Comparing IBM Engineering solutions to others reveals unmatched flexibility and value in token licensing. In the dynamic realm of software development, selecting the right licensing model is as crucial as the tools themselves. Organizations are in search of licensing solutions offering both flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Introducing IBM Engineering Token Licensing — a groundbreaking approach lauded for its adaptability, user-friendliness, and transformative impact on software development processes.
But what exactly are tokens? IBM token licensing presents a flexible method to access various software products. Instead of purchasing separate licenses for each product, you acquire tokens, functioning as currency to unlock the usage of different software tools.
Imagine IBM token licensing akin to a universal theme park pass. Rather than buying tickets for individual rides, you receive tokens granting access to diverse attractions. Here’s the twist: you can share your tokens with friends, family, or colleagues. Should someone wish to experience a specific ride, you can lend them the required tokens. Moreover, these tokens are valid in any theme park across different cities — it’s as if your pass works universally. Thus, not only can you enjoy a variety of rides yourself, but you can also share tokens, ensuring everyone relishes the fun. Similarly, just as tokens can be used by different individuals for various rides in different places, IBM token licensing enables you to allocate and reallocate licenses across team members, software products, and geographical locations, making it a versatile and efficient resource management solution.
Why is the token licensing model superior to the floating license model? IBM token licenses offer several advantages over traditional floating licenses. Tokens provide a unified and adaptable approach, allowing users to access a wide range of IBM software products and features using a single currency across diverse projects and teams. Unlike floating licenses, tokens enable allocation across different products. Additionally, tokens can be transferred and reallocated with ease, accommodating changing project dynamics.
Choosing IBM token licenses as an operational expense (OpEx) rather than traditional perpetual licensing as a capital expense (CapEx) offers distinct financial advantages. This OpEx approach provides financial flexibility, reduces initial expenditure, and enables better budget allocation. Unlike perpetual licenses with fixed ownership, tokens enable dynamic resource allocation across projects, teams, and products, fostering adaptability to changing business demands.
Why are IBM Engineering Tokens so effective?
Flexibility Tailored to Your Needs: IBM Engineering Token Licensing stands out due to its remarkable flexibility. Instead of tying licenses to specific products, it allows you to allocate tokens to a pool. Managers, engineers, developers, and testers can then utilize these tokens across a range of products, scaling up or down as needed. This dynamic allocation model adapts to changing project requirements and empowers organizations to respond swiftly to evolving business needs.
Maximize Tool Utilization: Traditional licensing models often lead to underutilization of software tools. With IBM Engineering Tokens, you can optimize tool usage by allowing team members to access multiple products using the same token pool. This encourages teams to explore new tools and leverage their full potential without limitations.
Geographically Flexible Allocation: Geographically distributed teams often work across different time zones and have varying work schedules. IBM Tokens Licensing allows teams to allocate licenses to the tools they need when they need them, regardless of their location or time zone. With geographically distributed teams, token allocation becomes a global resource management strategy. Checking in tokens as one team’s workday ends and checking them out as another team’s workday begins maximizes the utility of available tokens. This flexibility ensures that team members have access to the required tools without unnecessary delays.
Seamless Collaboration: Collaboration is the cornerstone of successful software development. IBM Engineering Token Licensing promotes collaboration by enabling teams to collaborate seamlessly across different tools. Whether it’s model-based systems engineering, workflow management, requirements management, testing, or development, teams can work together cohesively without concerns about license limitations.
Cost-Effective Efficiency: The concept of token-based licensing introduces a cost-effective dimension to software development. By centralizing license management, organizations can eliminate unnecessary expenses associated with maintaining multiple licenses for each product. The flexibility of IBM Engineering Token Licensing also aligns with fluctuating project demands, resulting in significant cost savings.
Enhanced Productivity: Simplifying licensing management allows development teams to focus on what they do best — developing quality software. With fewer license-related obstacles, managers, engineers, testers, and developers can concentrate on their tasks, resulting in increased productivity and faster time-to-market.
IBM Engineering Tokens Licensing has proven to be a game-changer in the realm of software development licensing models. Its unparalleled flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and ability to enhance collaboration and productivity make it an excellent choice for systems and software development teams.
But why should I purchase or expand IBM Engineering solutions rather than piecemeal solutions from Jama, Cameo, CodeBeamer, etc?
Investing in IBM Engineering Solutions with Token Licensing offers several compelling advantages over buying piecemeal competitors.
Here are some reasons to consider IBM Engineering Token solutions:
Comprehensive Suite: IBM Engineering Solutions provide an integrated suite of tools that cover the entire engineering lifecycle, from requirements management to testing and deployment. This holistic approach eliminates the need to cobble together various tools from different vendors, ensuring seamless end-to-end processes.
Unified Collaboration: With Token Licensing, your teams can collaborate seamlessly across the entire engineering lifecycle. Unlike piecemeal solutions that might require disjointed integrations, IBM Engineering Solutions offer a unified environment for teams to work together effectively, reducing communication gaps and errors.
License Flexibility: Token Licensing enables you to allocate licenses based on your team’s changing needs. Instead of purchasing separate licenses for each tool, you can adapt license allocation to match project demands and the skills of your team members, maximizing resource utilization.
Cost Efficiency: Buying competitive solutions piecemeal often results in higher costs due to separate license fees, integration efforts, and maintenance expenses. IBM’s Token Licensing model allows you to manage licenses centrally, preventing over-purchasing and optimizing costs.
Seamless Integration: IBM Engineering Solutions are designed to work together seamlessly, eliminating compatibility issues that might arise from combining disparate tools. This integration enhances data flow, visibility, and traceability throughout the engineering lifecycle.
Scalability: As your organization grows, your engineering needs will evolve too. Token Licensing provides the scalability to adapt your license allocation based on team size, project scope, and changing requirements, ensuring that licenses align with your growth trajectory.
Reduced Complexity: Managing licenses from multiple vendors can lead to administrative complexities. With Token Licensing, you can simplify license administration, avoid juggling multiple contracts, and streamline vendor interactions.
Consistent Reporting and Metrics: IBM Engineering Solutions offer consistent reporting and metrics across the engineering lifecycle. This unified approach provides insights into project progress, quality, and alignment, facilitating informed decision-making and risk management.
Future-Proofing: Investing in a comprehensive solution with Token Licensing future-proofs your engineering processes. You can adapt to emerging technologies and methodologies without the hassle of integrating new tools or negotiating additional licenses.
Compatibility: Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) brings immense value to IBM Engineering solutions by facilitating seamless interoperability and integration across heterogeneous tools and systems. OSLC’s standardized protocols enable ELM to establish connections, exchange data, and synchronize processes with other software solutions, regardless of their origin. By leveraging OSLC, IBM empowers organizations to optimize their engineering processes, achieve greater traceability, and embrace a more integrated, efficient, and responsive approach to software development and lifecycle management.
In summary, choosing IBM Engineering Solutions with Token Licensing offers a strategic advantage over piecemeal
A trap is a position or situation from which it is difficult or impossible to escape. Getting caught in product or software development requirement traps can be problematic. The traps of bad requirements definition and management result in cost overruns, missed deadlines, poorly designed products, and a failure to deliver what the customer needs.
Unfortunately, requirement traps are common. The State of the IT Union Survey explored the development management practices that teams applied to either stay out of trouble or address problems after they are discovered. The online survey of respondents reveals how often product development teams anticipate that they’ll fall into traps. They pad budgets and schedules. They change initial estimates to match actual results. And they request additional resources. Figure 1 reveals the lengths teams and team leaders will go to deal with these traps.
Poor requirements management results in inconsistent project outcomes.
Products today depend on software to deliver their value. A brake sensor on a car, a home appliance, a medical device—all contain software that plays an increasingly important role. The products are becoming smarter, and they involve more people and teams outside the typical value chain. Smarter management of the requirements process— the foundation of effective product and software delivery— is increasingly important for delivering these products.
This article presents 10 common mistakes that project teams make in defining and managing requirements. More importantly, it discusses how to avoid these traps so you can get your requirements right and develop the right product on time and within budget.
Trap 1: scope creep
Scope creep usually involves features being added to previously approved product designs without corresponding increases in resources, schedule, or budget. The potential causes vary, but creep tends to occur when project requirements are not defined and managed properly.
Creep can also occur when development teams create solutions before determining what the business needs. The business requirements of a project are typically seen by development teams as being too high level and vague and not applicable to them. They want to focus on detailed product requirements. However, business requirements are real requirements and they need to be sufficiently detailed to avoid scope creep. By meeting the product requirements and not the business ones, teams fail to develop solutions that provide value and may overcompensate by adding features.
Avoid the trap
Map detailed, real business requirements to product features that satisfy those requirements and provide value.
Manage change, be vigilant about focusing on business requirements prioritization.
Identify and work with stakeholders early and often to understand the business requirements, stakeholder priorities, and the effect on stakeholders when changes occur.
The payoff: Avoiding scope creep makes planning easier, helps keep budgets intact, and helps keep projects on schedule. Most important of all, it helps generate the desired return on investment.
Trap 2: asking customers what they want
This seems counter-intuitive. Teams are supposed to talk to customers and give them what they want in a product. But customers tend to talk about features, not what they truly need. The truth is that people often don’t know what they want. And when customers don’t know what they want and developers don’t understand the problem, poorly conceived solutions— and products— can result.
Avoid the trap
Ask customers why they need a particular capability. It may lead to a better understanding of their expectations and better discussions about specific requirements.
Guide the discussion away from focusing on features— ask customers what they want the product/software to do. Create a separate discussion for how the resulting products will be used.
Identify the right stakeholders. The target audience or end-user may not be the person who is responsible for the project or invested in its success. Find— and listen to— the right mix of users, customers, executives who fund the project, government representatives who impose regulations, project teams, support teams, and others.
The payoff: Asking customers what outcome they are seeking helps you determine the true and realistic product requirements that will deliver value to them.
Trap 3: inability to adapt to change
Setting requirements in stone early in development can be a recipe for disaster that results in an enormous waste in resources and an inability to stay on schedule. As recent changes in the global economy illustrate, outside influences can quickly change project requirements. Organizations have quickly changed their focus to doing more with less. Speculative or experimental pet projects are off the table, replaced by those with strong potential ROI. Yet in any economy, there are always new requirements to contend with as business priorities change, new government regulations are enacted, and new stakeholders are identified. Project teams need to accommodate those changes.
Avoid the trap
Expect and plan for requirements that change throughout your development process.
Re-prioritize requirements based on shifting circumstances such as business needs, customer importance, estimated effort, and cost.
Have a fine-grain plan that you adjust at regular intervals.
Keep your stakeholders informed as changes occur— get their input for prioritization and the rationale behind it.
The payoff: Accommodating and planning for change in project requirements helps mitigate risk and decreases costly rework.
Trap 4: failure to communicate effectively
Ineffective communication is often a root cause of project failure. The perspective of development teams, customers, end-users, and executives are different for each group, as are their needs for communication. If you don’t express requirements using methods your stakeholders can easily understand, you can’t possibly gain consensus on requirements.
Avoid the trap
Know your audience and communicate in ways that help them understand the information. Make use of diagrams, user stories, sketching, and storyboards.
Create glossaries, document templates, and feedback forms that are clear, concise, and easy to use.
Useprototypingto help stakeholders visualize the solution. This can either augment text or completely replace it depending on the level of detail required.
Elicit feedback from all of your stakeholder representatives. Remember that one or two people tend to be the most vocal. Don’t make the mistake of overlooking others’ feedback.
Alwaysrespondto feedback, preferably with some clear statement of status such as, “will incorporate,” “placed on a wish list” or “unable to accommodate” If you ask for input, acknowledge it.
The payoff: Effective communication makes the most efficient use of everyone’s valuable time and helps avoid misunderstandings that derail projects.
Trap 5: failure to communicate frequently
Failure to communicate with stakeholders early and often leads to one primary problem: rework. Developing a product for customers without consulting them while that product is being developed is just asking for trouble. The biggest reason it happens is that we often think we know what our customers want well enough that we don’t need to consult them. And stakeholders usually have different priorities.
Sometimes teams don’t communicate with stakeholders because they prefer to avoid confrontations. But if you want a positive result and minimum risk and rework, it is important to collaborate with stakeholders not just at the beginning of a project but throughout the entire process, from start to finish.
Avoid the trap
Identify key stakeholders, including customers. Choose a representative from each group to communicate with regularly.
For large, in-person stakeholder workshops, consider using skilled facilitators. Good facilitators are worth their weight in gold in keeping everyone on track for attaining the meeting objectives.
Establish regular checkpoints with your stakeholders. Determine at the beginning of the project how often you need to check-in. Schedule time for keeping stakeholders up to date as unexpected changes occur.
Make it easy for your stakeholders to provide feedback. When they do, let others see their feedback to generate better discussions.
The payoff: Regular communication reduces risks, increases team productivity, and avoids rework. Ultimately it helps deliver the product the customer wants.
Trap 6: unwieldy documents and too much information
Do you have time to review and give feedback on a 200-page document? Probably not— and most likely, neither do your stakeholders. Doing more work than necessary and adding unnecessary detail to documentation costs both time and money. It is unproductive for the person creating it and a hindrance to the people looking for information they need to get their work done. Two common missteps include adding too much detail to requirements too early in the process and requiring more traceability than is necessary to facilitate effective lifecycle management.
Think quality, not quantity. Better to add just enough detail to your requirements and identify just enough traceability to get the job done— not the entire job, but the next piece or iteration that needs to be completed.
Avoid the trap
Large, dense documents are not very consumable by stakeholders. Invest in communication tools that efficiently gather and disseminate requirements information.
Use visual techniques to model business and product requirements. Business process diagrams and use case diagrams, storyboards, and sketches can help cut through text-heavy clutter.
Provide a glossary of industry terms, acronyms, and domain-specific terms to facilitate communication.
Create transparency of feedback. When your stakeholders can review each other’s feedback, the discussion is richer, problems come to light, missing requirements are identified and necessary details get filled in.
Add just enough information to your documents so the rest of your team members can complete their work.
Remember that requirements management is an ongoing process. There will be other opportunities to add more detail to requirements and to capture more traceability later when it may be more appropriate.
The payoff: Focused documentation and feedback loops increase the efficiency of all stakeholders. Reduction of extraneous details in both requirements and traceability increases quality by focusing on the most important information— while postponing further detail until it’s needed.
Trap 7: hidden project artifacts
Engineers, developers, and testers often aren’t aware of the project vision or can’t locate the documentation for the architecture or the business requirements— that is, if they’re created at all. Without easy access to these foundational documents, how can we possibly expect them to deliver models, code, and tests that solve the right customer problems? We can’t. Transparency to all project artifacts is critical to the success of any software project.
Avoid the trap
Keep all project artifacts in a central repository that is accessible by project team members. Having to search multiple sources for relevant documents is frustrating and time-consuming.
Make sure documents are categorized and managed in such a way that they are easy to find.
Ensure that when changes occur, the team is informed. Automatic notifications can help deliver this information.
The payoff: Accessibility and management of information and transparency of project artifacts reduces rework, diminishes waste, and promote reuse because it makes collaboration and communication easier.
Trap 8: Ambiguous requirements
Ambiguous requirements are the result of unclear or missing information. This leads to confusion and rework. Project teams spend too much time trying to get clarification so they can design, code, and test. It’s very difficult for engineers or architects to develop relevant models, developers to write defect-free code and testers to develop the right test cases without clear requirements. Unfortunately, reworking requirements are so common that it can become an accepted practice— rework is just built into the schedule and budget.
Ambiguity also tends to push risks into the next phase of the project. Requirements then have to be reworked, and that poses problems to project schedule and cost. This trap is especially damaging to fixed-cost projects.
What causes ambiguity? Poor writing, inaccurate information, and the assumption that the audience understands just as much as you do.
Avoid the trap
Use a writing reference, such as Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White— which has long been considered the authoritative reference on writing crisp, clear text— before and during requirements creation.
Createa glossary, and make sure every acronym and technical term is included.
Pretend you are writing for a student just out of college or someone who recently joined the organization. Don’t assume the audience will know every term and understand every concept.
Augment text with visuals. It’s a great way to express both simple and complex concepts.
Step back. After writing any draft document, put it down for a while and read it later. A fresh perspective can reveal ambiguities.
The payoff: Clear, understandable requirements are the foundation of your software project.
Trap 9: failure to measure and assess requirements processes
Defining and managing requirements can be a complex task. Missing and ambiguous requirements can easily result in missed schedules, cost overruns, and decreased productivity and quality as downstream project deliverables fail to provide value to stakeholders. Don’t wait for disaster to strike— assess your project status regularly.
Organizations must have the ability to review, assess, and improve their requirements process. Having accurate insight into data, processes, and practices is a key component of success. Measuring project and process outcomes allow for continual process improvements across the software delivery lifecycle, which reduces project failures and lowers business costs.
Avoid the trap
As part of your process, conduct a “lessons learned” feedback session at the end of each development iteration or release.
Also, do a “lessons remembered” session before starting a new project. To encourage continual improvement, you need to not only capture lessons learned at the end of an iteration or release but also reinforce those lessons as you move forward.
Define and collect metrics that ensure your success. For example, measure the impact of changes to your requirements, test case coverage, priority, cost and effort of business, and product requirements. As you become more experienced with measurement, you’ll find just the right combination of metrics that allows you to continually improve your requirements process.
The payoff: Ongoing measurement of project performance reveals small problems before they become big issues.
Trap 10: Isolating your requirements
Viewing requirements as isolated entities, failing to capture relationships between requirements and other artifacts, and failing to recognize dependencies between requirements leads to increased project risk and rework. Re-prioritizing one requirement without considering its effect on other requirements results in increased project risk and costs.
For example, a risky trap that organizations often succumb to is not capturing the relationship between project requirements, business requirements, and other downstream deliverables such as models, test cases, and defects. When you fall into this trap, you deliver a product that doesn’t satisfy stakeholder needs.
Avoid the trap
Identify relationships between requirements and then manage them together.
Create the right level of traceability between requirements and downstream deliverables that balances the traceability needed for effective lifecycle management with support for productivity.
As you make changes to requirements and re-prioritize them, consider the effect of these changes to related requirements and your downstream deliverables.
Use tools that allow you to easily visualize the relationships you’ve identified.
The payoff: Identifying and managing relationships between requirements and other artifacts mitigates project risk; helps ensure alignment between your business requirements, product requirements, and downstream deliverables; and results in lower development costs.
IBM requirements solutions can help you avoid common software development traps.
There are many traps in software. Some of the most expensive ones occur in the requirements space because that is where the foundation for your project is laid. Lack of planning, lack of communication, and collaboration with stakeholders, ineffective requirements elicitation, and requirement management techniques all lead to problems. When we don’t measure how we’re doing and continually make improvements, the risk escalates quickly and the project gets out of control— something you may never recover from.
IBM software requirements solutions incorporate many Best Practices that help you avoid these common traps and enjoy the payoffs.
IBM’s requirements management solution enables you to capture, trace, analyze, and manage changes to requirements in a secure, central, and accessible location. These capabilities strengthen collaboration, increases transparency and traceability, minimizes rework, and expands usability. IBM solutions make it easier to adhere to standards and maintain regulatory compliance.
Key capabilities include:
Requirements traceability – Link individual artifacts to test cases for full visibility of changes in requirements as they happen. Capture all annotations, maintain them, and make them easily accessible.
Variant management – Manage the entire version and variant process while monitoring the progression of the system through a shared dashboard. Store data in a central location and present it in document format.
Compliance – Incorporate industry standards and regulations into your requirements to achieve compliance early on. Building compliance into the end-to-end engineering lifecycle makes achieving compliance less complex.
Quality – Using Watson Natural Language Service IBM provides the capability to evaluate requirement quality using guidelines from INCOSE for writing complete, clear, and testable requirements – to accelerate your review process and increase requirement quality.
For more information
To learn more about IBM requirement solutions for software or product development, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit IBM Requirements Solutions.
In his keynote address, Imran Hashmi, the leader of Engineering Sales for Americas, delved into the captivating world of generative AI and its remarkable impact. The adoption rate of generative AI has exceeded expectations, providing end-users with unprecedented power and control in various domains. From generating ideas for special occasions to comprehending complex topics and even assisting in debugging code, generative AI has the potential to revolutionize how we interact with technology. However, as Imran Hashmi pointed out, along with its great potential, generative AI also brings risks and challenges that need to be addressed.
The Power and Control of Generative AI
Generative AI is a game-changer, empowering individuals in countless ways. It serves as a valuable assistant for generating ideas and content for a range of occasions, from birthdays to anniversaries and weddings. It provides writing support, aids in comprehending complex subjects like quantum computing, and even assists with code debugging. The possibilities seem endless, and we have only begun to scratch the surface of what generative AI can achieve.
Risks and Limitations
While generative AI offers immense potential, it’s crucial to recognize its limitations and potential risks. Imran Hashmi shared an incident involving a reporter who interacted with a generative AI platform, pretending to be a 13-year-old girl seeking advice. The AI provided inappropriate suggestions, failing to grasp the context that the girl was interacting with a much older individual. This highlights the AI’s limitations in understanding context and factual information. It serves as a reminder that blindly trusting generative AI can have unintended consequences.
The Danger of Blind Trust
One of Imran Hashmi’s primary concerns regarding generative AI is its ability to speak authoritatively, leading users to trust it blindly. While generative AI can provide valuable insights and support, it’s important to remember that it lacks true understanding and consciousness. Asking a generative AI if it can be trusted will yield a simple and honest response: “No.” Users must exercise caution and not solely rely on generative AI without critical thinking and human judgment.
Building Blocks for Success
To navigate the evolving landscape of generative AI, Imran Hashmi outlined three essential building blocks for businesses to consider in their AI strategies.
Large Language Models: Large language models like ChatGPT have played a significant role in unlocking the potential of generative AI. These models have demonstrated the power of natural language processing and understanding, enabling more sophisticated interactions between humans and machines.
Foundational Models with Transformers: Foundational models that leverage transformers have proven to be invaluable in utilizing unlabeled data effectively. These models form the backbone of generative AI systems, enhancing their ability to generate high-quality content and insights.
Generative AI for New Content: Generative AI holds tremendous potential for creating new content across various domains. By harnessing the capabilities of generative AI, businesses can enhance creativity, productivity, and innovation.
Imran Hashmi highlighted IBM’s active contribution to the development of generative AI models. IBM not only offers a range of AI models, including the foundational ones discussed, but also focuses on sustainability. IBM’s sustainability group, responsible for engineering products, has developed a “requirements” model that ensures compliance with standards, minimizes ambiguity, and mitigates risks.
Conclusion
Generative AI has opened up a world of possibilities, providing power and control to end-users across industries. While its potential is immense, it’s essential to approach generative AI with caution and recognize its limitations. Blindly trusting AI without critical thinking can lead to unintended consequences. By leveraging the building blocks of large language models, foundational models with transformers, and generative AI for new content, businesses can unlock the full potential of AI. IBM’s contribution and sustainability focus further exemplify the commitment to responsible and innovative AI development. To explore IBM’s offerings and engage further, visit ibm.com/elm or reach out to Imran Hashmi directly at imran.contact. Generative AI is shaping the future, and it’s up to us to navigate its challenges and harness its immense power for the benefit of all.
We are currently experiencing a critical moment in history where innovative technologies, particularly AI, are fundamentally reshaping businesses and society as a whole.
The majority of AI systems currently in use are based on machine learning (ML), and IBM offers the most comprehensive range of ML deployment options for businesses.
The emergence of generative AI and foundation models has enabled unprecedented scalability in AI. It is anticipated that by 2025, foundation models will power a significant portion of AI solutions within enterprises.
As businesses adopt AI, they must consider three crucial factors: the quality of the models, the creation of unique business value, and the integration of AI into existing business processes.
To succeed in the AI landscape, our clients need to think about both the present and the future. IBM goes beyond language capabilities by developing foundation models trained on diverse types of business data.
Our watsonx platform, consisting of watsonx.ai, watsonx.data, and watsonx.governance, empowers clients to build, train, optimize, and implement AI solutions across their organizations, utilizing critical and trustworthy data from any source.
However, AI alone is not sufficient. In the past, transformative technologies only unlocked their true potential when they converged with other technologies.
Moreover, trust is of utmost importance. If our clients are expected to deliver essential services or provide accurate information, insights, and recommendations at scale, their systems cannot afford to be unreliable, contain errors, or exhibit biases.
Additionally, focus is crucial. To effectively harness the power of AI, our clients must align their data strategy with their overall business strategy. The more tailored and customized an AI model is to their specific business needs, the more value it can create.
watsonx, powered by Red Hat OpenShift, offers versatility and can run on any platform.
With watsonx, clients and partners can generate unique business value.
By leveraging watsonx, clients gain access to a comprehensive toolkit, advanced technology, robust infrastructure, and expert consultation services to build their own AI models or refine and customize existing ones, enabling scalable AI deployment for business success.
Scaled Agile has released SAFe® 6.0, which offers the latest Lean-Agile practices to help enterprises deal with rapidly changing challenges and opportunities. This update is a comprehensive improvement from version 5.1, with many new advanced practices, and updates to the Big Picture and terminology. IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) 7.0.2 now supports two new predefined process templates for SAFe 6.0: Full SAFe 6.0 and Essential SAFe 6.0. These templates can be used to configure the tooling environment for SAFe Portfolio, Large Solution, Portfolio, or Essential SAFe 6.0 configuration in ELM.
Some of the noteworthy new items in the SAFe 6.0 templates are:
OKRs support for defining clear goals and measurable outcomes.
Updates to strategic themes for improved business context and portfolio strategy.
New flow metrics reports for accelerating value flow.
Terminology updates for simplicity and clarity.
Updated roles and permissions to empower teams and clarify responsibilities.
Updated guidance for working with SAFe 6.0 templates.
SAFe 6.0 templates also support the SAFe 6.0 data model, which includes lean budgeting for organizations to adopt a financial governance approach that funds value streams instead of projects, accelerating value delivery and reducing overhead and other costs. SAFe 6.0 Flow Metrics JRS reports help measure the flow of business value through all the activities involved in producing business value through a value stream. The guidance on roles, key collaborations, and responsibility wheel has been updated to help teams improve their performance and better support the organization’s goals. SAFe 6.0 templates have been updated to reflect the recommended terminology changes by SAFe 6.0.
