Global markets and customer needs shift in the blink of an eye. Digital disruptors are invading your market. To survive, your organization must quickly innovate to get high-quality solutions into customers’ hands faster and more predictably. Maybe you’re headed toward those goals by adopting SAFe®, and maybe you have buy-in from leadership to embark on a SAFe journey. But if your architects aren’t on board, the business can’t execute on its vision and objectives.

Architects are critical to successfully adopting SAFe in large part because they connect with developers—if your architects understand and are committed to your SAFe transformation, your devs most likely will be too. Architects provide technical vision, guidance, and alignment to the people in your Agile Release Trains who are building your software and systems. Which is why it’s so critical for your architects to understand their roles in your SAFe rollout strategy and be involved from the get-go in your organization’s Lean-Agile transformation.

Our newest course, SAFe® for Architects with SAFe® 4 Architect certification, is designed to help architects apply their craft and do their jobs in a Lean-Agile way. Uniquely positioned between the business wanting to accomplish large initiatives and the developers building the systems, architects must align the technical strategy with business goals and communicate that strategy to development teams. In this course, architects learn how to perform this work collaboratively and continuously in small, incremental batches. Attendees will also learn how to lead from a technical perspective and connect with stakeholders to understand future business goals and ensure support from the technology side of the house.

This course targets architects in all areas of the enterprise, whether they identify with the three SAFe architect roles—Enterprise, Solution, or System—or with more domain-specific roles such as senior technical leads, senior engineers, and technical program managers. During our beta teachings of SAFe for Architects, more business-focused product managers and product owners working on highly technical products said they found the course helpful in understanding technical architecture and how products are built. Based on what we’ve learned in our beta teachings, we’ve updated our System and Solution Architect/Engineering and Architectural Runway articles that relate to what architects will learn in this course. And, we’re currently rewriting the Agile Architecture article to align with the flow of this new course—look for another notification when it’s published.

Come learn how to align architecture with business value to create continuous value flow, and how architects engage in and contribute to a Lean-Agile enterprise. Sign up for our very first publicly available SAFe for Architecture course in March where you’ll learn directly from our SAFe Fellows, some of the best minds in the industry. Register here