activities required to design, build, test, and deliver the systems or solutions that enable an organization’s operational value streams. It represents how teams create and evolve the capabilities the business relies on.
• An value steam step describes the stages needed to implement an operational or developmental value stream relevant to provide a continued flow of value to the enterprise. The value stream step captures information about the solutions that enable the value stream as well as the overall value that the step provides.
• A solution is a large, integrated system that delivers value to customers by fulfilling a specific business need. In Alfabet , a solution is the application or component that is built and evolved by the development value stream and enables the flow of value in the operational value stream.
• A value stream group bundles operational value streams and developmental value streams.