7 core competencies of SAFe

Explained with the help of key practices, examples and their purpose:

1. Lean-Agile Leadership

• Purpose: Inspire individuals and teams to embrace a Lean-Agile mindset, align them with organizational goals, and support organizational transformation.
• Key Practices: Lead by example by adopting Lean-Agile values. Empower teams to make decisions and take ownership of their work. Align organizational strategy with Lean-Agile principles to foster transparency.
• Examples: A CIO creates an Agile Center of Excellence (CoE) to coach and train leaders on adopting Agile leadership principles. Executives host regular "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) sessions to foster transparency and encourage team feedback.

2. Team and Technical Agility

• Purpose: Build high-performing Agile teams with technical excellence, collaboration, and alignment.
• Key Practices: Form cross-functional teams that include developers, testers, UX, and other specialists. Use Agile frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, or XP for team workflows. Adopt modern engineering practices like Continuous Integration (CI), Test-Driven Development (TDD), and pair programming.
• Examples: A software development team integrates automated testing and TDD to reduce defects and shorten delivery time. A retail company uses Scrum to coordinate the development of its e-commerce website with regular 2-week sprints.

3. Agile Product Delivery

• Purpose: Deliver innovative products quickly while focusing on customer needs and maintaining high quality.
• Key Practices: Apply customer-centric thinking and design thinking to understand customer needs. Build and maintain Continuous Delivery Pipelines to enable frequent releases. Coordinate work across teams using Agile Release Trains (ARTs).
• Examples: A fintech company develops a customer-facing digital wallet using design thinking workshops and frequent feedback loops. A media platform uses a Continuous Delivery Pipeline to roll out personalized recommendations and feature updates every week.

4. Enterprise Solution Delivery

• Purpose: Coordinate the development of large-scale, complex systems that span multiple teams, ARTs, and suppliers.
• Key Practices: Use Solution Trains to manage the alignment of multiple ARTs and suppliers. Focus on compliance and system quality, ensuring alignment with regulatory or industry standards. Break down large systems into manageable components that can be delivered incrementally.
• Examples: An automotive company coordinates multiple Agile Release Trains to develop an autonomous vehicle platform, ensuring quality and safety compliance. A defense contractor uses a Solution Train to deliver an integrated radar system, meeting government standards for security.

5. Lean Portfolio Management (LPM)

• Purpose: Align strategy and execution by managing funding, governance, and work prioritization at the portfolio level.
• Key Practices: Align portfolio objectives with organizational strategy. Use lean budgeting to allocate funding based on value streams instead of individual projects. Implement lightweight lean governance to track progress without micromanagement.
• Examples: A bank allocates funding across "retail banking" and "corporate banking" value streams to focus on customer-centric outcomes. A logistics company holds quarterly Portfolio Syncs to reprioritize initiatives based on market shifts, like focusing on AI for route optimization.

6. Organizational Agility

• Purpose: Ensure the organization can adapt its processes, culture, and structure to meet changing market needs.
• Key Practices: Apply Lean thinking to business and operational processes to eliminate waste. Continuously improve workflows and operational value streams. Restructure organizational silos into value stream-aligned teams for greater collaboration.
• Examples: A healthcare company transforms its HR processes to use Agile practices, allowing faster hiring of critical roles during a pandemic. A retail chain restructures its marketing, inventory, and sales operations into a single cross-functional team focused on improving customer experience.

7. Continuous Learning Culture

• Purpose: Promote an environment of relentless learning, experimentation, and knowledge sharing across the organization.
• Key Practices: Encourage a growth mindset to motivate employees to learn and innovate. Conduct blameless retrospectives to identify lessons from failures. Create Communities of Practice (CoPs) to share knowledge and best practices.
• Examples: A technology company hosts monthly Hackathons to foster innovation and exploration of new ideas. A global consulting firm establishes a knowledge-sharing platform where employees document and share solutions to complex challenges.

How They Work Together:

Imagine a bank wants to develop an AI-powered fraud detection system for its mobile banking app. Here's how the competencies come together:

1. Lean Portfolio Management prioritizes the fraud detection initiative as part of its Retail Banking value stream and allocates funding for development.
2. Lean-Agile Leadership ensures leaders align the teams with the initiative's vision, emphasizing its importance in reducing fraud losses and enhancing customer trust.
3. Team and Technical Agility enables the formation of a cross-functional team with AI engineers, data scientists, and software developers who use CI/CD pipelines to test models in real-time.
4. Agile Product Delivery ensures the fraud detection system is developed incrementally, with features like real-time transaction monitoring released first, followed by machine learning-powered insights.
5. Enterprise Solution Delivery coordinates integration with the bank’s core systems and third-party transaction networks while ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR and PCI DSS.
6. Organizational Agility restructures operational workflows to prioritize customer data collection for AI models while ensuring strict adherence to privacy standards.
7. Continuous Learning Culture fosters experimentation, allowing teams to refine AI algorithms based on real-world data and feedback from customers.

By integrating these competencies, the bank delivers the fraud detection system on time, with high quality, and aligned with customer needs, while also remaining adaptable to future technological advances or market demands.