What are the primary SAFe values and why are they important?
SAFe have distinctive values and principles, which I will cover independently in an exclusive video series, but for now we’ll focus on two broad focus areas and explain why they matter.
- Customer Centricity
- Respect for people
- Alignment with purpose
Customer Centricity
In SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), the customer is the priority.
Everything that we do is aligned with ensuring that customer needs and requirements are being met. We invest a great deal of time understanding the problems that customers face and making sure that we fully understand the problem and have selected the most compelling problems to solve.
Often, the team will never have solved such a problem before or created the solution, and so they follow empirical process control. They design a hypothesis for the problem or opportunity and focus on designing an experiment that will validate or disprove that hypothesis.
As they do the work, they gather data and evidence, and that informs what they attempt next.
We discover, we learn, we evolve, and we become better with each iteration.
Respect for people.
In SAFe, there is a very strong focus on respect for others. That could be people working with the value stream (teams and teams of teams), it could means customers, or it could mean the suppliers and partners we work with.
We create a culture, supported by a mindset, and reinforced by behaviours and practices that respect people, their contribution, their ideas, and beliefs.
We value their feedback and opinions, and we ensure that our language, our processes, systems, and policies align with that belief that people are valuable and worthy of our respect.
SAFe, in particular, works hard to align customer need with organizational needs.
Yes, customers are incredibly important, but so are the people who work to create and deliver value for those customers. Alignment ensures that both sides of the table are valued and respected.
Alignment of purpose
In a project management environment, people are valued and respected, but the thinking is more short-term. The project has a defined start and end date, and often the team and customers will part ways at the end of that project.
It’s hard to establish a strong vision, sense of purpose, and align the team around those values, principles, and purpose when they don’t have enough time to form as a team, let alone grow into a high-performing team, because they need to deliver the project within 6 months.
Their focus lies in hitting the project milestones and working with the project manager to ensure that something is delivered to the customer within 6 months, and that something needs to be good enough to meet contractual obligations.
SAFe focuses a great deal on aligning purpose, vision and strategic goals with creating and delivering value for customers.
Because the team are going to grow, evolve, and improve over time, we see continuous improvement with each iteration and a high-performing team that are inspired by the product goal and organizational vision.
People who dig a little deeper, stretch a little further, and find a deep sense of purpose and fulfilment in their work.
That’s the goal of aligning purpose with organizational vision and strategy.
Value Glide
Value Glide are a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) consultancy, coaching practice, and training specialist who work with organizations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.
As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team are invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and use the data and evidence we gather from each implementation to inform our training, coaching, and consulting services.
In a nutshell, empirical process control or empiricism.
If you are thinking of adopting agile within your organization and have identified SAFe as a great agile framework to adopt, implement and improve your business agility, visit our SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program page or view our SAFe Consulting Services page.
If you have identified a need for an agile coach and SAFe coach to help your organization adopt and implement SAFe, visit our SAFe Coaching Services page.
If you want to know more about SAFe and how to lead SAFe, visit our SAFE Training page for a host of options, from Leading SAFe to a SAFe Release Train Engineer course.
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