SAFe is a relatively new framework that I was exposed to while working on an agile project at a major Energy client.
Without going into all of the details, what started out as a waterfall project became an agile project about halfway through. This required a complete transformation of our mindset and working practices. My role switched from being a project manager to more of a program coordinator and scrum master. To further help the team with being more agile, we brought in an agile coach who had a long list of letters after his name. Of course, being the curious person I am, I started to look at what all the letters meant and found that there was a whole world of agile that I had no idea about.
SAFe stands for Scaled Agile Framework and is a mixture of scrum, kanban, devops, and other agile frameworks to give organizations a structure that works for any level of ‘project’. Perhaps I did not understand scrum that well, but it did not seem to scale as well at the biggest levels. There were scrums and scrums of scrums for coordination, but past that, it seemed like there was not an elegant framework for managing that level of complexity.
This is not a post about SAFe, but a post on a recent course I took called Leading SAFe (5.0), and I’d like to share the tips and lessons I learned from taking and passing the exam. By the way, the exam is open book which may change your strategy slightly.
Take notes
Our course trainer was great at communicating what needed to be done ahead of time. There were a number of articles that we were supposed to pre-read before the course, and a few days before the course, I reviewed the articles and took notes on some of the more salient points. I think this pre-read really helped to frame what I learned in the course.
Then, during the course, I was also taking notes. Note that this was all remote and so it was easy to get distracted by other things on your computer or phone, but taking notes helped me to pay attention.
Make it real
One problem that I frequently have with courses is that there is so much theory and discussion that it is hard to apply it to real world situations. A lot of the SAFe framework was borrowed from scrum so I managed to apply what I had learned being a scrum master to the SAFe theory and so I think it definitely helps to have some exposure to agile before trying to learn SAFe.
Review the SAFe framework
After completing the course, our trainer suggested that we go through the SAFe framework (which is fully clickable and links to articles) and click on every single item. I did so and even though I don’t remember everything, it was great to get a good sense of where topics were.
Since the exam is open book, if you are stuck on a question, you can look it up in the SAFe framework. You have 90 minutes for 45 questions, but I found that it only took me about 30–35 minutes to complete the exam, even with looking up the answers and reviewing all of the answers at least once. However, if you don’t review the SAFe framework, you may spend more time searching for topics than you would like to.
Use the practice exam strategically
For me, there were two ways I could use the practice exam: one, I could go through the practice exam at the start, before any of my reviews and after I had finished the course, to see where my strengths and weaknesses are. I could then focus on the things that I needed to learn. Or two, I could do all of my review, and then use the practice exam as if it was the real exam, to see whether I know the material or not.
I decided on option two because the practice exam does not generate new questions each time you do it, and it simulates the real exam very closely. Some things I learned on the practice exam:
I managed to get through 45 questions in about 20 minutes, which meant I could afford to slow down, read the question carefully and check answers over on the real exam
Some of the questions I sped through but did not read carefully, resulting in careless mistakes that could have been prevented. I decided that on the real exam, I would read each question through twice so that I understood the question. I couldn’t have done this without knowing how quickly I could get through the practice exam.
I passed the practice exam on the first try, which helped give me confidence that I could do equally as well on the real exam. I noted down the areas that I was not strong in, reviewed those particular sections, and took the practice exam again. When I scored higher on the second try, I felt I had a better understanding of my weaknesses.
Beware tricky questions (or read the question carefully)
Unfortunately, I’m not able to provide any actual questions, but one of the tricky areas was around principles, values and the like. There is the agile manifesto and agile principles. There are SAFe core values. There are SAFe principles. Make sure you read the question carefully to understand what the question is asking. The answers also try to trick you. If they ask about agile principles, they may throw in one or two SAFe principles that will seem familiar to you, but are not agile principles.
Eliminate wrong answers
In some questions, the right answer is not immediately obvious. In those cases, I read through all of the answers and determine which ones I know are obviously wrong. For example, some answers are not aligned with the agile principles or mindset and therefore, cannot be the right answer. Then, after eliminating what is obviously wrong, usually you can narrow down the right answer to two and then make a decision then. It was, for me, a lot easier to find the right answer from two answers than four.
Search strategy for an open book exam
With an open book exam, I quickly realized from the practice exam that there were some questions where you could search for the answer, and other questions where you had to read and understand the material to identify the right answer. My point? Don’t spend all of your time trying to ‘look’ for the answer when it is not explicitly written in the articles. You develop a certain intuition for which questions are which, but my strategy was to read through the article, get a sense for where the question’s thinking was at, and then identify the right answer from my understanding.
Hopefully that helps you in your quest to become a SAFe Agilist! Please let me know if you have any questions or comments on SAFe.