About This eBook

Leading SAFe  equips leaders and change agents with the knowledge and tools to build a culture of agility, align strategy with execution,  improve productivity, and ultimately lead successful enterprise-scale change. 

The target audience is anyone leading or supporting a SAFe transformation initiative including executives, managers, change agents, coaches, RTEs, Product Managers, Solution and Systems Architects, Program and Project managers. 

The Leading SAFe course curriculum (version 6.0) is structured around six modules. These modules guide attendees through the knowledge and skills necessary to lead a Lean-Agile enterprise using the Scaled Agile Framework.

The six modules are:

1. Thriving in the Digital Age with Business Agility: Evaluates SAFe as an operating system for Business Agility and explores how the seven core competencies support this goal.
2. Leadership and Culture. Becoming a Lean-Agile Leader and establishing a new way of working within the organization. How to apply a Lean-Agile mindset at scale and how to apply SAFe principles to enable business agility.
3. Establishing Team & Technical Agility: Accelerating value delivery. Focuses on forming cross-functional Agile teams and organizing Agile Release Trains (ARTs) around the flow of value.
4. Building Solutions with Agile Product Delivery: Covers applying customer centricity and design thinking, participating in PI planning, and building a Continuous Delivery Pipeline with DevOps.
5. Exploring Lean Portfolio Management: Agility at the strategy level. Defines and connects the SAFe portfolio to enterprise strategy, managing vision, funding value streams, and establishing portfolio flow.
6. Leading the Change: Focuses on navigating the transformation roadmap and leadership strategies for a successful transformation. 

Who this eBook is For

• Leaders, Product Managers, RTEs, Scrum Masters, Architects, and change agents seeking practical guidance.
• Those seeking SAFe Agilist (SA) certification.

How to use this eBook

• Understand each chapter’s Core Ideas and complete the Checklists. 
• Deeper Dive into More Details when needed.
• Reference the Appendices for Step-By-Step Guidance, Tools & Templates.

Take the quiz at the end of each chapter to test your knowledge.

1. Thriving in the Digital Age with Business Agility

Core Ideas

• Business Agility: The ability to sense and respond quickly to market changes and emerging opportunities. “Operating at the speed of change” requires adaptable organizational structures, and broad operational agility, not just faster projects.
• SAFe as an operating system for Business Agility. The Seven Core Competencies of Business Agility: 1) Team & Technical Agility, 2) Agile Product Delivery, 3) Enterprise Solution Delivery, 4) Lean Portfolio Management, 5) Organizational Agility, 6) Continuous Learning Culture, 7) Agile Leadership. 
• Flow as the leading indicator of value. Flow metrics: WIP, flow time, throughput, predictability, and time-to-value beat output metrics for guiding decisions

Checklist

• Map your business value streams.
• Organize teams into ARTs aligned with value streams (not functions).
• Establish cadences (PIs, iterations) and synchronization events (system demos).
• Make work and policies explicit and visible; limit WIP.
• Adopt flow metrics:  Measure and improve flow, predictability, and customer outcomes.

More Details

Business Agility is the ability to engage and prosper in the digital era by adapting swiftly to market changes and new opportunities with creative, digitized business solutions. It involves a combination of technology, leadership, culture, and processes that allow businesses to quickly adapt to market changes and to continuously deliver value to customers. Key components include customer-centricity, adaptive planning, cross-functional collaboration, and a focus on speed and learning.

Key aspects of business agility in the digital age

• Customer-centricity: Agile businesses prioritize understanding and responding to customer needs quickly, aiming to create superior experiences.
• Rapid Response: Market disruption is the norm. The ability to quickly develop and launch new digital products and services is crucial for staying competitive.
• Strategic Adaptability: Strategic agility involves continuously reassessing priorities and adapting long-term vision based on market feedback and emerging opportunities.
• Operational Agility: Operational agility means extending agile principles beyond software teams to other functions like HR, finance, and marketing, often using cross-functional teams and adaptive budgeting.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Breaking down silos to foster closer ties between departments allows the entire organization to focus on delivering value rather than on functional goals.
• Continuous Delivery: Regularly delivering value to customers through frequent, incremental outcomes and shortening feedback loops is a hallmark of agile organizations.
• Dynamic Workforce: Cultivating a workforce that is ready to adopt new digital technologies is essential for successful and sustained digital transformation.

The Seven Core Competencies

The Seven Core Competencies of SAFe constitute a framework for the broader goal of Business Agility – not just for scaling software delivery. Each core competency has Values & Principles, Roles & Responsibilities and Key Practices. Here’s a summary:

• The Lean-Agile Leadership Core Competency is the foundation of the entire framework. This competency area emphasizes the necessity for an organization’s leadership to understand and exemplify Lean-Agile Principles in their leadership behaviors.
• Team & Tech Agility: Accelerating value delivery. Small cross-functional teams, with the ability to deliver working increments of a product or solution as the output of every iteration – using the important principle of building quality in.
• Agile Product Delivery – defines a delivery model using teams-of-teams – known as Agile Release Trains (ARTs), operating in fixed-width timeboxes (PIs) to plan and deliver solutions. DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline creates the foundation that enables the release of value, in whole or in part, at any time it’s needed.
• Enterprise Solution Delivery provides an additional layer of governance for creating large solutions requiring the capacity of multiple Agile Release Trains.
• Lean Portfolio Management – agility at the strategy level. This is where we connect strategy to execution using Lean Budgeting as an adaptive approach for investment funding among multiple value streams in a portfolio. LPM helps organizations better align portfolios and portfolio strategy with investments and broader business strategy. Done successfully, this helps optimize portfolio value flow.
• Organizational Agility: the ability of an organization to sense and quickly respond to threats and opportunities in fast-changing business environments. Everyone delivering solutions has received training in lean and agile methodologies and embraces its principles, values and practices.
• Continuous Learning Culture: is about how Organizations must embrace continuous improvement as a way of life, and where everyone in the organization must be involved in change & continuous improvement. This is accomplished through establishing a learning organization committed to continuous improvement and development, fostering a culture of innovation.

Flow Metrics

Our ultimate goal is to deliver maximum value at minimum cost. We seek to achieve this via a relentless focus on Cycle Time reduction – Cycle Time is a proxy for cost. The cost to produce an item is directly proportional to the amount of time it spends in the system. Thus, reducing Cycle Time reduces operating costs.  The basic measures of flow are Cycle Time and Throughput, and the levers of flow (controllable leading indicators) are WIP (Work In Process) and Work Item Age. 

The fundamental measures of flow are:

• Cycle Time: The elapsed time between when work on an item starts and when it is done.
• Throughput: The number of items finished per unit of time (per day, per week, per sprint and so on).
• WIP: The number of items in progress – started but not finished.
• Work Item Age: The amount of time between when work on an item started and the current time: how long an item has been in progress.

Work Item Aging and WIP are leading indicators and these are the measures that teams should focus on daily in order to proactively manage the flow of work. 

Cycle Time and Throughput are lagging indicators (the data is based on work that has already been completed). These are historical data which can be input to Monte Carlo and applied for planning and forecasting purposes. Cycle Time addresses: When will it be done, and Throughput addresses: How much can we do. In both cases, the measures are expressed as a range plus a probability. 

More details on Flow Metrics in Appendix E.

Challenges in achieving business agility

• Leadership and culture: The biggest challenges often lie in leadership’s ability to manage change and in the overall company culture.
• Organizational structures: Unsuitable structures, practices, and processes can hinder agility.
• Mindset: A resistance to change and adopting new ways of thinking can be a significant obstacle.

Further Reading

• Appendix A: ART Design –  Organizing Around Value
• Appendix D: The Physics of Flow

Sample Exam Questions

What is the primary goal of Business Agility in SAFe?

1. To respond quickly to changing market conditions while delivering value sustainably
2. To maximize individual utilization across all teams
3. To apply governance over all change
4. To bring focus on reducing IT costs

The seven core competencies of SAFe are designed primarily to:

1. Ensure teams work longer hours to meet deadlines
2. Support the technical architecture of a single application only
3. Create the organizational capabilities needed for Business Agility
4. Standardize all tools used by development teams

Which SAFe core competency focuses on creating solutions that delight customers?

1. Agile Product Delivery
2. Organizational Agility
3. Lean Portfolio Management
4. Continuous Learning Culture

Which statement best describes value streams in SAFe?

1. They are only used to group projects by department
2. They represent the steps used to deliver value from order to cash
3. They are a list of all applications owned by IT
4. They describe the annual budgeting cycle

Why is customer centricity critical in the digital age?

1. It reduces the need for feedback from real users
2. It ensures technology decisions are made by architects only
3. It focuses the enterprise on understanding and solving real customer problems
4. It guarantees all projects will finish on time

2. Leadership and Culture

Core Ideas

• Enabling agility – not supervising it.
• Leading by example: model transparency, limit WIP, attend system demos, ask for evidence.
• Decentralizing decisions – push control to those closest to the work.
• Applying SAFe Principles: #1 Take an economic view (WSJF), #6 Limit WIP & small batches, #9 Decentralize decisions.

Leader’s Weekly Checklist

• Attend a System Demo.
• Remove one cross-team impediment.
• Clarify one decision guardrail.

Anti-Patterns to Avoid

• Utilization obsession – measuring people by utilization instead of outcomes.
• Centralized approvals that disrupt flow.
•  “Agile by announcement” without leader behavior change.

More Details

Lean-Agile leadership is a core competency that drives organizational change by empowering individuals and teams by leaders embodying a Lean-Agile mindset and principles.. Leadership is most effective when actions align with words. The most effective approach for driving cultural change is for leaders to lead by example and to demonstrate the behaviors and mindsets needed to succeed so others can follow. Only leaders have the authority to change the organization such as enabling organizing around value, and creating an environment that fosters continuous improvement and innovation. Change must be inspired, not mandated. Effective leaders provide vision, mobilize teams, and swiftly remove obstacles.

Lean-Agile Values & Principles:

SAFe Core Values & Principles:

By combining Lean and Agile principles and methods, organizations can streamline processes while staying responsive to customer needs, ultimately driving better outcomes and continuous improvement:

• Lean focuses on eliminating waste, optimizing processes, and maximizing value with minimal resources. It drives efficiency by continuously identifying and removing non-value-adding activities in all work areas, from product development to delivery.
• Agile emphasizes adaptability, collaboration, and delivering working solutions frequently. It helps teams respond to change quickly, ensuring that products meet evolving customer needs and that feedback loops drive continuous improvement.

Key elements of Lean-Agile leadership

• Embracing the Mindset and Principles: Leaders need to internalize and consistently apply Lean-Agile values and principles in their own beliefs and actions.
  • Lean-Agile Mindset
  • SAFe Core Values
  • SAFe Lean-Agile Principles
• Leading by Example: Leaders must model Lean-Agile behaviors, demonstrate a growth mindset, and be accountable for their actions and the system’s outcomes.
• Guiding and Empowering Teams: The role is to facilitate, coach, and motivate teams, creating a decentralized decision-making environment where those closest to the work can make choices.
• Focusing on Value Flow: Leaders are responsible for organizing and reorganizing around value streams, continuously identifying and reducing bottlenecks, queues, and excess Work in Progress (WIP).
• Driving Continuous Improvement: This involves eliminating demotivating policies, inspiring others, and creating a culture of relentless improvement and innovation.
• Creating a Supportive Environment: Leaders must create the necessary conditions for teams to thrive, providing the space for them to learn, innovate, and experiment.

Sample Exam Questions

Which behavior best reflects Lean-Agile Leadership in SAFe?

1. Delegating all decision-making to managers only
2. Leading by example and modeling the Lean-Agile mindset
3. Focusing solely on enforcing compliance to processes
4. Minimizing transparency to avoid uncomfortable conversations

Which statement best describes a growth mindset for leaders?

1. Believing that abilities are fixed and cannot change
2. Seeing challenges and failures as opportunities to learn
3. Avoiding feedback to protect one’s reputation
4. Rewarding only short-term results regardless of how they were achieved

Decentralized decision-making in SAFe means that:

1. All decisions are made by the central PMO
2. Teams closest to the work make frequent, local decisions
3. Only executives can approve any change
4. Decisions are delayed until all data is available

Which SAFe principle is most closely linked to systems thinking for leaders?

1. Apply systems thinking
2. Build incrementally with fast learning cycles
3. Unlock intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers
4. Assume variability, preserve options

Relentless Improvement as a leadership behavior includes:

1. Conducting blameless retrospectives and acting on insights
2. Assigning blame to individuals when things go wrong
3. Keeping performance issues hidden to maintain morale
4. Focusing only on annual improvement initiatives

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