The 7 SAFe Core Competencies

The SAFe Core Competencies

The SAFe Core Competencies encompass seven areas vital for achieving Business Agility. They are central to PI Planning as this event aligns teams on the business strategy and execution for the upcoming Planning Interval.

SAFe Business Agility

The seven SAFe Core Competencies are:

Lean-Agile Leadership: Inspires adoption of Agile practices.
Team and Technical Agility: Enhances team capabilities and technical skills.
Agile Product Delivery: Delivers customer value through fast, integrated delivery cycles.
Enterprise Solution Delivery: Manages large-scale, complex solutions.
Lean Portfolio Management: Aligns strategy and execution.
Organizational Agility: Enables quick, decentralized decision-making.
Continuous Learning Culture: Encourages innovation and improvement.

PI Planning is an essential event in SAFe that applies these competencies in a focused manner. During PI Planning, Lean-Agile Leadership fosters alignment on the shared mission and vision. Team and Technical Agility allows synchronized planning and dependency management across Agile teams. Agile Product Delivery ensures that teams plan to deliver customer value in the upcoming PI. Organizational Agility, Enterprise Solution Delivery, and Lean Portfolio Management provide the context and strategy for the work. A continuous Learning Culture helps teams retrospect and improve their planning processes for future PIs. Implementing these competencies during PI Planning contributes to overall Business Agility.

What is Organizational Agility?

Organizational Agility ensures swift adaptation to market changes through Lean-thinking teams and Agile practices, optimizing business processes for timely response to customer needs and new opportunities.

Organizational Agility (OA) represents a vital aspect of Business Agility within the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). It focuses on enabling an organization to adapt to market changes and emerging opportunities swiftly. This agility is achieved by instilling Lean-thinking and Agile practices across all levels of the organization, ensuring that teams can respond quickly and efficiently to customer needs and new opportunities.

At the core of OA are three key dimensions:

Lean-Thinking People and Agile Teams: This dimension emphasizes training and cultivating a mindset among all involved in solution delivery. It consists in embracing Lean and Agile values, principles, and practices. The goal is to create a flexible, responsive, and continuously improving workforce.
Lean Business Operations: Teams apply Lean principles to business processes. This involves understanding, mapping, and continuously improving these processes. The focus is maximizing efficiency and effectiveness in delivering and supporting business solutions.
Strategy Agility: This dimension ensures the enterprise remains Agile enough to sense market changes and adapt its strategy accordingly. It involves preparing to pivot strategies quickly in response to changing market demands or emerging trends.

Organizational Agility in SAFe is not just about speeding up processes; it’s about creating a culture and structure that allows an organization to respond effectively and efficiently to changes and challenges in the business environment. It moves away from traditional, siloed organizational structures, favoring a more integrated approach that aligns teams and processes around value streams. This alignment facilitates better decision-making, faster delivery of value, and an enhanced ability to address the opportunities and threats of the digital age.

Traditional business models, often structured for control and stability, are inadequate in today’s fast-paced digital economy. To stay competitive, organizations must adopt a leaner, more Agile approach. This involves significant changes across the enterprise, positively impacting how businesses manage, strategize, and execute their operations.

SAFe’s approach to digital transformation involves what is termed the ‘dual operating system.’ This concept combines the stability and resources of the existing hierarchical organization with the entrepreneurial drive of a value stream network. By reorganizing around the flow of value rather than traditional organizational silos, SAFe helps restore agility and innovation, enabling organizations to better focus on new ideas and the delivery, operation, and support of existing solutions. This dual system approach is key in leveraging Organizational Agility to meet the demands of the digital age.

What is Lean Portfolio Management?

Lean Portfolio Management aligns strategy with execution in SAFe, ensuring efficient resource allocation and governance for optimal business outcomes.

Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a strategic tool that aligns portfolio execution with enterprise strategy. It optimizes resource allocation and governance to achieve efficient and effective outcomes. LPM addresses the challenges of rapid change and complexity in the digital era, focusing on agility and flexibility in portfolio management.

LPM operates on three key dimensions:

Strategy & Investment Funding: This dimension ensures that the portfolio aligns with enterprise strategy and is adequately funded. It involves setting priorities, allocating resources, and making funding decisions to create and maintain solutions that meet business targets. It requires a keen understanding of the financial, technical, and business contexts.
Agile Portfolio Operations: This dimension coordinates and supports decentralized Agile Release Train (ART) execution while fostering operational excellence. It plays a critical role in ensuring that the various teams within the organization work in synergy towards common goals.
Lean Governance: This aspect of LPM oversees spending, audit, compliance, and reporting. It establishes mechanisms to monitor and guide financial expenditure, ensuring compliance with both internal policies and external regulations. This governance framework is crucial for maintaining transparency and accountability in the organization’s operations.

LPM operates within a specific portfolio containing a set of Development Value Streams (DVS) for a business domain in an enterprise. Each DVS is responsible for building, supporting, and maintaining solutions for Operational Value Streams (OVS) delivered to the enterprise’s external or internal customers.

The critical shift from traditional portfolio management to LPM is driven by the need to compete in the ‘age of software and digital.’ Traditional portfolio management practices, designed for a less dynamic era, are often ill-suited for the uncertainties and demands of the modern digital marketplace. LPM addresses this gap by embracing a Lean-Agile way of working, facilitating faster delivery of innovative solutions and enabling businesses to adapt to market changes more effectively.

LPM’s importance is highlighted because it holds the highest decision-making and financial accountability for a portfolio’s solutions and value streams. The roles involved in LPM are varied, often spanning different parts of an organization’s hierarchy. Executives and business owners who understand the broader financial, technical, and business contexts play a pivotal role in LPM, holding responsibilities for strategy, investment funding, and ensuring alignment between strategy and execution.

LPM in SAFe is a strategic, integrated portfolio management approach. It ensures alignment between strategy and execution, optimizes resource allocation, and enhances governance, all crucial for achieving Business Agility in the digital age.

What is Enterprise Solution Delivery?

Enterprise Solution Delivery optimizes large-scale solution building with Lean-Agile principles, ensuring rapid, compliant, and quality-driven delivery in complex environments.

Enterprise Solution Delivery (ESD) in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) addresses the complexities of developing and evolving large-scale solutions, which often involve extensive teams and stringent regulatory requirements. ESD integrates Lean-Agile principles to streamline these systems’ building, deployment, and maintenance, ensuring they meet high quality and compliance standards while adapting to market demands efficiently.

ESD encompasses three key dimensions, each with specific practices:

Lean Systems Engineering: This dimension applies Lean-Agile Practices to the engineering process. Key practices include:
- Specifying the solution incrementally.
- Applying multiple planning horizons.
- Designing for change.
- Frequently integrating the end-to-end solution.
- Continually addressing compliance concerns.
Coordinating Trains and Suppliers: This dimension focuses on managing and aligning complex value streams with a shared mission. Practices include:
- Using Solution Trains to build large solutions.
- Managing the supply chain.
Continually Evolve Live Systems: This dimension ensures that large solutions and their development pipelines support continuous delivery. Practices include:
- Building an end-to-end Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP).
- Evolving deployed systems.
- Actively managing artificial intelligence/machine learning systems.

ESD is critical in the digital age, where traditional development models like the ‘V’ model are often too slow and rigid. This model, which emphasizes large batches of specification and design with handoffs, can delay feedback and hinder responsiveness to market and technical changes.

In contrast, SAFe’s Lean-Agile Mindset, Values, and Principles underpin ESD, guiding organizations toward more efficient and responsive development processes. These principles include:

Assume variability; preserve options: This addresses uncertainty in significant solution development, advocating for Set-Based Design and a fixed-variable Solution Intent to keep options open.
Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles: This emphasizes reducing uncertainty through quick building, integrating, and deploying system functionality for timely feedback.
Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems: This principle shifts the assessment of the progress to objective, verifiable evidence rather than traditional phase-gate milestones.
Decentralize decision-making: This reduces delays in decision-making, improving productivity and innovation at scale.
Organize around value: This reduces functional silos and creates optimal Agile Teams and Development Value Streams for faster, more predictable, and higher-quality value delivery.

Adopting ESD practices enables organizations to build and maintain large, complex solutions more effectively. It allows for rapid adaptation to changes, better alignment with customer needs, and compliance with regulatory standards. ESD transforms large solution development from a traditional, sequential approach to a more dynamic, iterative, and integrated process, essential for competing and thriving in today’s fast-paced, technology-driven world.

What is Agile Product Delivery?

Agile Product Delivery in SAFe ensures rapid, customer-focused product and service delivery, balancing execution with customer engagement for the right solutions at the right time.

Agile Product Delivery (APD) is a core competency of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) that focuses on delivering innovative products and services quickly and efficiently. APD is essential for achieving Business Agility, as it balances the focus on execution with customer engagement, ensuring the creation of the right solutions for the right customers at the right time.

APD is structured around three key dimensions:

Customer Centricity and Design Thinking: This dimension emphasizes understanding and addressing customer needs. It involves:
- Focusing on the customer through user and market research.
- Understanding customer needs deeply.
- Empathizing with customers.
- Building whole product solutions.
- Creating customer lifetime value.
DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline: This dimension lays the foundation for releasing value anytime to meet demand. It involves:
- Continuous Exploration for aligning with customer and market needs.
- Continuous Integration for integrating the work of many Agile Teams.
- Continuous Deployment for migrating solutions to production.
- Release on Demand for making value available based on market and business needs.
Develop on Cadence, Release on Demand: This dimension separates the development of solutions from their release, providing flexibility and responsiveness. It involves:
- Predictable, routine development activities on a fast, synchronized cadence.
- Releasing solutions based on customer or market demand.

Customer Centricity and Design Thinking in APD put the customer at the forefront, focusing on creating positive user experiences and building long-term relationships. This mindset drives the development of solutions that are not only desirable and viable but also economically sustainable.

The Develop on Cadence, Release on Demand approach helps manage variability in product development. It enables organizations to release solutions as soon as they are needed by the market, thus improving business agility.

DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline in APD support the delivery of new functionality. This includes promoting innovation (Continuous Exploration), building quality into the development process (Continuous Integration), and managing the migration of solutions from staging to production (Continuous Deployment). This pipeline ensures that new functionality can be released quickly and reliably, in whole or part, to meet customer demands.

Agile Product Delivery in SAFe integrates customer-centric design thinking with Agile development practices. It combines predictable development cadences with the flexibility to release on demand, all underpinned by a robust DevOps culture and a Continuous Delivery Pipeline. This integration ensures that enterprises can rapidly deliver innovative products and services closely aligned with customer needs and market demands.

What is Team and Technical Agility?

Team and Technical Agility is foundational for Business Agility, focusing on high-performing teams applying Agile principles to deliver high-quality solutions rapidly.

Team and Technical Agility (TTA) in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a core competency focusing on the skills and practices necessary for Agile teams to create and support business solutions. It is foundational for Business Agility, as the ability of an organization to thrive in the digital age relies on its teams’ capability to deliver solutions that reliably meet customer needs.

TTA consists of three critical dimensions:

Agile Teams: The basic building block of Agile development, consisting of cross-functional groups of 10 or fewer individuals. These teams iteratively define, build, test, and deliver value, applying SAFe Scrum, SAFe Team Kanban, or a hybrid method. They focus on five key areas:
- Connecting with the customer.
- Planning the work.
- Delivering value.
- Getting feedback.
- Improving relentlessly.
Teams of Agile Teams: This dimension addresses the need for multiple Agile teams to collaborate as part of an Agile Release Train (ART). ARTs operate across business functions, delivering one or more solutions. They align teams to a common mission, requiring a spectrum of skills applied to similar areas of responsibility as individual Agile teams.
Built-In Quality: This set of practices ensures outputs meet appropriate quality standards. Building quality into products and services during development is favored over merely inspecting for quality before release. Key domains and practices of built-in quality include:
- Business functions: Unique quality standards for non-technology disciplines.
- Software applications: Practices addressing functional, non-functional, and compliance requirements.
- IT systems: Infrastructure quality, focusing on scalability, reliability, and security.
- Hardware: Physical specifications like weight, tension, heat, and others.
- Cyber-physical systems: Complex arrays of quality standards for systems with hardware and software components.

Agile teams in SAFe are multidisciplinary, containing all the people and skills needed to deliver value across functional domains. Team members are dedicated full-time to the team, enhancing flow and shared purpose. Agile teams include two specialty roles: the Product Owner, who ensures alignment with customer needs, and the Scrum Master/Team Coach, who facilitates the Agile process.

Agile teams are organized into four topologies:

Stream-aligned team: Directly delivers value to customers or end-users.
Complicated subsystem team: Specializes in specific subsystems requiring deep expertise.
Platform team: Develops and supports platforms serving other teams.
Enabling team: Helps other teams develop new skills or technologies.

Team and Technical Agility is essential for delivering value efficiently and with high quality. It supports rapid adaptation to change, ensures alignment with customer needs, and promotes continuous improvement, which are crucial for an organization’s success in today’s dynamic business environment.

What is Lean-Agile Leadership?

Lean-Agile Leadership drives organizational change and operational excellence by exemplifying Lean-Agile values, principles, and practices, empowering teams to achieve their full potential.

Lean-Agile Leadership is a fundamental competency in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), crucial for achieving Business Agility. It involves leaders at all levels of an organization embodying and promoting Lean-Agile ways of working. These leaders drive and sustain organizational change and operational excellence by setting an example and empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential.

Lean-Agile Leadership encompasses three main dimensions:

Mindset, Values, and Principles: Leaders embed Lean-Agile thinking in their beliefs, decisions, responses, and actions. This mindset transformation is crucial for guiding organizational change toward Business Agility.
Leading by Example: Leaders gain authority and influence by modeling desired behaviors. They inspire others by demonstrating a commitment to Lean-Agile values and principles, creating a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
Leading Change: Leaders actively lead the transformation rather than support it. They create an environment conducive to change, prepare people for new ways of working, and provide the necessary resources for the transition.

Critical aspects of Lean-Agile Leadership include:

Internalizing Lean-Agile Values and Principles: Leaders must deeply understand and practice Lean-Agile values and principles, demonstrating them consistently in their actions and decisions.
Empowering Teams: Leaders foster environments where teams have the autonomy, tools, and support to innovate and deliver value effectively.
Promoting Continuous Improvement: They constantly seek opportunities for organizational improvement and encourage teams to do the same.
Creating a Culture of Learning: Lean-Agile leaders prioritize learning and growth for themselves and their teams. They promote a mindset of insatiable learning, authenticity, and emotional competence.
Decentralizing Decision-Making: Leaders enhance agility and responsiveness by moving decision-making closer to the information source.
Developing New Mindsets: Leaders encourage the adoption of growth mindsets, emphasizing adaptability, flexibility, and a willingness to change traditional management practices.
Championing Change: They drive the change process, communicating the vision for change effectively, forming coalitions for change, and leading by personal example.

Lean-Agile Leadership is critical in steering an organization towards Business Agility. It requires leaders to not only support but actively lead the change towards Lean-Agile ways of working. This involves a profound shift in mindset, embracing new values and principles, and a commitment to lead by example, empowering teams and driving continuous improvement. Effective Lean-Agile Leadership is pivotal in creating a culture that is adaptable, innovative, and capable of thriving in the digital age.

Continuous Learning Culture

Continuous Learning Culture in SAFe fosters adaptability and innovation, enabling organizations to thrive in rapidly changing environments by leveraging collective knowledge and creativity.

A Continuous Learning Culture is a critical competency in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), crucial for organizations aiming to excel in the digital age. It’s about transforming into adaptive engines of change powered by a culture that values learning, innovation, and relentless improvement. This culture is vital for organizations to adapt and evolve in response to fast-paced technological advancements and market changes.

The three dimensions of a Continuous Learning Culture are:

Learning Organization:
- Encourages ongoing growth of employees.
- It fuels the enterprise’s ability to transform and adapt.
- Excels in creating, acquiring, transferring knowledge, and integrating new insights.
- Fosters intrinsic nature to learn and gain mastery.
Innovation Culture:
- Supports creative thinking and curiosity.
- Encourages employees to explore new ideas, experiment, and take informed risks.
- It involves exploring enhancements to existing products and experimenting with new ones.
- Includes fixing chronic defects and improving processes to reduce waste.
Relentless Improvement:
- Focuses on continuously improving solutions, products, and processes.
- Applies iterative and incremental improvements and experiments.
- Encourages a mindset of continuous improvement among all employees.
- Uses Lean methods like Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA) cycles for problem-solving.

Key practices in fostering a Continuous Learning Culture include:

Developing T-shaped Employees: Encouraging employees to build a breadth of knowledge across multiple disciplines for collaboration and deep expertise in their areas of interest.
Promoting Shared Vision: Leaders align with and articulate exciting possibilities and invite others to contribute to a shared future vision.
Encouraging Team Learning: Facilitating collective problem-solving and learning, complementing each other’s skills for group learning.
Challenging Mental Models: Encouraging teams to surface assumptions and create new models based on shared understanding and Lean-Agile working methods.
Embracing Systems Thinking: Viewing the organization holistically and optimizing the entire system rather than individual components.

SAFe’s principles and practices directly support these efforts, providing structures and opportunities for continuous learning and innovation. This includes Lean-Agile leaders modeling learning behaviors, giving time and space for creation, and encouraging experimentation and feedback. The framework also emphasizes optimizing the system, ensuring that improvements benefit the entire organization, not just isolated parts.

A Continuous Learning Culture is essential for organizations to remain competitive in the digital age. It involves creating an environment where learning, innovation, and relentless improvement are part of the organizational DNA, enabling them to adapt rapidly and continuously in response to an ever-changing world.

Conclusion

The seven SAFe Core Competencies – Lean-Agile Leadership, Team and Technical Agility, Agile Product Delivery, Enterprise Solution Delivery, Lean Portfolio Management, Organizational Agility, and Continuous Learning Culture – collectively form the backbone of Business Agility.

Each competency plays a unique yet interconnected role in ensuring an organization’s adaptability and success in the fast-paced and ever-evolving digital landscape. From inspiring Agile practices and enhancing technical skills to optimizing large-scale solutions and aligning strategy with execution, these competencies cover a comprehensive range of business aspects.

Moreover, the emphasis on continuous learning and innovation fosters an environment of relentless improvement, which is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge. Implementing these competencies, particularly during critical events like PI Planning, equips organizations with the tools and mindset necessary to drive growth, respond to market demands, and ultimately thrive in the digital age. The SAFe framework, through its structured yet flexible approach, empowers organizations to navigate the complexities of today’s business environment, turning challenges into opportunities for development and innovation.

What is the SAFe Framework?

The SAFe Framework is a method for scaling Agile practices across large organizations, where PI Planning is a key event for synchronizing all Agile teams on a shared mission.

The SAFe Framework is an industry-standard methodology that scales Agile practices across large organizations. Within this framework, PI Planning is an important event in the SAFe cadence that helps to synchronize all teams within an Agile Release Train (ART) on a shared mission. It lays the foundation for ARTs to plan, commit, and execute a set of business features over the upcoming Planning Interval. Therefore, PI Planning is the heartbeat of SAFe, facilitating alignment, collaboration, and delivery predictability.

What are the SAFe configurations?

SAFe configurations are variations of the SAFe framework to suit different organizational needs, and all configurations incorporate PI Planning for alignment and synchronization.

SAFe configurations are adaptations of the SAFe framework designed to meet diverse organizational needs based on size, complexity, and specific business objectives. There are 4 SAFe configurations, and they are:

Essential SAFe: This is the foundational level of the Scaled Agile Framework that provides the basic elements needed for teams to align on strategy, collaborate effectively, and deliver complex, multi-team solutions.
Large Solution SAFe: This configuration extends Essential SAFe to address the challenges faced when multiple Agile Release Trains are needed to deliver large-scale solutions that typically involve coordinating multiple teams across an organization.
Portfolio SAFe: This configuration adds strategic and portfolio management to the Essential SAFe configuration, providing a way to align enterprise strategy with portfolio execution and manage Lean-Agile budgeting, strategic direction, and investment funding.
Full SAFe: The most comprehensive configuration, Full SAFe integrates all other configurations to provide a complete approach to delivering large, integrated solutions while coordinating multiple Agile Release Trains and managing portfolios at the enterprise level.

SAFe Practices

What is the SAFe Requirements Model?

The SAFe Requirements Model combines Artefacts and activities that guide the creation of system solutions.

SAFe Requirements Model includes a combination of Artefacts – Epics, Capabilities, Features, and Stories, along with the corresponding activities necessary for defining and implementing a system. It’s a flexible model that can be adapted according to the needs of each organization. This model assists in breaking down large work items into manageable sizes, thus promoting incremental delivery.

What is PI Planning?

PI Planning represents a routine, face-to-face event where Agile Release Trains establish a plan for the upcoming Program Increment (PI).

Agile Release Train (ART) teams collaborate and align on a shared mission and vision in this event. PI Planning creates the framework for teams to understand their work in the broader context, set team and program PI objectives, and identify dependencies across teams. It involves two main parts: Day One focuses on business context, product vision, and team breakout sessions, while Day Two emphasizes draft plan reviews, management review, and problem-solving.

What is SAFe built-in Quality?

SAFe built-in Quality means integrating quality standards into every product increment, promoting high standards rather than fixing issues afterward.

Built-in Quality is one of the core values of SAFe and emphasizes prevention over cure. It encompasses flow, architecture and design quality, code quality, system quality, and release quality. Incorporating quality from the earliest stages of the development process reduces the cost of subsequent defects, promotes faster delivery times, and encourages frequent iterations.

What are SAFe Value Streams?

SAFe Value Streams identify the activities needed to deliver value to the customer through a product or service.

In SAFe, two types of value streams are identified: Operational and Development. Operational Value Streams are the steps that an organization uses to deliver the product or service to the customer. In contrast, Development Value Streams represent the organization’s steps to develop new products or services, underpinned by Agile Release Trains (ARTs).

What is SAFe Continuous Delivery?

SAFe Continuous Delivery refers to the development practice of always maintaining a releasable state of the product, enabling frequent and reliable releases.

SAFe’s continuous delivery pipeline consists of four aspects: Continuous Exploration, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, and Release on Demand. Continuous Delivery allows teams to reduce the lead time of feature delivery, increase deployment frequency, enhance product quality, and heighten customer satisfaction by providing regular updates and improvements.

SAFe Principles

The SAFe Principles are a set of ten fundamental principles derived from Lean and Agile methodologies that guide the implementation of SAFe.

The SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) principles are guidelines derived from Agile practices and methods, Lean product development, and systems thinking to facilitate large-scale, complex software development projects. The ten principles that make up the SAFe framework are as follows:

Take an economic view: This principle emphasizes the importance of making decisions within an economic context, considering trade-offs between risk, cost of delay, and various operational and development costs.
Apply systems thinking: This principle encourages organizations to understand the interconnected nature of systems and components and prioritize optimizing the system as a whole rather than individual parts.
Assume variability; preserve options: This principle highlights the importance of maintaining flexibility in design and requirements throughout the development cycle, allowing for adjustments based on empirical data to achieve optimal economic outcomes.
Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles: This principle advocates for incremental development in short iterations, which allows for rapid customer feedback and risk mitigation.
Base milestones on an objective evaluation of working systems: This principle emphasizes the need for objective, regular evaluation of the solution throughout the development lifecycle, ensuring that investments yield an adequate return.
Make value flow without interruptions: This principle focuses on making value delivery as smooth and uninterrupted as possible by understanding and managing the properties of a flow-based system.
Apply cadence, and synchronize with cross-domain planning: This principle states that applying a predictable rhythm to development and coordinating across various domains can help manage uncertainty in the development process.
Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers: This principle advises against individual incentive compensation, which can foster internal competition, and instead encourages an environment of autonomy, purpose, and mutual influence.
Decentralize decision-making: This principle emphasizes the benefits of decentralized decision-making for speeding up product development flow and enabling faster feedback. However, it also recognizes that some decisions require centralized, strategic decision-making.
Organize around value: This principle advocates that organizations structure themselves around delivering value quickly in response to customer needs rather than adhering to outdated functional hierarchies.

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