Hi Christoph!

The example is a few years old. We did have problems initially with prioritization where the person yelling the loudest got what they wanted.

We solved the problem by having a board of directors - in principle directors from HR, PM, Finance and so on sit in the same room together every second month. Before the meeting, they would all have received suggestions or business cases from anyone wishing to submit a case. They would then fight it out among themselves and decide the top priority business cases and a fixed amount of weeks to work on each feature. It might sound like a lot to do business cases, but they were just a few pages. The benefit was clear prioritization, and we also got rid of persons who would not put effort into writing a case. We reasoned that in that case, the need was not that great. Sometimes the directors would not prioritize a business case for many meetings, and then we just threw it away. Apparently, the demand was not very great after all.

For the business case we had used RUP previously so people were used to these so we just reused the template. Here is one example https://sceweb.uhcl.edu/helm/RationalUnifiedProcess/webtmpl/templates/mgmnt/rup_buscs.htm

If you look closely you will see that SAFe uses exactly the same format as for example:

The problem of

[describe the problem]

affects

[who are the stakeholders affected by the problem?]

the impact of which is

[what is the impact of the problem?]

a successful solution would be

[list some key benefits of a successful solution]

Funny isnt it ;)