When we own the horizontal and vertical, we get to move, make changes, and respond to customer requirements at the pace we’re used to. We think this is a really big deal. —James Hamilton, an AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer
Applying SAFe to Hardware Development
Note: This article is part of Extended SAFe Guidance and represents official SAFe content that cannot be accessed directly from the Big Picture.
Business Agility requires everyone involved in product delivery to use Lean and Agile practices to create innovative, high-quality products. As Agile adoption extends beyond software, hardware development needs to keep pace. Although the hardware community is relatively new to Agile, SAFe’s Lean-Agile Values and Principles are universal. They can be used to guide hardware engineers to create and adopt their own best practices. An Agile transformation will ultimately affect every part of the Enterprise. Twenty years ago, businesses struggled to deliver value to their customers due to bottlenecks in software development. Software practitioners began applying Agile practices and created new technologies such as virtualization, microservices, and infrastructure-as-code, accelerating execution and driving innovations. Today, organizations that employ these Agile practices and development innovations deliver value significantly faster with higher quality. And those early innovators now dominate the software marketplace. Organizations building hardware systems now find themselves in a similar position. However, they can now apply the insights from the previous two decades. Many companies have already started this journey (Figure 1). Through extensive use of virtualization and learning in the digital world, General Motors cut the Hummer EV’s launch time in half [1]. This is because digital engineering shifts learning to the left by integrating virtual drawings, models, and simulations to get feedback before creating physical parts. SpaceX uses additive manufacturing on all parts of its system, from rocket engines to helmets [2]. Additive manufacturing prints physical parts on-premises directly from computer-aided design (CAD) data, on-premises, faster than traditional manufacturing and assembly processes. Apple, Google, and Amazon also design their hardware to meet business demands [3].
