SAFe — ceremonies (prescriptive)

Purpose: Prescriptive detail for each SAFe event: inputs, outputs, participants, timebox, and agenda sketch. Covers both team-level and program-level events.

Foundation intents: Ceremony foundation (methodology-neutral) (C1–C6). SAFe fork: SAFe ceremonies → ceremony foundation.

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Program-level events

PI Planning

Agenda sketch (Day 1):

1. Business context — senior leadership or Product Management
2. Product / solution vision — Product Management
3. Architecture vision and enablers — System Architect
4. Planning context and process — RTE
5. Team breakout #1 — teams draft plans, identify dependencies
6. Draft plan review — teams present, dependencies identified on program board

Agenda sketch (Day 2):

1. Planning adjustments — address overnight feedback
2. Team breakout #2 — finalize plans, resolve dependencies
3. Final plan review and program board walkthrough
4. PI Objectives — teams present committed and stretch objectives
5. Business value assignment — Business Owners assign value to each team's objectives
6. Confidence vote — all ART members; revote if < 3/5 average
7. PI Planning retrospective and moving forward — RTE facilitates

System Demo

Agenda sketch:

1. Context — RTE: iteration goals, what was planned
2. Integrated demo — team representatives show working software end-to-end
3. Feature acceptance — Product Management and Business Owners evaluate against criteria
4. Feedback capture — open discussion, new ideas, concerns
5. Wrap-up — RTE summarizes outcomes and next steps

Inspect & Adapt (I&A)

Agenda sketch:

1. PI System Demo — final integrated demo for the PI (if not done separately)
2. Quantitative review — RTE presents metrics: PI predictability, velocity trends, defect trends, cycle time
3. Qualitative review — retrospective: what went well, what didn't, across the ART
4. Problem-solving workshop — identify top problem; root-cause analysis (fishbone, 5 Whys); define improvement stories
5. Improvement backlog — vote on top items; assign to next PI backlog

ART Sync

Typically combines Scrum of Scrums (SM-focused: impediments, dependencies) and PO Sync (PO-focused: scope, priorities, feature progress). Can be combined or separate depending on ART size.

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Team-level events

Team-level events are identical to Scrum events — see Scrum — ceremonies & events (prescriptive) for full detail. Summary below for SAFe-specific context.

Iteration Planning

Daily Stand-up

Iteration Review

Iteration Retrospective

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Large Solution events (when applicable)

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References

• SAFe ceremonies → ceremony foundation — intent mapping table
• Ceremony foundation (methodology-neutral) — C1–C6 intents
• https://forgesdlc.com/methodology-safe.html — SAFe methodology summary
• SAFe — roles — event participation matrix