All Flashcards
Implementation Roadmap
Reaching the Tipping Point Train Lean-Agile Change Agents Train Executives, Managers, and Leaders Create a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence Identify Value Streams and ARTs Create the Implementation Plan Prepare for ART Launch Train Teams and Launch the ART Coach ART Execution Launch More ARTs and Value Streams Extend to the Portfolio Accelerate
Four Core Values of SAFe
Alignment
Built-in Quality
Transparency
Program Execution
SAFe Core Competencies
EATLOCL
- Enterprise Solution Delivery - applying lean-agile principles to spec, dev, deploy, operation, and evolution
- Agile Product Delivery - customer centric approach
- Team and Technical Agility - critical skills and principles of agile teams
- Lean Portfolio Management - aligns strategy, execution, and funding by applying lean
- Organizational Agility - how lean thinking people evolve strategy. 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
- Continuous Learning Culture - encourages individuals & enterprise to continually increase knowledge
- Lean-Agile Leadership - how lean agile leaders drive and sustain change
Three dimensions of Agile Product Delivery (Competency #2)
‘1. Customer Centricity and Design Thinking
- Develop on Cadence; Release on Demand
- DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Four ways design thinking inspires new ways to measure success
- Desirable
- Feasible
- Viable
- Sustainable
Pillars of SAFe house of lean
FIRR
Flow - optimize sustainable value delivery w built in quality, manage variability, move from projects to products
Innovation - Innovative people, provide time and space for innovation, GO SEE, experimentation and feedback, innvovation riptides, pivot without mercy or guit
Respect for people and culture
Relentless Improvement - constant sense of danger, optimize the whole, problem solving culture, base improvements on facts, reflect at key milestones
Keys to implementing flow
- Understanding the full value stream
- visualizing and limiting WIP
- Reducing batch sizes
- Managing queue lengths
Agile Manifesto Values
WICR
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Agile Manifesto Principles
- Highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software
- Welcome changing requirements, even late in development
- Deliver working software frequently
- Business people and developers must work together throughout project
- Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them environment and support
- Most efficient and effective method of conveying info is face-to-face
- Working software is primary measure of progress
- Agile processes promote sustainable development
- Continous attention to technical excellence and good design
- Simplicity is essential
- Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing team
- Team should reflect at regular intervals on how to become more effective
SAFEe Lean-Agile Principles
MISMOVED WC
- Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems - PI demos orchestrated to deliver objective progress, product, and process metrics
- Build Incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles - facilitated by small batch sizes, requires increased investment in development environment, integration points reduce risk
- Apply systems thinking - system can evolve no faster than its slowest integration point, optimize value stream
- Unlock intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers
- Organize around value - not silos
- Assume variability, preseve options
- Take an economic view - deliver early and often, apply an economic framework
- Decentralize decision-making
- Visualize and limit WIP, reduce batch sizes, manage queue lengths
- Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning
Elements of applying an economic framework (part of principle #1)
- Operating within lean budgets and guardrails
- Understanding solution economic trade-offs (lead time, product cost, value, development expense, risk)
- Leveraging suppliers
- Sequencing jobs for the maximum benefit
Primary aspects of systems thinking (part of principle #2)
- Solution itself is a system
- Enterprise building the system is a system too
- Optimize the full value stream
Why limit WIP? (related to principle #6)
Confuses priorities, causes frequent context switching, and increases overhead. It overloads people, scatters focus on immediate tasks, reduces productivity, and throughput, and increases wait times for new functionality.
Basic building block when organizing around value (part of principle #10)
Agile teams are cross-functional, which enables them to define, build, test, and where applicable deploy elements of value quickly with a minimum of handoffs and dependencies.
Who owns team backlog
Product Owner
Who has content authority to make decisions at the user story level during PI planning
Product Owner
Who owns program backlog
Product Manager
Who owns features, PIs, and Releases
Product Manager
Quality software practices
CAARDD
- Code Quality
- Agile architecture - define
- Agile testing
- Refactoring
- Behavior-driven development
- Test-driven development
Components of Continuous Delivery Pipeline
DIE R
Enables the flow of value
- Continuous Exploration - Understand customer needs
- Continuous Integration - Dev, build, test E2E, stage. Critical practice of ART.
- Continuous Deployment - Deploy, verify, monitor, respond. Hide all new functionality under feature toggles until time to release
- Release on Demand - release, stabilize and operate, measure, learn
What two SAFE principles does ART apply?
- Systems Thinking (#2) and
2. Organize Around Value
What can be used to design the customer experience?
Journey Map
How many ARTs is a program backlog for? Who is responsible?
For a single ART. Product Management is responsible
Two things required for prioritization in flow-based system?
- Cost of delay (CoD)
- Duration to implement the value
How is Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) calculated?
Cost of delay (CoD) / job duration
Components of Cost of Delay (CoD)
- User-Business Value - preference, revenue impact, negative impact
- Time Criticality - deadline, will they wait or move on?
- Risk Reduction & Opportunity Enablement (RR & OE)
What jobs should receive preference as it relates to duration and cost of delay (CoD)?
Shorter duration and higher cost of delay (CoD)
Who owns feature priorities?
Product Management
Inputs to PI Planning
Business context, roadmap and vision, top 10 features of the program backlog
Outputs from PI Planning
- Committed PI Objectives
- Program Board
Elements of program board
- Feature delivery
- Dependencies
- Milestones
Benefits of uncommitted objectives
- Improved economics
- Increased reliability
- Adaptability to change
When is pre-PI planning event needed?
Cases where large value streams contain multiple ARTs and suppliers. Pre-PI planning sets context and provides the inputs for the individual ART PI planning events
What activity may be required in Day 2 of PI planning based on Day 1?
Plan rework
How to calculate velocity
Use historical data. Total Story Points / # Iterations = Velocity per iteration
ROAMing risks
Resolved
Owned
Accepted
Mitigated
How often should demo of full system increment be done
Every two weeks after iteration review, may lag by as much as one iteration
What is the CALMR approach to DevOps?
Culture - Establish culture of shared responsibility for dev, deploy, and ops
Automation - Automate the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Lean flow - Keep batch sizes small, limit WIP, and provide extreme visibility
Measurement - Measure the flow throug the pipeline
Recovery - Architect and enable low-risk releases. Establish fast recovery, fast reversion, and fast fix-forward
What do strategic themes influence?
Portfolio Vision
- Value Stream Budgets and Guardrails
- Portfolio Kanban and Portfolio Backlog
- Vision and Large Solution, ART, and Team backlogs
What type of analysis can be used to identify opportunities for the portfolio’s future state?
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
What is TOWS method?
Places options at intersection of internal strengths (S) and weaknesses (W) vs external opportunities (O) and threats (T)
What are all the Kanban systems used throughout SAFe?
- Team
- Program
- Solution
- Portfolio
How to foster innovation and control scope
MVP
Attributes of leading by example
GLADE (Glad to lead by example)
Growing Others
Lifelong Learning - Ongoing, volunteary, and self-motivated pursuit of knowledge and growth
Authenticity
Decentralized Decision-Making
Emotional Intelligence - How leaders identify and manage their emotions and of others
Keys to Leading Successful Change (Kotter’s)
CAGED CUG
4 Communicate the vision
8 Anchor new approaches in the culture
2 Guiding - Create a powerful Guiding coalition
5 Empower employees for broad-based action
3 Develop the vision and strategy
7 Consolidate gains and produce more wins
1 Urgency - Establish a sense of urgency
6 Generate short-term wins
Different types of SAFE and differences
Essential SAFe - Basic
Large Solution SAFe - large / complex but do not require constructs of Portfolio, describes additional roles, practices, and guidance to build and evolve world’s most largest applications, networks, and cyber-physical systems
Portfolio SAFe - includes portfolio strategy, funding, Agile portfolio ops, lean governance. Aligns strategy with execution and organizes solution development around flow of value through one or more value streams
Full SAFe - everything, requires 100s of people to maintain, includes all 7 core commpetencies
How many ARTs is a solution backlog for? Who is responsible?
Can span multiple ARTS. Solution management
Difference between feature and capability
Feature - fulfills a stakeholder need. Each feature includes a benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria, and is sized or split as necessary to be delivered by a single ART
Capability - higher-level solution behavior that typically spans multiple ARTs. Capabilities are sized and split into multiple features to facilitate their implementation in a single PI
Connection between feedback and optimum batch size
Lack of feedback contributes to higher holding cost
What can be used to script the change to SAFe
The Implementation Roadmap
What is business agility?
Business Agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative business solutions
Best Practices for applying Enterprise Solution Delivery (Competency #1)
- Lean Systems and Solution Engineering
- Coordinating Trains and Suppliers
- Continually Evolve Live Systems
What is design thinking? (Related to Competency #2)
- 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
Three dimensions of Team and Technical Agility (Competency #3)
- 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.
Refactoring
Activity of improving the internal structure or operation of a code or component without changing its external behavior
Spikes
Type of exploration Enabler Story. Represent activities such as research, design, investigation, exploration, and prototyping. Purpose is to gain the knowledge necessary to reduce the risk of a technical approach, better understand a requirement, or increase the reliability of a story estimate. Demonstrated at the end of an iteration. Do not directly deliver user value
Two types of spikes
Functional - How to break it down, organize the work, where risk and complexity exist, how to use instights to influence implementation decisions
Technical - Determine build vs buy, evaluate potential performance or load impact, evaluate specific tech implementation approaches, develop confidence about desired path
Dimensions of Organizational Agility (Competency #5)
- Lean thinking people and agile teams
- Lean Business Operations
- Strategic Agility
Dimensions of a Continuous Learning Culture (Competency #6)
- Learning Organization
- Innovative Culture
- Relentless Improvement
Dimensions of Lean-Agile Leadership (Competency #7)
- Leading by Example
- Mindset and Principles
- Leading Change
Lean Portfolio Management Grows (Competency #4)
Opportunities for improving proficiency in the Lean Portfolio Management competency
Roof of SAFe house of lean
Value - Shortest sustainable lead time with best quality and value, morale, safety, customer delight
Related to Operating within lean budgets and guardrails, what are the specific guardrails SAFe suggests? (part of principle #1)
- Guide investments by horizon
- Optimize value and solution integrity with capacity allocation
- Approve significant activities
- Continuous business owner engagement
What is a set-based design approach? (part of principle #3 - assume variability / preserving options)
Considering multiple design options up front instead of single option up front and then adjusting. Keeping design options flexible for as long as possible instead of choosing a single point solution upfront
Problem with traditional milestones (related to principle #5 - based milestones on objective evaluation of working systems)
Delays critical learning points until it’s too late
- Centralizing requirements and design decisions in siloed functions that do not actually build the system.
- Forcing too-early design decisions and false-positive feasibility.
- Assuming a point solution exists and can be built correctly the first time. This ignores the variability inherent in the process and provides no legitimate outlet for it. Variability will find a way to express itself.
- Making up-front decisions creates large batches of requirements, code, and tests, and long queues. This leads to large-batch handoffs and delayed feedback.
Benefits of Cadence (related to principle #7)
- Converts unpredictable events into predictable ones and lowers cost
- Makes waiting times for new work predictable
- Supports regular planning and cross-functional coordination
- Limits batch sizes to single interval
- Controls injection of new work
- Provides scheduled integration points
Benefits of Synchronization (related to principle #7)
- Causes multiple events to happen at the same time
- Facilitates cross-functional tradeoffs
- Provides routine dependency management
- Supports full system and integration and assessment
- Provides multiple feedback perspectives
True or False - Cadence without synchronization is enough (#7)
False
Attributes of cross-domain planning (#7)
- All stakeholders meet face-to-face
- Management sets mission with minimal constraints
- Requirements and design happen
- Important stakeholder decisions are accelerated
- Teams create and take responsibility for plans
What type of decisions should be centralized? (#9)
- Infrequent
- Long-lasting
- Significant economies of scale
What type of decisions should be de-centralized? (#9)
- Frequent
- Time critical
- Require local information
What is the benefit of a dual operating system? (related to principle #10)
Restores the speed and innovation benefits of the entrepreneurial network, while leveraging the benefits and stability of the hierarchical system.
How to find optimal batch size
Lowest combined holding and transaction cost
How optimum batch size lowered?
By reducing transaction cost
How is wait time calculated?
Average queue length / average processing wait
True or False - Value at scale is distributed and often flows across organizational boundaries
True
Who is responsible for defining and supporting the building of desirable, feasible, viable, and sustainable large scale business solutions that meet customer needs over time
Solution Management
Practices to build-in quality
- Establish flow
- Peer review and pairing
- Collective ownership and standards
- Automation
- Definition of done
Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)
Practice of developing a set of related system models that help define, design, analyze, and document the system under development. Provide efficient way to virtually prototype, explore, and communicate system aspects, while signficantly reducing or eliminating depedence on traditional documents.
Hardware quality practices
- Exploratory, early iterations
- Frequent system-level integration
- Design verification
- MBSE
- Set-Based Design
Role of Release Train Engineer
Chief scrum master for the train. Facilitates ART events and processes, assist teams in delivering value, communicate with stakeholders, escalate impediments, manage risk, drive relentless improvment
What are used to capture workflows needed for feature (starting conditions / triggers, ending conditions, essential stories, future improvement stories)
Story Maps
What justifies feature implementation cost and provides business perspective when making scope decisions?
Benefit Hypothesis
How many program increments are features developed in? How long are program implements?
One. Typically 8 - 12 weeks long made up of typically made up of four development iterations
How many iterations do stories span?
One
Benefits of PI Planning
- Face-to-face communication across team and stakeholders
- Building the social network the ART depends on
- Aligning business goals, business context, vision, and objectives
- Identifying dependencies and cross team collaboration
- Opportunity for “just the right amount” of architecture and Lean UX guidance
- Matching demand to capacity, eliminating excess WIP
- Fast decision making
Benefits of PI Objectives
- Provide a common language for communicating with business and technology stakeholders
- Creates the near-term focus and vision
- Enables the ART to assess its performance and the business value achieved via the Program Predictability Measure
- Communicates and highlights each team’s contribution to business value
- Exposes dependencies that require coordination
Type of synch meetings
Scrum-of-Scrums
PO Synch
What is intended visibility for Scrum-of-Scrums vs PO Synch?
Scrum of Scrums - Visibility into progress / impediments
PO Synch - Visibility into progress, scope, and priority adjustments
What is risk without Innovation and Planning iteration?
There is a risk that the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ outweighs all innovation activities
- Facilitate reliability, program increment readiness, planning, and innovation
- Occurs every Program Increment (PI)
- Acts as estimating buffer for meeting PI Objectives
Type of activities during IP Iteration
- Time for innovation and exploration, beyond the iterations dedicated to delivery
- Work on technical infrastructure, tooling, and other impediments to delivery
- Education to support continuous learning and improvement
- Cross training to develop skills in new domains, development languages, and systems
- Dedicated time for the I&A event, backlog refinement, including final prioritization of Features using Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), and PI planning
- Final integration of the solution, including verification and validation, if releasing on the PI boundary
- Final user acceptance testing and documentation, and any other readiness activities that are not feasible or economical to perform every iteration
What is inspect and adapt and how often does it happen?
Held at end of each program increment (PI)
Current state is demo’d and evaluated.
When is program performance reporting done?
As part of PI demo, teams compare planned vs actual PI objects and business value
Goal of DevOps
- Increases the frequency and quality of deployments
- Improves innovation and risk-taking by making it safer to experiment
- Realizes faster time to market
- Improves solution quality and shortens the lead time for fixes
- Reduces the severity and frequency of release failures
- Improves the Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
What portfolios do Lean Portfolio Management govern?
- Strategy and Investment Funding - Ensures the entire portfolio is aligned and funded to create and maintain the solutions needed to meet business targets. build portfolio kanban to establish flow.
- Agile portfolio operations - coordinates and supports decentralized program execution
- Lean governance - Oversight and decision-making of spending, audit and compliance, forecasting expenses, and measurement
True or False - In larger enterprises, still only one SAFe portfolio
False. Can be multiple SAFe portfolios, typically one for each line of business, business unit, or division
How should investments be categorized?
By Horizon:
Horizon 1 - Core businesses most readily identified with the company name, provide greates profits and cash flow
Horizon 2 - Emerging opportunities, likely to generate substantial profits, could require big investment
Horizon 3 - Ideas for profitable growth down the road (research projects, pilot programs, etc)
What are epics?
Container for signficant solution development initiative that captures the more substantial investments within a portfolio
Managed through the Portfolio Kanban
Epic owners collaboratively define epic, it MVP, Lean business case, and facilitate implementation
Once options evaluated and future state picked, what is next?
Identify the epics to get you there.
Express the future state as a vision
Problem with traditional project-based, cost-center budgeting
Creates overhead and friction, lowers velocity
Slow, complex, leads to utilization-based planning and execution, low program throughput
Results in re-budgeting, increases cost of delay
Who is responsible for coordinating portfolio Epics through the Portfolio Kanban system. They collaboratively define the epic, its Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and Lean business case, and when approved, facilitate implementation.
Epic Owner
What are the 3 types of SAFe milestones?
- Program Increment (PI),
- Fixed-date
- Learning milestones
