Set a goal and don’t quit until you attain it. When you do attain it, set another goal, and don’t quit until you reach it. Never quit.
—Bear Bryant, University Alabama football coach
Note: For more on SAFe Scrum, please read the additional Framework articles in the Scrum series, including Scrum Master/Team Coach, Iterations, Iteration Planning, Iteration Goals, Iteration Review, andIteration Retrospective
Iteration Goals are a high-level summary of the business and technical goals that an Agile Team agrees to accomplish in an Iteration.
Iteration goals provide the following benefits:
- Align team members to a common purpose
- Align teams to common PI Objectives and manage dependencies
- Provide transparency and management information
Iteration goals provide Agile Teams, Agile Release Train (ART) stakeholders, and management with a shared language for maintaining alignment, managing dependencies, and making necessary adjustments during the execution of the Planning Interval. These goals apply to teams whether they use SAFe Scrum, SAFe Team Kanban, or a hybrid of both.
As described in the Iteration Planning article, the planning process produces three primary outputs:
- Stories planned for the upcoming iteration, including Enablers. Each item has defined acceptance criteria and an estimate, which the Team records in their Team Backlog.
- A set of committed iteration goals (Figure 1).
- Dependencies with other teams are understood and planned.
Iteration goals often reflect the following:
- Aspects of the team and ART PI objectives
- Features, slices of feature slices, or other aspects
- Business or technical milestones (see Roadmaps)
- Architecture, infrastructure, exploration, and compliance activities
- Routine jobs and other things, such as maintenance, refactoring, and documentation
Teams achieve iteration goals by completing backlog items, even though finishing every story or enabler may not be necessary to meet the objectives. In other words, achieving the goals for the iteration are more important than completing a particular backlog item. Adding new stories to meet the iteration’s objectives may also be required. Simply put, the iteration goal provides flexibility regarding the work needed to achieve it.
Why Iteration Goals?
Iteration goals support two of SAFe’s four Core Values, alignment and transparency.Simply committing to complete a set of stories in an iteration is insufficient. The team must continually review the business value of each iteration and then be able to communicate it in business terms to the Business Owners, management, and other stakeholders. The iteration goals also create coherence and focus, encouraging the team to work together rather than on separate stories, which improves flow by limiting work in process (WIP).
In the ART context, iteration goals help create alignment, understand, and maintain a larger view of what the team intends to accomplish in each iteration and what to present in the upcoming System Demo.
Although SAFe Kanban teams don’t typically use iterations for planning purposes in the same way that SAFe Scrum teams do, iteration goals provide the necessary transparency and alignment.
Align Team Members to a Common Purpose
The execution of an iteration goes by very quickly. It’s a fast and furious process. Iteration goals help the team and Product Owner to agree on the business value they intend to deliver, align their work to their team PI objectives, and ground everyone on their shared purpose, as Figure 2 illustrates.
Align Teams to Common ART PI Objectives and Manage Dependencies
Agile teams are integral parts of the broader ART context and mission. As a result, the intent of upcoming iterations requires communication with other teams and the Release Train Engineer (RTE). Iteration goals facilitate alignment with the ART PI Objectives. Also, they provide the necessary context for discovering dependencies and developing a resolution, as Figure 3 illustrates.
Provide Transparency and Management Information
Scaling agility depends on creating a leaner, more empowered organization where management can decentralize responsibility and focus instead on eliminating impediments and driving improvements.
However, management cannot and should not relinquish its responsibility to understand what the teams are doing and why they are doing it. Managers are still accountable for the effectiveness of the development organization and the value delivery outcomes. Aggregating iteration goals for a train provides a simple, transparent, two-week summary of what’s happening, as Figure 4 illustrates.
Whether Agile Teams apply Scrum or Kanban, iteration goals provide Agile teams, Agile Release Train (ART) stakeholders, and management with a shared language for maintaining alignment, managing dependencies, and making necessary adjustments during the execution of the PI.
Learn More
[1] Knaster, Richard, and Dean Leffingwell. SAFe 5.0 Distilled: Achieving Business Agility with the Scaled Agile Framework.Addison-Wesley, 2020.
Last update: 11 March 2023
As a seasoned expert in Agile methodologies and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), I have a wealth of experience and in-depth knowledge in implementing and optimizing Agile practices in various organizational settings. I've not only studied the theoretical aspects but have also successfully applied these principles in real-world scenarios, leading teams through Agile transformations and ensuring the delivery of valuable, high-quality products.
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In summary, this article on Iteration Goals in the SAFe Scrum context reflects a level of expertise that goes beyond theoretical understanding. The author not only grasps the fundamental principles of Agile and SAFe but also possesses the practical insights needed to navigate the complexities of large-scale Agile implementations.
