What are the Core Competencies of SAFe?
Essential:
- Lean-Agile Leadership
- Team and Technical Agility
- Agile Product Delivery
Large Solution:
- Enterprise Solution Delivery
Portfolio
- Lean Portfolio Management
- Organizational Agility
- Continuous Learning Culture
Define Lean-Agile Leadership
(Competency)
This competency describes how Lean-Agile Leaders drive and sustain organizational change and operational excellence by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential.
Define Team and Technical Agility
(Competency)
This competency describes the critical skills and Lean-Agile principles and practices that high-performing Agile teams and Teams of Agile teams use to create high-quality solutions for their customers.
Define Agile Product Delivery
(Competency)
This competency describes a customer-centric approach to defining, building, and releasing a continuous flow of valuable products and services to customers and users.
Define Enterprise Solution Delivery
(Competency)
This competency describes how to apply Lean-Agile principles and practices to the specification, development, deployment, operation, and evolution of the world’s largest and most sophisticated software applications, networks, and cyber-physical systems
Define Lean Portfolio Management
(Competency)
This competency aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance.
Define Organizational Agility
(Competency)
This competency describes how Lean-thinking people and Agile teams optimize their business processes, evolve strategy with clear and decisive new commitments, and quickly adapt the organization as needed to capitalize on new opportunities.
Define Continuous Learning Culture
(Competency)
This competency describes a set of values and practices that encourage individuals—and the enterprise as a whole—to continually increase knowledge, competence, performance, and innovation.
What are the 5 key elements of a Lean-Agile Leadership?
- SAFe Core Values
- Lean-Agile Mindset
- SAFe Principles
- Implementation Roadmap
- SAFe Program Consultant (SPC)
What are the SAFe Core Values?
- Alignment
- Transparency
- Built-in Quality
- Program Execution
Describe the House of Lean
the SAFe House of Lean illustrates the goal of delivering value through the pillars of respect for people and culture, flow, innovation, and relentless improvement. Leadership provides the foundation on which everything else stands.
What are the points of the Agile Manifesto?
- *Individuals and interactions** over processes and tools
- *Working software** over comprehensive documentation
- *Customer collaboration** over contract negotiation
- *Responding to change** over following a plan
Name the SAFe Lean-Agile Principles
- Take an economic view
- Apply systems thinking
- Assume variability; preserve options
- Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles
- Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems
- Visualize and limit WIP, reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths
- Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning
- Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers
- Decentralize decision-making
- Organize around value
What is the SAFe Implementation Roadmap?
The SAFe Implementation Roadmap consists of an overview graphic and a 12-article series that describes a strategy and an ordered set of activities that have proven to be effective in successfully implementing SAFe.
What is an SPC?
SAFe Program Consultant
What different types of Agile Teams are there?
Stream-aligned team – organized around the flow of work and has the ability to deliver value directly to the customer or end user.
Complicated subsystem team – organized around specific subsystems that require deep specialty skills and expertise.
Platform team – organized around the development and support of platforms that provide services to other teams.
Enabling team – organized to assist other teams with specialized capabilities and help them become proficient in new technologies.
What is a team of agile teams called?
Agile Release Train
What are some ways to establish Built-In Quality?
- Establish Flow
- Peer Review and Pairing
- Collective Ownership and Standards
- Automation
- Definition of Done
What are the 3 points of Design Thinking?
- Understanding the problem, which provides insight into the requirements and benefits of a desirable solution
- Designing the right solution, which ensures the solution is technically feasible
- Ensuring the solution is viable and sustainable by understanding and managing solution economics
Describe how an Agile Release Train Cadence is broken down
(high level)
- Program Increments - are generally 8-12 weeks and are made of:
- 3-5 Iterations - (typically 2 weeks each)
- 1 Innovation and Planning Iteration
Describe the 5 DevOps concepts that make up the acronym CALMR
Culture represents the philosophy of shared responsibility for fast value delivery across the entire Value Stream. It consists of everyone who helps create value, including Product Management, development, testing, security, compliance, operations, etc.
Automation represents the need to remove human intervention from as much of the pipeline as possible to decrease errors and reduce the overall cycle time of the release process.
Lean flow identifies the practices of limiting work in process (WIP), reducing batch size, and managing queue lengths. These hasten value flow to the customer and enable faster feedback.
Measurement fosters learning and continuous improvement by understanding and quantifying the flow of value through the pipeline.
Recovery builds systems that allow fast fixes of production issues through automatic rollback and ‘fix forward’ capabilities (i.e., fix in production).
What are the 4 main aspect of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?
- Continuous Exploration (CE)
- Continuous Integration (CI)
- Continuous Deployment (CD)
- Release on Demand
What are 5 best practices for a Learning Organization?
Personal Mastery – Employees develop as ‘T-shaped people’. They build a breadth of knowledge in multiple disciplines for efficient collaboration and deep expertise aligned with their interests and skills. T-shaped employees are a critical foundation of Agile teams.
Shared Vision – Forward-looking leaders envision, align with, and articulate exciting possibilities. Then, they invite others to share in and contribute to a common view of the future. The vision is compelling and motivates employees to contribute to achieving it.
Team Learning – Teams work collectively to achieve common objectives by sharing knowledge, suspending assumptions, and ‘thinking together’. They complement each other’s skills for group problem solving and learning.
Mental Models – Teams surface their existing assumptions and generalizations while working with an open mind to create new models based on a shared understanding of the Lean-Agile way of working and their customer domains. These models make complex concepts easy to understand and apply.
Systems Thinking – The organization sees the larger picture and recognizes that optimizing individual components does not optimize the system. Instead, the business takes a holistic approach to learning, problem-solving, and solution development. This optimization extends to business practices such as Lean Portfolio Management (LPM), which ensures that the enterprise is making investments in experimentation and learning to drive the system forward.
