What does the SAFe Business Agility Assessment comprise
The
assessment follows the structure that is defined in the SAFe framework. SAFe
describes 7 “core competencies”. Each competence consists of a set
of related practices around a certain process area. You can find descriptions
of the core competences by navigating to the blue circles on the SAFe overview
on the scaledagileframework.com website. There are competences focused on team
“Team and Technical Agility”, focused on leadership: “Lean Agile Leadership”,
focused on portfolio: “Lean Portfolio Management” and so on.
If
you drill down to a core competency you will get a description of what
practices it comprises. One of the competences is Agile Product Delivery which
concerns the development of a solutions as a team of teams or a SAFe calls it: “Agile
Release Train”. I will use this practice as an example.
Within
the Agile Product Delivery competence several practices are described. For
instance the role of Product Manager, System architect and RTE are described; the
program increment and events on the program layer like the PI big-room planning
are described, etc.. The practices on Agile Product Delivery support the first
principle of the Agile Manifesto “Our highest priority is to satisfy the
customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software”:
1. ensuring customer centricity and the
value of the solution delivered
2. developing as one team in the same
cadence and decouple deployment to production environment from releasing software
to end-users
3. improving the lead times from idea
to deployment
Below
you find a infographic that shows the core competence and it’s practices.
The assessment follows the setup in core competences and supporting practices. For each core competence there is an Excel tool to assess it. Within the tool there is a list of statements for the supporting practices. Each statement can be rated on a 5 scale value from fully true to fully false or set to not-applicable. I’ve taken some statements from the assessment:
· We gather feedback from customers
who use our solutions
· We research customer experiences
through Gemba
· We define features with stated
benefits
· Prior to our planning event we write
features with defined Acceptance Criteria
· We support customers in adopting our
solutions
· We analyze how customers use our
solution
For personnel
working in software development most of the statements are not difficult to assess.
Rating them is of course subjective and less straight forward. While rating,
the Excel tool aggregates the ratings per practice on a scale from 1-5. As a
result of the assessment you will find a radar chart; see the example below:
SAFe
has created a toolkit for community members to support the preparation and the assessment
itself. The toolkit contains a presentation to support an actual assessment workshop.
It contains the Excel assessment sheets and a preparation checklist. Several videos
are available that explain the way of working for the assessment for the
workshop facilitator.
Tips and tops on the assessment:
The
SAFe Business Agility Assessment follows the structure of the SAFe framework
and uses concepts and terminology that are well explained on the website and in
SAFe trainings. For SPC’s there is a toolkit provided that will guide you
through the assessment process and tooling. The overview by means of the radar
charts give insight in improvement area’s and support transparency and continuous
improvement.
The
SAFe Business Agility Assessment is setup to be a self-assessment. However, it
requires in depth knowledge about the Scaled Agile Framework as the structure
and terminology is partly specific to the framework. For those new to the
framework some of the statements will be difficult to comprehend.
For
me personally I like to start with to get a course overview of the situation at
a client. I often read over the individual statements of the assessments to
verify whether I’ve covered all relevant items. However, I don’t rate each
statement individually as it takes quite some time. I just simply overwrite the
calculated values to get the radar charts and be able to communicate the first
results and maybe decide which area to look deeper into.
Also
when working with my client for a while, I like to get an idea of, and show the
progress of my work. As the assessment tool is setup in Excel it is easy to
grab the assessed values at a certain point in time and copy them as another
series. Adding the series to the radar chart will give an idea on the growth,
see the example below:
Another change that I’ve made is, it to adapt the Excel tool slightly, to be able to add a description for a rating. Rating the statements is subjective. Given you want to see if you’ve grown after last assessment it is quite handy to add a field to describe your reasoning for choosing a particular value.
As a
certified SAFe Program Consultant I’ve come to appreciate the SAFe framework.
However, there are other scaling frameworks around like Spotify an Nexus. The
maturity assessment that I’ve previously used was based on SAFe, but was more
framework agnostic. As such it has proven useful for assessing maturity in
assignments where the organization used one of the other models. Note that making
the assessment more framework agnostic will make it less suitable for a
self-assessment as the questions required more interpretation of the situation.
All in
all I quite like the self-assessment tool provided by the SAFe framework. I
will definitely use it again, the next time I’m working on a SAFe
implementation. If you like to learn more or want me to guide you through an
assessment, then don’t hesitate to contact me. Leave your thoughts below!
