Seeing the horizons

The SAFe® Investment Horizon model highlights spending allocations for solutions that are created by individual Value Streams. This model is an adaption of Geoffrey Moore’s Zone to Win [1]:

Figure 13.1 – SAFe® investment horizon model illustrating solution investments by horizon (© Scaled Agile, Inc.)

Let’s explore each of the Horizons in turn. First, we need to explain that, in Figure 13.1, each cube represents a solution and that the size of the cube is meant to relatively reflect the size of the investment in that solution.

Horizon 3 (Evaluating): You will notice that the size of the “solutions” (cubes) in Horizon 3 is smaller compared to some of the other solutions in Horizon 2 and 3 because these are experiments dedicated to investigating new potential solutions. Often, an initial experiment is defined to test the Benefit Hypothesis. The investment continues until the initiative...