Hello,

When we recently announced SAFe^® 4.6, we introduced the Five Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise. These are:

• Lean-Agile Leadership
• Team and Technical Agility
• DevOps and Release on Demand
• Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering
• Lean Portfolio Management

These competencies describe the knowledge, skills, and mindset that enable an organization to operate in a truly Lean fashion and better navigate the complex challenges of digital disruption. You can read about each competency in more detail by clicking on each of their respective icons in the SAFe Big Picture but how do you know if you’re getting close to becoming a Lean Enterprise or not?

To help you answer this question, we developed a Lean Enterprise Assessment. Building on the SAFe DevOps Health Radar we released last year, our newest assessment splits each competency into three sub-dimensions that define scoring categories as ‘sit, crawl, walk, run, or fly’ and include descriptions of what each one might look like. The result is presented in a radar chart, as illustrated below.

Here’s an example: For the Lean-Agile Leadership competency, ‘crawl’ in the Lean-Agile Mindset sub-dimension means leaders have been trained in Lean and Agile and ‘walk’ means leaders are starting to exhibit Lean-Agile mindset and behaviors.

So, for each competency, you can see what all of the stages look like in terms of business agility and identify what actions you can take to get to the next level.

Keep in mind that it’s better to move from a ‘crawl’ to a ‘walk’ across all sub-dimensions versus going to ‘fly’ in one, while leaving the rest at a ‘crawl.’ Why? Because we’re taking a balanced, systems view in our journey to business agility, not locally optimizing just one sub-dimension. And remember that the assessment is designed as a guide to help you create a growth plan. This new Lean Enterprise Assessment also forms the basis of the latest version of our SAFe Executive Workshop Toolkit that’s available to Certified SAFe^® Program Consultants (SPCs).

Becoming a truly Lean enterprise can make the difference between just surviving and thriving in a world driven by digital transformation. Take the assessment to see where your enterprise is right now, identify areas that you need to address, and discover specific steps you can take to improve.

You can download the Lean Enterprise Assessment (an Excel spreadsheet) from the Metrics article on this website. As always, please use comments to let us know what you think.

Stay SAFe!

—Inbar Oren