SAFe-Agilist SAFe 6 Agilist - Leading SAFe (SA) (6.0) Questions and Answers

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The Agile Manifesto lists four core values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Option C is a direct verbatim value from the Agile Manifesto.

(Source: Agile Manifesto)

In the Design Thinking section, the workbook specifies:

“Use empathy maps to identify with Customers… This helps teams develop deep shared understanding and empathy for the Customer.”

This tool is essential in capturing user perspectives, making it a key Design Thinking practice.

Source: 01 Workbook SA (6.0).pdf, Pages 4-7 to 4-9

The Lean Budget Guardrails defined in SAFe include "Guiding investments by horizon" as one of the main components. This ensures strategic alignment and responsible use of funds.

“Fund Value Streams; Lean budgets and Guardrails… Value Stream budgets adjusted dynamically…”

In the SAFe Workbook under Principle #1 ("Take an economic view"), it states:

“Deliver early and often. Deliver value incrementally… Accelerates feedback and learning, allows early and continuous delivery.”

This principle is illustrated using the difference between waterfall and Agile delivery models.

Source: 01 Workbook SA (6.0).pdf, Pages 2-26 to 2-28

This is one way to describe a cross-functional Agile team. A cross-functional Agile team is a group of 5-11 individuals who have the skills and authority to define, build, test, and deploy some element of solution value—all within a short iteration timebox. A cross-functional Agile team is optimized for communication and delivery of value by having clear roles and responsibilities, shared goals and commitments, frequent feedback and collaboration, high trust and accountability, and continuous improvement. References: Cross-functional Agile Teams

Customer Centricity is described as:

“A mindset and way of doing business that focuses on creating positive experiences for the customer by understanding their needs, behaviors, and preferences.”

This drives innovation and aligns solutions to real customer problems.

This is how SAFe recommends using a second operating system to deliver value. A second operating system is a way of organizing an enterprise that combines two complementary structures: a traditional hierarchy that provides stability, alignment, and efficiency; and a network of empowered teams that provides speed, agility, and creativity. A second operating system helps enterprises achieve organizational agility, which is one of the core competencies of business agility in SAFe. Organizing development around the flow of value means creating cross-functional Agile teams and ARTs that deliver value in a regular cadence. Maintaining the hierarchies means preserving the existing roles and functions that provide governance, compliance, and support. References: Organizational Agility, Dual Operating System

Design thinking is a method that provides a continuous understanding of the target market. Design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving that involves empathy, ideation, experimentation, and implementation. Design thinking helps teams discover the real needs and desires of their customers, generate innovative solutions that address those needs, validate their assumptions through fast feedback loops, and deliver value that delights their customers. Design thinking helps teams achieve the core competency of Customer Centricity in SAFe. References: Customer Centricity, Design Thinking

The SAFe House of Lean is based on:

“Goal: Value in the shortest sustainable lead time, with the best quality and people morale.”

This guides decisions and continuous improvement.

The four SAFe Core Values listed in the workbook are:

Alignment

Transparency

Respect for People

Relentless Improvement

“Transparency: Create a trust-based environment, communicate directly, turn mistakes into learning moments.”

“Relentless Improvement: Build a problem-solving culture, reflect and adapt frequently.”

According to the SAFe Agilist 6.0 domain of Lean Thinking, a value stream is triggered by a demand for some value, such as a new feature, a change request, or a defect fix1. A feature is a service that fulfills a stakeholder need2. Therefore, a feature request is a valid trigger for a value stream.

A spike request is a type of exploration enabler that addresses technical uncertainty or risk3. A user story request is a type of backlog item that represents an end user goal or function4. These are not triggers for a value stream, but rather work items that flow through a value stream.

ROAM is an acronym for Resolved, Owned, Accepted, Mitigated. ROAM is a technique for categorizing and managing PI risks during the final plan review in the PI planning event. PI risks are potential events or conditions that may have a negative impact on the PI objectives or outcomes. ROAM helps teams address their PI risks by assigning them to one of four states: Resolved (the risk has been eliminated or is no longer relevant); Owned (the risk has been assigned to a person or a team who is responsible for managing it); Accepted (the risk has been acknowledged and its impact has been factored into the plan); Mitigated (the risk has been reduced or its likelihood has been lowered). References: PI Planning, Final Plan Review

According to the SAFe Agilist 6.0 domain of Built-in Quality, this practice reduces bottlenecks and ensures consistency by:

Encouraging teams to share responsibility for the quality of their work products

Establishing common standards and guidelines for coding, testing, documentation, etc.

Enabling teams to collaborate and coordinate across domains and dependencies

Promoting a culture of continuous improvement and learning

https://scaledagileframework.com/built-In-quality/

Cadence and synchronization are applied in events like PI Planning:

“PI Planning provides cadence-based alignment of multiple Agile Teams… Synchronization allows all stakeholders to align and collaborate.”

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

In SAFe 6.0, the Business Agility Value Stream (BAVS) describes the steps that enterprises take to rapidly respond to new opportunities and deliver value. The steps are:

Sense Opportunity

Fund MVP

Organize Around Value

Connect to Customer

Deliver MVP

Pivot or Persevere

Deliver Value Continuously

(Source: Scaled Agile Framework – Business Agility Value Stream)

Reducing delays is the focus of Lean thinking. Lean thinking is a philosophy and a set of principles and practices that aim to eliminate waste and optimize value delivery. Waste is anything that does not directly contribute to customer value or that causes delays in delivering value. Delays are the primary cause of waste, as they increase inventory, risk, variability, overhead, and dissatisfaction. Reducing delays means minimizing the time between customer need and value delivery, which improves quality, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. References: Thriving in the Digital Age, SAFe Principle #2

SAFe emphasizes:

“Separate deploy to production from release… This enables testing in production before exposing new functionality and makes the timing of the release a business decision.”

This approach supports business agility by decoupling technical readiness from market timing.

Source: Workbook, Continuous Deployment, Page 4-86

The Continuous Delivery Pipeline represents the workflow, activities, and automation needed to deliver new functionality more frequently. The Continuous Delivery Pipeline is a key enabler of Agile Product Delivery, which is one of the core competencies of business agility in SAFe. The Continuous Delivery Pipeline consists of four elements: Continuous Exploration, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, and Release on Demand. These elements help teams continuously explore customer needs, develop high-quality solutions, deploy them to various environments, and release them to customers when and where they want. References: Agile Product Delivery, Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Trust is developed by:

“Delivering value consistently and predictably… Predictability builds confidence between teams and stakeholders.”

This is reinforced during PI Planning and Iteration Reviews.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The items “Sense Opportunity,” “Fund MVP,” “Pivot or Persevere,” and “Deliver Value Continuously” are official step names in SAFe 6.0’s Business Agility Value Stream (BAVS). In SAFe 6.0, the BAVS describes the end-to-end steps an enterprise uses to rapidly explore opportunities, fund and test hypotheses via MVPs, make an evidence-based “pivot or persevere” decision, and then scale and deliver value continuously. (Note: corrected the typo from “Preserve” → Persevere.)

For completeness, SAFe 6.0 defines the BAVS steps as:

Sense Opportunity

Fund MVP

Organize Around Value

Connect to the Customer

Deliver MVP

Pivot or Persevere

Deliver Value Continuously

These terms are presented by SAFe as the canonical step names (proper nouns) and are used consistently across the SAFe 6.0 website and the SA (SAFe Agilist) study materials when describing the Business Agility Value Stream.

References (Authoritative SAFe 6.0 sources):

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe 6.0) — Business Agility Value Stream (BAVS)(Official SAFe article that lists the steps above and explains each step’s purpose.)

SAFe Agilist (SA) Exam Study Guide (v6.0) — Topics on Business Agility and Business Agility Value Stream

Related SAFe 6.0 pages: Lean Portfolio Management, Organize Around Value, Customer Centricity & Design Thinking, Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Lean Portfolio Management, Agile Product Delivery, and Lean-Agile Leadership are SAFe core competencies. A SAFe core competency is a set of knowledge, skills, and behaviors that enable an organization to achieve business agility. Business agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative solutions. There are seven core competencies in SAFe: Team and Technical Agility, Agile Product Delivery, Enterprise Solution Delivery, Lean Portfolio Management, Organizational Agility, Continuous Learning Culture, and Lean-Agile Leadership. References: SAFe as an Operating System for Business Agility, Core Competencies of Business Agility

In the workbook’s PI Planning agenda:

"After the draft plan review, the RTE facilitates a management review and problem-solving meeting with Business Owners, Product Management, and other stakeholders. Here, capacity and load adjustments, scope changes, and planning adjustments are agreed upon."

Source: Workbook, PI Planning Module, Page 4-70

According to the SAFe Agilist 6.0 domain of PI Planning, the confidence vote is a process where:

Each team conducts a vote using their fingers (fist of five) or a digital tool for remote events

The teams vote on the confidence level for the objectives as a set, and if confidence is high enough, the aggregate set of objectives becomes the committed ART plan

The Release Train Engineer summarizes the team objectives into the ART PI objectives in a format suitable for management communication

https://scaledagileframework.com/pi-planning/

Mindset and principles is one of the dimensions of Lean-Agile Leadership. Lean-Agile Leadership is one of the core competencies of business agility in SAFe. Lean-Agile Leadership means exhibiting the behaviors that enable an organization to achieve business agility. Lean-Agile Leadership has three dimensions: mindset and principles; leading change; and developing people. Mindset and principles means adopting the values and principles of Lean thinking and Agile development, and applying them to lead others in achieving business agility. References: Lean-Agile Leadership, Mindset and Principles

The Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) plays a key role in enabling transformation and follows the SAFe Implementation Roadmap.

“LACE uses the SAFe Implementation Roadmap to guide the transformation… The roadmap outlines a step-by-step strategy from reaching the tipping point to sustaining and accelerating SAFe.”

During the PI Planning simulation, the workbook details that:

“In the second team breakout, Business Owners circulate and assign business value to PI Objectives from low (1) to high (10)... This reflects the importance of the objectives and helps prioritize based on business impact.”

The purpose is to guide teams in understanding what matters most to the business.