Core Competencies

Question 1

What are the Core Competencies of SAFe?

Answer 1

Essential:

1. Lean-Agile Leadership
2. Team and Technical Agility
3. Agile Product Delivery

Large Solution:

1. Enterprise Solution Delivery

Portfolio

1. Lean Portfolio Management
2. Organizational Agility
3. Continuous Learning Culture

Question 2

Define Lean-Agile Leadership

(Competency)

Answer 2

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.

Question 3

Define Team and Technical Agility

(Competency)

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

Define Agile Product Delivery

(Competency)

Answer 4

This competency describes a customer-centric approach to defining, building, and releasing a continuous flow of valuable products and services to customers and users.

Question 5

Define Enterprise Solution Delivery

(Competency)

Answer 5

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

Question 6

Define Lean Portfolio Management

(Competency)

Answer 6

This competency aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance.

Question 7

Define Organizational Agility

(Competency)

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

Define Continuous Learning Culture

(Competency)

Answer 8

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.

Question 9

What are the 5 key elements of a Lean-Agile Leadership?

Answer 9

• SAFe Core Values
• Lean-Agile Mindset
• SAFe Principles
• Implementation Roadmap
• SAFe Program Consultant (SPC)

Question 10

What are the SAFe Core Values?

Answer 10

• Alignment
• Transparency
• Built-in Quality
• Program Execution

Question 11

Describe the House of Lean

Answer 11

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.

Question 12

What are the points of the Agile Manifesto?

Answer 12

• *Individuals and interactions** over processes and tools
• *Working software** over comprehensive documentation
• *Customer collaboration** over contract negotiation
• *Responding to change** over following a plan

Question 13

Name the SAFe Lean-Agile Principles

Answer 13

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. Visualize and limit WIP, reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths
7. Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning
8. Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers
9. Decentralize decision-making
10. Organize around value

Question 14

What is the SAFe Implementation Roadmap?

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

What is an SPC?

Answer 15

SAFe Program Consultant

Question 16

What are the 3 dimensions of Team and Technical Agility?

Answer 16

Agile Teams – High-performing, cross-functional teams anchor the competency by applying effective Agile principles and practices.

Team of Agile Teams – Agile teams operate within the context of a SAFe Agile Release Train (ART), a long-lived, team of Agile teams that provides a shared vision and direction and is ultimately responsible for delivering solution outcomes.

Built-in Quality – All Agile teams apply defined Agile practices to create high-quality, well-designed solutions that support current and future business needs.

Question 17

What different types of Agile Teams are there?

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

What is a team of agile teams called?

Answer 18

Agile Release Train

Question 19

What are some ways to establish Built-In Quality?

Answer 19

• Establish Flow
• Peer Review and Pairing
• Collective Ownership and Standards
• Automation
• Definition of Done

Question 20

What are the 3 dimensions of Agile Product Delivery?

Answer 20

Customer Centricity and Design Thinking – Customer centricity puts the customer at the center of every decision and uses design thinking to ensure the solution is desirable, feasible, viable, and sustainable.

Develop on Cadence; Release on Demand – Developing on cadence helps manage the variability inherent in product development. Decoupling the release of value assures customers can get what they need when they need it.

DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline – DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline creates the foundation that enables Enterprises to release value, in whole or in part, at any time to meet customer and market demand.

Question 21

What are the 3 points of Design Thinking?

Answer 21

1. Understanding the problem, which provides insight into the requirements and benefits of a desirable solution
2. Designing the right solution, which ensures the solution is technically feasible
3. Ensuring the solution is viable and sustainable by understanding and managing solution economics

Question 22

Describe how an Agile Release Train Cadence is broken down

(high level)

Answer 22

• Program Increments - are generally 8-12 weeks and are made of:
  
  • 3-5 Iterations - (typically 2 weeks each)
  • 1 Innovation and Planning Iteration

Question 23

Describe the 5 DevOps concepts that make up the acronym CALMR

Answer 23

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).

Question 24

What are the 4 main aspect of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

Answer 24

• Continuous Exploration (CE)
• Continuous Integration (CI)
• Continuous Deployment (CD)
• Release on Demand

Question 25

What are the 3 essential dimensions of Enterprise Solution Delivery?

Answer 25

**Lean Systems and Solution Engineering** applies Lean-Agile practices to align and coordinate all the activities necessary to specify, architect, design, implement, test, deploy, evolve, and ultimately decommission these systems. **Coordinating Trains and Suppliers** coordinates and aligns the extended, and often complex, set of value streams to a shared business and technology mission. It uses the coordinated Vision, Backlogs, and Roadmaps with common Program Increments (PI) and synchronization points. Aspects of this dimension include: **Continually Evolve Live Systems** ensures large systems and their development pipeline support continuous delivery. Aspects of this dimension include:

Question 26

What are the 4 essential dimensions of **Lean Systems and Solution Engineering**?

Answer 26

* Continually refine the fixed/variable Solution Intent * Apply multiple planning horizons * Architect for scale, modularity, releasability, and serviceability * Continually address compliance concerns

Question 27

What are the 3 essential dimensions of **Coordinating Trains and Suppliers**?

Answer 27

* Build and integrate solution components and capabilities with Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and Solution Trains * Apply ‘continuish’ integration * Manage the supply chain with systems of systems thinking

Question 28

What are the 2 essential dimensions of **Continually Evolve Live Systems**?

Answer 28

* Build a Continuous Delivery Pipeline * Evolve deployed systems

Question 29

What are the 3 dimensions of a Continuous Learning Culture?

Answer 29

**Learning Organization** – Employees at every level are learning and growing so that the organization can transform and adapt to an ever-changing world. **Innovation Culture** – Employees are encouraged and empowered to explore and implement creative ideas that enable future value delivery. **Relentless Improvement** – Every part of the enterprise focuses on continuously improving its solutions, products, and processes.

Question 30

What are 5 best practices for a **Learning Organization**?

Answer 30

**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.

Question 31

What are the 3 dimensions of **Lean Portfolio Management**?

Answer 31

**Strategy & Investment Funding** ensures the entire portfolio is aligned and funded to create and maintain the solutions needed to meet business targets. **Agile Portfolio Operations** coordinates and supports decentralized program execution and fosters operational excellence. **Lean Governance** is the oversight and decision-making of spending, audit and compliance, forecasting expenses, and measurement.

Question 32

What are the 3 dimensions of **Organizational Agility**?

Answer 32

**Lean-Thinking People and Agile Teams** – Everyone involved in solution delivery is trained in Lean and Agile methods and embraces their values, principles, and practices. **Lean Business Operations** – Teams apply Lean principles to understand, map, and continuously improve the processes that deliver and support businesses solutions. **Strategy Agility** – The enterprise is Agile enough to continuously sense the market, and quickly change strategy when necessary.