During a mid-PI review of an ART, which was on its fifteenth planning increment, I was asked by the business owner to assess how well the ART was functioning. Along with another agile coach, we decided to observe ART events such as Coach Sync, Product Owner Sync as silent participants. Speaking with the Release Train Engineer and Product Managers, we found a few anti-patterns related to running of Sync events and Demos, all of which could be easily addressed. After presenting recommendations for improvement and obtaining agreement on action items, the meeting ended with a feeling of a job well done.

This was an ART that did not have access to an Agile Coach and was mostly operating on their own; thus, the team’s falling back onto older ways of working was not entirely a surprise. However, it’s easy even for experienced teams (and ARTs) to slide back into the older, more familiar, ways of working, unless they consciously measure what they want to improve.

SAFe provides a useful resource on its website to measure progress on achieving agility–a publicly accessible list of self-assessment surveys. SAFe studio members get access to a more enhanced version through a SAFe Partner. The surveys measure performance on the seven core competencies of a lean enterprise, introduced in Jan-2020 as part of the v5.0 of the framework.

For many organizations, adopting the prior versions of SAFe did not result in a meaningful change. Many of these organizations focused on renaming teams to fancy names, project managers to scrum master and business analysts to product owners. These were the kind of cosmetic changes that allowed checking the box on “doing agile” without improving outcomes.

Team members received SAFe training and certificates, but the harder decisions that required managers to embrace values and principles and rethink their way of working and decision-making were overlooked.

The introduction of core competencies brought focus back onto the mindset change needed to achieve business agility. These seven core competencies that line up the big-picture include:

• Organizational Agility
• Lean Portfolio Management
• Enterprise Solution Delivery
• Agile Product Delivery
• Team and Technical Agility
• Lean-Agile Leadership
• Continuous Learning Culture

Each competency highlights areas that would go through fundamental change to align with a new setup – A Lean-Agile Organization.
Going back to the mid-PI review, in the past I’ve often utilized self-assessment surveys to guide teams and ARTs on how they can build new skills necessary to operate in an agile way. Here is an assessment item from the “Agile Product Delivery” survey.

“Our ART identifies the personas that represent our customers” © Scaled Agile, Inc.
Scale: 1-Strongly Disagree, 2-Disagree, 3-Neither, 4-Agree, 5-Strongly Agree [0-NA]

How would you assess your ART on the statement above?

When each ART member provides their response without being influenced by others, you can get a true picture of how personas are being utilized by them.
Let’s say the aggregate score is low (less than 3). This would indicate a general disagreement on the use of personas to represent the customer. Next step would be to discuss and analyze the root cause. Customer centricity is at the heart of agile transformation and personas are a useful tool to understand the customer. Having identified this gap, the coach/RTE can work with the ART to identify action items to include in the improvement backlog. Here’s a link that provides guidance on Successfully Facilitating SAFe Assessments.
Utilizing these surveys periodically can help assess and improve the state of business agility. The Measure and Grow page has a table with survey links for each of the core competencies.

What’s missing from core competencies

Core competencies are not fully integrated with the framework. They seem to be on the periphery, both in the pictorial representation and in the content. While the surveys provide a means to assess the state of business agility, they do not provide guidance on what could be changed to improve a specific area.

The statements are also open to interpretation, which can vary based on the reader’s skill level and role in the organization. In that respect, the survey does not provide an additional explanation or context. Advanced tools are needed to fill this gap or experienced SPCs/SPCTs can step in to provide guidance.

Responses to each assessment item could vary based on where the organization is on their agile transformation journey. However, the survey does not provide descriptions of observed patterns for each of these items indicative of the organization’s agile maturity. Doing so could provide more accurate assessment results. Finally, the implementation roadmap is another area where the advancement of core competencies can shape the next phase of agile transformation.

Have you found these surveys useful in guiding teams and ARTs? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.