SAFe Lean Agile Mindset

Question 1

Value

Value is the benefit that your orgnization provides to customers, employees, society, and/or the environment. This may take the form of revenue for employees or shareholders by an enterprise, services provided to citizens by a goverment, or achievment of a mission statement by a non-profit.

Question 2

House of LEAN

The first pillar, Respect for people and culture

Answer 2

A Lean-Agile approach doesn’t implement itself or perform any real work—people do. Respect for people and culture is a basic human need. When treated with respect, people are empowered to evolve their practices and improve. Management challenges people to change and may steer them toward better ways of working. However, it’s the teams and individuals who learn problem-solving and reflection skills and are accountable for making the appropriate improvements.

Respect for people and culture is also to be extended to relationships with suppliers, partners, customers, and the broader community; all of these parties are vital to the long-term success of the enterprise.

Question 3

The second pillar, Flow

The key to successfully executing SAFe is to establish a continuous flow of work that supports incremental value delivery based on constant feedback and adjustment. Continuous flow enables faster sustainable value delivery, effective built-in quality practices, relentless improvement, and evidence-based governance based on working solutions.

Question 4

The following principles of flow are an important part of the Lean-Agile Mindset:

1. Understanding the full value stream. Doing work without considering the way your customer gains value from it leads to defects and missed opportunities in the work, but by understanding the full way that customers use the solution leads to more successful value.
2. Visualizing and limiting work in process (WIP). Multitasking and context switching destroy productivity, but we can avoid those behaviors by tracking what is in progress and saying ‘no’ to too much different work at once.
3. Reducing batch sizes. Large batches require us to get all the possible work done before we see value and get feedback, but with small batches or pieces of work, we can quickly and more consistently deliver value.
4. Managing queue lengths. Large work queues mean any item in them may take a long time to be delivered and can be impacted by delays and issues from other items. With small queues, we can better predict when work will be delivered.
5. Eliminating waste and removing delays. Anything that prevents a team from accomplishing its goals, such as unreadiness, delays, or procrastination should be looked at to be eliminated. When waste is eliminated, the team will function faster and with higher quality.

Question 5

STOP STARTING / START FINISHING

Prepare work and execute with a focus on issues and delays to spend as much time as possible creating value. Waste from rework, duplicated efforts, and wait times, increases the time a customer is waiting for value. By identifying and removing these items we can flow work faster.

Lean-Agile principles provide a better understanding of the development process by incorporating new thinking, tools, and techniques. Leaders and teams can use them to move from a phase-gated approach, where work must pass key decision points before continuing, to a continuous delivery approach to work that extends flow to the entire value delivery process.

Question 6

House of LEAN - Pillar #3 Innovation

1. Create opportunity - Provide time and space for people to be creative to enable purposeful innovation. This can rarely occur in the prsence of 100 percent utilization and firefighting. SAFe’s Innovation and Planning (IP) Iteration is one such opportunity.
2. Foster innovation - Hire, coach, and mentor innovation and entrepreneurship in the organization’s workforce.
3. Apply continuous exploration - Apply continuos exploration, the process of constantly exploring the market and user needs, getting fast feedback on experiments, and defining a vision, roadmap, and set of fetures that bring the most promising innovations to market.
4. Go see - Visit the actual workplace (known as Gemba), where the products and solutions are created and used.
5. The facts are friendly - Validate innovations with customers and then pivot without mercy or guilt when fact patterns change.
6. Everyone innovates - Couple strategic thinking with local team-based innovations to create an innovation riptide that can power a tidal wave of new products, services, and capabilities.

Question 7

Remember the goal is to provide the best quality and value to people and society, high morale, safety, and customer delight.

Question 8

The fourth pillar, Relentless improvement

Relentless improvement guides the business to become a learning organization through continuous reflection and adaptation. A ‘constant sense of competitive danger’ drives the aggressive pursuit of improvement opportunities.

Question 9

Leaders and teams systematically do the following:

• Optimize the whole, not just the parts, of the organization and the development process.
• Reinforce the problem-solving mindset throughout the organization, where all are empowered to engage in daily improvements to the work.
• Reflect at key milestones to openly identify and address process shortcomings at all levels.
• Apply Lean tools and techniques to determine the fact-based root cause of problems and apply effective countermeasures rapidly.
• Base improvements on facts. Consider facts carefully and then act quickly.

Question 10

The foundation of the SAFe® House of Lean, Leadership

As with any significant organizational change, the enterprise’s managers, leaders, and executives are responsible for the adoption and success of the Lean-Agile transformation. Their leadership is the foundation of Lean and is the starting point for individual, team, and enterprise success. Successful leaders are trained in these new and innovative ways of thinking and exhibit the principles and behaviors of Lean-Agile leadership.

From a leadership perspective, Lean is different than Agile. Agile was developed as a team-based process for a small group of cross-functional, dedicated individuals who were empowered, skilled, and needed to build working functionality in a short timebox. Management, however, was not part of this definition. But, excluding management from the new way of working doesn’t scale in an enterprise.

By contrast, in Lean, managers are leaders who embrace the values of Lean, are competent in the basic practices, and teach these practices to others. They proactively eliminate impediments and take an active role in supporting organizational change and facilitating relentless improvement.