Leading SAFe 6.0 (SA)

Each Value Stream contains:

- Activities from recognizing an opportunity through release and validation - contains the steps, the flow of information and material, and the people who develop the solution used by the operational value streams

SAFe Core Values

- Alignment - Transparency - Respect for People - Relentless Improvement

Built-In Quality 5 Domains

- Business Functions - Software Applications - IT Systems - Hardware - Cyber-physical Systems

Principle 7 - Apply Cadence, Synchronize with cross-domain planning

- Cadence : rhythmic pattern of cross-domain planning - Synchronization : allows multiple solution perspectives to be understood, resolved, and integrated at the same time

Synchronization

- Causes multiple events to happen simultaneously - Facilitates cross-functional traditional trade-offs - Provides routine dependency management - Supports full-system integration and assessment - Provides multiple feedback perspectives

Core value: Alignment

- Communicate the vision, mission, and strategy - connect strategy - speak with a common language - understand customer

Responsibilities of Product Owner

- Connect with customer - Contribute to vision/roadmap - Manage and prioritize team backlog - Support team and deliver value - Get and apply feedback

Cadence

- Converts unpredictable events into predicable ones and lowers cost - Makes waiting times for new work predictable - Supports regular planning and cross-functional coordination - Limits batch sizes to a single interval - Controls injection of new work - Provides scheduled integration points

Benefits of Personas

- Conveys the problem end users are facing in context, and key triggers for using the product - Capture rich, concise information that inspires great products without unnecessary details

Core Value: Transparency

- Create Trust based Environment - Communicate directly, openly, and honestly - turn mistakes into learning moments - visualize work - provide ready access to needed information

Core Value: Relentless Improvement

- Create a constant sense of urgency - build a problem-solving culture - reflect and adapt frequently - provide time and space for innovation

Agiles Teams are capable, enabled, and able to:

- Define - Build - Test - Deploy

Principle 1 - Take an Economic View

- Deliver Early and Often - Apply Value Incrementally - Apply a Comprehensive Economic Framework

Principle 10 - Organize around value

- Dont organize around silos - Organize around development value streams (DVSs)

Synchronization Events

- Everyone plans together - management sets mission w/ minimum constraints - Requirements/design emerge - identify dependencies and risk - important decisions are accelerated - teams take responsibility for their own plans

Responsibilities of Scrum Master/Team Coach

- Facilitate PI planning - Support Iterative execution - Improve flow - Build high-performing teams - Improve ART performance

Decisions that should be decentralized

- Frequent - Time Critical - Requires local information

Benefits of Customer Centricity

- Greater revenue - Increased employee engagement - More satisfied customers - Alignment to mission - Better product resiliency and sustainability

Relationships between transaction cost & holding cost with optimal batch size

- Higher transaction cost makes optimal batch size bigger - higher holding cost makes optimal batch size smaller

Core Value: Respect for People

- Holds precious what it is to be human - value diversity of people/opinions - grow people through coaching and mentoring - build long-term partnerships

PDCA

- Improves learning efficiency by decreasing the time between action and effect - Reduces cost of risk-taking by truncating unsuccessful paths quickly - Is facilitated by small batch sizes - Requires increased investments in development environment

Work in Smaller Batches

- Increases Predictability - Accelerates feedback - Reduces rework - Lowers cost

Decisions that should be centralized

- Infrequent - Long-lasting - Significant economies of scale

Ways to achieve continuous flow of value

- Limiting WIP - Addressing bottlenecks - minimize dependencies - fast feedback - small batches - queue length - optimizing 'time in zone' - remediating legacy & policies/practices

Visualize and Limit WIP

- Make current WIP visible to all stakeholders - show current bottlenecks - set a WIP limit

Attributes of Systems Thinking

- Optimizing a component does not optimize the system - For the system to behave well as a system, a higher-level understanding of behavior and architecture is required - The value of a system passes through its interconnections - A system can evolve no faster than its slowest integration point

Roles of ART

- Release Train Engineer (RTE) - System Architect - Business Owner - Product Management - System Team

Specialty Roles in Agile Teams

- Scrum Master/Team Coach - Product Owner

Basic Agile Quality Practices

- Shift learning left - Pairing and peer review - Collective ownership and T-shaped skills - Artifact standards and definition of done - Workflow automation

Team topologies for team organization

- Stream-aligned team - Complicated subsystem team - Platform team - Enabling team

Principle 5 - Base milestones on object evaluation of working system

- System is build in increments w/ integration points - Integration point demonstrates evidence of feasibility of solution under development - Every milestone involves a portion of each step that produces a full increment of value

Characteristics of ART

- Virtual organization of 5-12 teams - Synchronized on a common cadence; a PI - Aligned to a common mission via ART backlog

Principle 6 - Make value flow w/o interruptions

- Visualize and Limit WIP - Work in Small Batches - Reduce Queue Length

Principle 8 - Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers

- Workers themselves are more qualified to make decisions on how they work - workers manage themselves and require autonomy

Principle 3 - Assure variability; preserve options

- You cannot possibly know everything at the start - Requirements must be flexible to make economic design choice - Designs must be flexible to support changing requirements - preservation of options improves economic results

Steps of BAVs

1. Business opportunity emerges 2. Sense opportunity 3. Fund MVP (Minimal Viable Product) 4. Organize around value 5. Connect to Customer 6. Deliver MVP 7. Pivot or Preserve 8. Learn and Adapt 9. Business Opportunity Leveraged

SAFe's Seven Core Competencies

1. Enterprise Solution Delivery 2. Lean Portfolio Management (*) 3. Organizational Agility 4. Continuous Learning Culture 5. Lean-Agile Leadership (*) 6. Team and Technical Agility (*) 7. Agile Product Delivery (*)

Agile Manifesto values

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 2. Working software over comprehensive documentation 3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 4. Responding to change over following a plan

Principles of Lean Thinking

1. Precisely specify value by product 2. identify the value stream for each product 3. Make value flow w/o interruptions 4. Let the customer pull value from the producer 5. pursue perfection

SAFe Lean-Agile Principles

1. Take an economic view 2. Apply systems thinking 3. Assume variability; preserve options 4. Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles 5. Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems 6. Make value flow without interruptions 7. Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning 8. Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers 9. Decentralize decision-making 10. Organize around value

The 8 flow accelerators

1. Visualize and limit WIP 2. Address bottlenecks 3. Minimize handoffs and dependencies 4. Get faster feedback 5. Work in smaller batches 6. Reduce queue length 7. Optimize time 'in the zone' 8. Remediate legacy practices and policies

Principle 2 - Apply Systems Thinking

2 Primary Aspects - The solution itself is a system - The enterprise building the solution is a system

Design Thinking

A clear and continuous understanding of the target market, customers, the problems they are facing, and the jobs to be done

Agile Team

A cross-functional group of five to ten people who have the ability and authority to define, build, and test some element of Solution value—all in a short Iteration timebox. Specifically, it incorporates the DevTeam, Scrum Master, and Product Owner roles.

Business Agility Value Streams (BAVs)

A rapid cycle of sensing and responding that helps the enterprise navigate the unknowns and arrive at a desirable solution before the window of opportunity closes.

Empathy Maps

A tool that helps teams develop deep, shared understanding of empathy for other people. They are used to design better experiences and value streams

Little's Law

Average wait time = average queue length / average processing rate

Principle 9 - Decentralize Decision-Making

Centralizing strategic decisions and decentralizing everything else

Personas

Characterizations of the people who might use your product

Release Train Engineer (RTE)

Coach for the ART

Product Vision

Defines what the product is, how it supports the customer's business strategy, and who will use it; makes clear what outcomes the team is responsible for and where their boundaries are

Goal of Lean Thinking

Deliver maximum value to the customer in the shortest sustainable lead time from the trigger to the point at which the customer receives the value

Autonomy

Desire to be self-directed and have control over what we work on, how we do our work, and who we work with

Purpose

Desire to do something that matters and has meaning

Set-Based Design

Developers initially cast a wider design net and consider multiple design choices. They eliminate the weaker options over time and converge on a final design based on a knowledge gained to the point

Benefit Hypothesis justifies ________ and provides ___________

Development Costs, business perspective for decision0making

SAFe creates a second virtual operating system organized around ______________

Development Value Streams

We are currently in the _____ age

Digital

Design Thinking Process

Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver

The type of techniques applied to understand a problem, design a solution, and deliver the solution to the customer

Divergent and Convergent Techniques

Intrinsic Motivation

Drive to perform an activity without any obvious external reward

What is needed to prevent the network colliding with the hierarchies?

Dual operating system

What does establishing shorter PDCA cycles do?

Enables more frequent integration points and integration points reduce risk

Dual Operating System

Fuses the stability of organizational hierarchy with the swift response ability of an empirical network

Scrum

Has an iteration backlog and teams will continuously sync and deliver value for each increment

Why hierarchies are needed

Hierarchies have provided time-tested structures, practices and policies

__________ control product development and accelerates learning

Integration points

ART Backlog

It's the holding area for upcoming Features, which are intended to address user needs and deliver business benefits for a single Agile Release Train (ART). Also contains the enabler features necessary to build the Architectural Runway.

Business Owners

Key stakeholders on the Agile Release Train

Lean-Agile Mindset consists of ____________

Lean Thinking & Agile Values

Cadence-based planning does what?

Limits Variability to a single interval

Agile Release Trains (ART)

Long-lived team of agile teams that incrementally develops, delivers, and often operates one or more solutions in a value stream

Customer Centricity

Mindset that focuses on creating positive experiences for the customer through a full set of products and services.

Second Operating System

Operating system for business agility

Enabling team

Organized to assist other teams with specialized capabilities and help them become proficient in new technologies

Product Management

Owns, defines, and prioritizes the ART Backlog

System Architect

Provides architectural guidance and technical enablement to the teams on the train

System Team

Provides processes and tools to integrate and evaluate assets early and often

Built-in Quality

Set of practices to help ensure that the outputs of Agile teams in business and technology domains meet appropriate quality standards throughout the process of creating customer value

A good way to preserve options in principle 3

Set-Based Design (SBD) or Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE)

Business Agility

The ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative, digitally-enabled business solutions.

Architectural Runway

The existing code, hardware components, marketing branding guidelines, and other variables that enable near-term business features

Main casualty of network colliding with hierarchy

The focus of customer needs

Benefit Hypothesis

The proposed measurable benefit to the end-user or business as part of a feature or capability.

Development Value Streams

The sequence of activities needed to convert a business hypothesis into a digitally-enabled solution that delivers customer value

Features

This is a service that fulfills a stakeholder need. Each one includes a benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria, and is sized or split as necessary to be delivered by a single Agile Release Train (ART) in a Program Increment (PI).

Enablers

This supports the activities needed to extend the Architectural Runway to provide future business functionality. These include exploration, architecture, infrastructure, and compliance. They are captured in the various backlogs and occur throughout the Framework.

Mastery

Urge to get better at what we do and improve our personal and team skills

Kanban

Use Kanban board to limit WIP and address bottlenecks

Reduce Queue Length

Use Little's Law: - Faster processing time decreases wait - shorter queue lengths decrease wait - wait times is controlled by queue lengths

Principle 4 - Build Incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycle

Uses plan-do-check-adjust (PDCA) cycle as the mechanism for gaining faster feedback and controlling the variability of solution development. Allows continuous improvement and acceleration of learning.

First Operating System

Value Stream Network - operates at the speed of innovation Traditional Hierarchy - offers efficiency and stability

The shorter the _______, the faster the __________

cycles, learning

______ can proceed no faster than the slowest ____________

development, learning loop

SBD facilitates __________

learning and allows for continuous, cost-efficient adjustment towards an optimum solution

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

Stream-aligned team

organized around the flow of work and has the ability to deliver value directly to the customer or end user

In buisness agility, _______ is key

speed

Why networks are needed within the enterprise

without network, organization lacks agility to respond when the customer needs drastically when a disrupter technology or competitor emerges