Study Guide Flashcards
Business Agility
Ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes with innovative, digitally enabled business solutions
Business Agility Value Stream
Sense Opportunity > Fund MVP > Organize > Connect with Customer > Deliver MVP > Pivot or Persevere > Deliver value > Learn and Adapt
Lean Portfolio Management (Core Competency)
Strategy and Investment Funding
Agile Portfolio operations
Lean Governance
Lean-Agile Leadership (Core Competency)
- Precisely specify value
- identify the value stream for each product
- make value flow without interruption
- Let the customer pull value from the producer
- Pursue Perfection
Team and Technical Agility (Core Competency)
Agile teams and teams of agile teams create and support the business solutions that deliver consistent value to enterprise’s customers
Agile Product Delivery (Core Competency)
In order to achieve business agility, enterprises must rapidly increase their ability to deliver innovative products and services - right solutions, for right customers, at the right time
Optimizing full value stream by…
Reducing delays - fastest way to reduce time to market
SAFe Core Values
- Alignment
- Transparency
- Respect for People
- Relentless Improvement
Lean Agile Principles
- Take an economic view
- Apply systems thinking
- Assume variability; preserve options
- Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles
- Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems
- Make value flow without interruption
- Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning
- Unlock the motivation of knowledge workers
- Decentralize decision making
- organize around value
Take an economic view (Lean Agile Principles)
- Deliver early and often
- Incremental delivery
- Do not consider money already spent
- Quantify the cost of delay
- Empower local decision making
Apply Systems Thinking (Lean Agile Principles)
- Optimizing a component does not optimize the system
- high level architecture is required
- value of system passes through its interconnections
- can evolve no faster than its slowest integration point
Assume variability; preserve options
- A lot of unknowns at the start
- Flexible requirements
- Flexible design
Set based design (preserving options)
Start with many options and slowly narrow down to the correct one
PDCA
Plan, Do, Check, Adjust (incremental design with fast learning cycles)
Base Milestones on objective evaluation of working systems (Lean Agile Principles)
- Planning Interval (PI) system demos are orchestrated to deliver objective progress, product, and process metrics
Make Value flow without interruptions (Lean Agile Principles)
- Visualize and limit WIP
- Address bottlenecks
- Minimize handoffs and dependencies
- Get faster feedback
- Work in smaller batches
- Reduce queue length
- Optimize time in the zone
- Remediate legacy practices and policies
Apply Cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning
- Cadence: make unpredictable events predictable, limits batch sizes, controls injection of new work - requires scope or capacity margin
- Synchronization: simultaneous events, cross-functional trade-offs, dependency management, feedback - design cycles must be synchronized
Cross domain planning
- Everyone plans at the same time
- management sets mission with minimum constraints
- requirements and design emerge
- dependencies and risks identified
- teams take responsibility for their own plan
Unlock motivation of knowledge workers (Lean Agile Principles)
- Mastery
- Autonomy
- Purpose
Decentralize Decision Making (Lean Agile Principles)
- Provide clarity on organizational objectives
- Take responsibility for making strategic decisions, but decentralize everything else
Agile Release Train
Multiple agile value streams
ARTs are cross functional
* Virtual organization of 5-12 teams
* Synchronized on a common cadence (A PI)
* Aligned to a common mission via a single ART Backlog
Scrum Master/Team Coach Responsibilities
- Improving ART Performance
- Facilitating PI Planning
- Supporting iteration execution
- Improving flow
- Building high performing teams
Product Owner Responsibilities
- Getting and Applying Feedback
- Connecting with the customer
- Supporting the team in delivering value
- Contributing to the vision and roadmap
- Managing and prioritizing the team backlog
ART Roles
Agile Release Train
* Release train engineer - coach for the train
* System Architect
* Business Owners - key stakeholders
* Product Management - owns the ART Backlog
* System Team - provides processes and tools to evaluate early and often
Enabling Team
Organized to assist other teams with specialized capabilities and help them become proficient in new tech
WSJB
Weighted Shortest Job First
Cost of Delay / Job Duration
Journey Map
Maps to design end-to-end customer experience
Story map
Capture user workflows
ART Backlog is the holding area for…
Features
PI
Planning Interval
Enablers
- Define existing code, hardware components, marketing guidelines, other variables that enable near-term business feature
- build up the runway (exploration, architecture, infrastructure, compliance)
- I.E. Research how to calculate the shipping costs
Story Point represents
- volume
- complexity
- knowledge
- uncertainty
CoD
Cost of Delay
To prioritize based on lean economics, we need to know two things
- Cost of Delay
- How long it takes to implement value
Cost of Delay Components
- User Business value - relative value to the customer or business
- Time Criticality
- Risk Reduction and opportunity Enablement
PI Planning
Planning Interval Planning - cadence based event that serves as the heartbeat of the agile release train, aligning all teams on the ART to a shared mission
* Two days every 8-12 weeks
* Product Management owns features and priorities
* Development teams own story planning and estimating
Uncommitted objectives
Help improve the predictability of delivering business value
NOT just in case features
ROAM - addressing ART PI Risks
Resolved, Owned, Accepted, Mitigated
Inspect and Adapt post PI
PI System Demo
Quantitative and Qualitative Measurement
Problem Solving workshop
CDP
Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Continuous exploration, integration, and deployment
SAFe Portfolio
- Collection of development value streams
- Each stream builds, supports, and maintains solutions
Portfolio Canvas
- template for identifying a specific portfolio
- Defines the domain and other key elements
SWOT
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats
helps identify portfolio’s future state
TOWS
Matrix that combines multiple items within SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, threat), for example,
Business Epic
Enabler Epic
Portfolio Epic
Business - directly delivers business value
Enabler - support architectural runway, future business functionality
Portfolio - typically span multiple value streams and PIs
Lean Budgets: Fund value streams, not …
Projects
- no costly delays
- no resource reassignment
- no blame game for overruns
Manage epic flow with
Portfolio Kanban
- makes largest initiatives visible
- helps prevent unrealistic expectations
- sets WIP limits
Portfolio Kanban
Reviewing > Analyzing > Ready > Implementing > Done
LPM
Lean Portfolio Management
Leading successful change
- create a sense of urgency
- build a guiding coalition
- form a strategic vision
- enlist a volunteer army
- remove barriers
- generate short-term wins
- sustain acceleration
- institute changes
Agile Manifesto
Individuals and interactions over processes
Working Software over documentation
Customer collaboration over contracts
Responding to change over following a plan
How’s the flow of portfolio epics managed
Portfolio Kanban
Inputs to portfolio canvas
Strategic themes
Basic Agile Quality Practices
Shift Learning Left
Pairing and peer review
Collective ownership and tshaped skills
Artifact standards and definitions of done
workflow automation
What is used to capture the current state of the portfolio
Portfolio canvas
