Thriving in the Digital Age

Question 1

What are the four business benefits of SAFe?

Answer 1

Increased Engagement
Faster Time-to-market
Improvements in Quality
Increase in Productivity

Question 2

What four disciplines does SAFe draw from to make it improve business outcomes for organizations in the digital age?

Answer 2

SAFe draws from four primary bodies of knowledge:
1) Agile Development
2) Systems Thinking
3) Lean Product Development
4) DevOps

Question 3

What is necessary to thrive in the digital age?

Answer 3

The ability to quickly respond to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative, digitally-enabled business solutions

Question 4

What did John P Kotter say about the difference between organizations now versus organizations created in the previous century?

Answer 4

“The organizations we created in the 20th century were designed much more for reliability and efficiency than for agility and speed.

Question 5

How do organizations start?

Answer 5

As fast adaptive entrepreneurial networks of motivated individuals focused on responding to customer needs trying to deliver value in any way that they can.

Question 6

What does Kotter mean when he says that we need a dual-operating system?

Answer 6

He means that we need to preserve the typical organizational hierarchy since it provides stability and reintroduces the more network-like entrepreneurial structure around development value streams.

Question 7

What is a development value stream?

Answer 7

It’s a value stream that is responsible for converting the business hypothesis into a digitally-enabled solution that delivers value to the customer. This is the ART.

Question 8

What is an operational value stream?

Answer 8

The OVS is the sequence of activities needed to deliver a product or service to a customer. These are the things that surround the ART that get the finished product to the customer.

Question 9

Why organize people into a Development Value Stream?

Answer 9

Because it improves workflow, efficiency and accelerates time to market.

Question 10

What are the 6 benefits offered by value streams?

Answer 10

They:
1) enable long-lived, stable teams that focus on delivering value

2) help identify and visualize all the work necessary to produce solutions

3) create transparency of delays, bottlenecks, and handoffs

4) support smaller batch sizes of work

5) Enable knowledge growth and more continuous learning

6) Allow the funding model to shift to value streams from traditional project budgets

Question 11

What is the output of the DVS?

Answer 11

A new increment of the solution