Trend analysis helps organizations understand whether they’re moving in the right direction. Rather than focusing solely on absolute numbers, effective tracking examines patterns over time. The metrics used to track SAFe competencies should connect directly to business outcomes while providing insight into capability development. A manufacturing conglomerate faced this challenge when they mandated SAFe implementation across 15 business units simultaneously. The transformation team couldn’t provide adequate support, resulting in inconsistent practices and growing resistance. Many organizations attempt to implement all seven competencies of SAFe simultaneously across the entire enterprise.

This big-bang approach typically leads to superficial adoption without meaningful capability development. Signs of this challenge include leaders who continue to demand traditional project plans and Gantt charts while teams try to work in an agile manner. Perhaps the most significant challenge organizations face involves leadership buy-in and alignment. Agile Product Delivery represents the customer-focused approach to defining, building, and releasing products and services that deliver value continuously.

The 7 Core Competencies of SAFe: A Comprehensive Guide to Business Agility

Teams can apply uncommitted objectives whenever there is low confidence in meeting the objective. Customers – Customers provide fast feedback and have intimate knowledge of what scaled agile business strategy integration is needed. In the same way, tests are written during coding, and acceptance tests for capabilities, features, and stories are written during elaboration. The just-in-time practice of elaborating the proposed system behavior also mitigates the need for overly detailed requirement specifications and sign-offs. Even better, unlike conventionally-written requirements, these tests are automated wherever possible.

What Is One Characteristic Of An Effective Agile Team?

By nurturing these cultural elements, businesses create an adaptive workforce that remains steadfast in achieving strategic objectives. Teams feel motivated, leadership sees tangible results, and customers receive products and services that map directly to the company’s mission. Strong alignment between Agile development and strategy thrives in an environment where transparency, collaboration, and inventive thinking are celebrated.

Why the Focus on Principles?

Value stream mapping is an ongoing practice of understanding, tuning, and planning how the organization will deliver value against its strategy in the long term. SAFe is the most popular framework for agile, Lean, and DevOps practices at scale. Foster transparency through KPIs, frequent retrospectives, and adaptive feedback loops at team, program, and portfolio levels. We will partner with you to identify and build capabilities within business, technology, and operations to achieve critical business results.

• It’s been shaped by the real-world experiences of Consortium members and other agile professionals.
• At the same time, software development remains on the critical path for most enterprises.
• Many organizations attempt to implement all seven competencies of SAFe simultaneously across the entire enterprise.
• Develop skills to drive innovation across your enterprise with Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt Certification.
• One serves as the driver writing the code while the other as the navigator providing real-time review and feedback.

They are often the teams consuming the work of that value stream so they can then provide a larger, integrated unit of value. Figure 1 shows the elements, processes, and outcomes of large solution integration and delivery. Product owners can use them to divide, group, and prioritize top-level portfolio items in a manner that reflects the targets and strategic priorities of the company. Develop a centralized data repository that enables users to access data for more informed decisions.

Organizational Structure Misalignment

• They provide the necessary information, learning resources, and practical application guidance needed to support success.
• With business agility, you can capitalize on emerging opportunities and respond to surprises and uncertainty.
• You can use the guidance in the toolkit to identify the operational value stream and apply it to your altitude of influence to fully articulate how the business area delivers value.
• Teams can prioritize high-return initiatives, eliminate redundant effort , and allocate resources wisely.

When teams see how their Iterations or Sprints reinforce big-picture ambitions, they collaborate more effectively and foster a culture of ownership. Leaders can break broad strategies into achievable deliverables, and teams can iterate toward tangible milestones that move the business forward. When “Full SAFe” or “Portfolio SAFe” is being implemented, Strategic Themes are an integral part of Lean Portfolio Management. Instead, the organization needs fast feedback from early indicators, many of which are not financial metrics. Agile Teams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs) cannot go fast without high quality.

As an organization starts to scale, it becomes difficult to track progress, manage dependencies, or foresee potential roadblocks. SAFe solves this through its Portfolio and Program Kanban systems, visualizing the flow of work from the top of the organization to the individual teams. By offering a holistic view of all work in progress, SAFe enables better decision-making at the leadership level and more effective collaboration between teams. For large organizations, SAFe provides an unparalleled framework for scaling Agile.

The larger the projects and the more systems involved, the slower we are at delivering them, and the more deadlines we miss. Explore the benefits of certification and find the right SAFe® courses for professional development or to train an entire team. The most successful implementations recognize that SAFe isn’t a rigid framework to be followed prescriptively. Improvement communities create another powerful mechanism for advancing the competencies of SAFe. This challenge particularly affects Team and Technical Agility and Agile Product Delivery competencies.

Coordinating Large Solution Delivery Competency

Strategic Themes are specific, itemized business objectives, new business differentiators that connect the portfolio vision to the evolving enterprise business strategy. They provide business context for decision-making within the portfolio, affecting investment in value streams and release trains, and serve as inputs to the Portfolio and Program Backlogs. Strategic themes have an influence on the vision and backlogs for development at every portfolio level. They help determine the attributes of Weighted Shortest Job First prioritization for items in the program and solution backlogs.

Executive Sponsorship and Vision

It has some powerful insights and findings that we hope everyone in the SAFe community and those interested in learning more about SAFe will find highly valuable. As of today, the following competencies have been released, with more to follow iteratively, based on the most pressing business problems to solve. For customers who need additional granularity to manage Tasks and Defects, Agile Development 2.0 can be used at the team level which can integrate with EAP. The impression that ‘our problems are different’ is a common disease that afflicts management the world over.

These competencies of SAFe represent more than just a checklist of practices—they form an interconnected system that transforms how enterprises deliver value. Since its introduction in 2011, SAFe has evolved through multiple versions, with each iteration refining its approach to enterprise agility. Transform your organization’s approach to value delivery with Lean Fundamentals.