Hi Folks,

The goal of SAFe 5.0 is clear: achieving a state of Business Agility across the enterprise. The seven core competencies of Business Agility describe the practices in support of this goal, and the implementation roadmap provides a blueprint for the journey ahead. But change of any kind is never a linear path—it requires constant reflection on the steps taken previously and an ability to adapt plans based on the results achieved. Indeed, we are often asked by organizations how best to assess the progress they are making on this journey, and how to identify appropriate next steps.

“Measure and grow” is the term we use to describe how a Portfolio of SAFe value streams evaluates its progress towards Business Agility and identifies opportunities for improvement. The evaluation starts with the SAFe Business Agility assessment, which assesses overall progress, followed by applying one of the seven core competency assessments to further identify areas of opportunity or concern within a specific dimension. 

The next step is to identify improvement actions based on the assessment results. To support this, we have created “Grows”: recommended activities for increasing proficiency in a dimension of a core competency. 

Since there are seven competencies, each with three dimensions, that means there are 21 Grows templates to explore. The Grows are linked from the top of each core competency article. This example is from the Team and Technical agility competency.

All the recommended Grows have clear activity descriptions and links to access them directly and include a mixture of activity types such as videos, toolkits, courses, articles and more. They are categorized into core, intermediate and advanced stages so you can carefully plan your own improvement journey based on where you are starting from. We will continue to update the Grows as we develop more resources and collect feedback from the SAFe community. 

Finally, the central Measure and Grow article provides guidance on both facilitating these assessments, including periodically re-assessing, and prioritizing the Grows to deliver the greatest benefit in the shortest time.

Stay SAFe,

—Andy