Solving Business Problems with SAFe Competencies

The ability to solve business problems is the true measure of SAFe success.

– Andrew Sales, Chief Methodologist at Scaled Agile

Why is Solving Business Problems so important?

Whilst the 2025 State of SAFe report highlights that many organizations have been practicing SAFe successfully for many years, it also illustrates that some organizations struggle to achieve and sustain the results they expect. Although the specific reasons vary from organization to organization, a common factor was lower competency levels in critical areas. In particular, the skills, knowledge, and behaviours are required to transition to a Lean-Agile operating model effectively.

This realization led to an important evolution in the Framework. Not only do we need to provide guidance for Implementing SAFe through the implementation roadmap, alongside a clear process for customizing SAFe to their organizational context, but we also need to provide support for the ongoing journey towards mastery of this new way of working. This last step required us to reframe our thinking and to offer guidance in a more modular, accessible format, centered on what matters most to these organizations: solving business problems to achieve business outcomes. Together, these three critical activities create a truly adaptive operating model (Figure 1). 

This article describes this evolution and outlines how all organizations, regardless of their current level of success, can benefit from being on a path towards deeper levels of competency. And in particular, how every organization must, at all times, have clarity on its biggest business problems and its plan for solving them. To this end, this guidance article presents a structured, collaborative approach to creating a “SAFe Competency Journey Map” that becomes a cohesive, prioritized organizational change plan. The goal of the journey map is to move beyond the transformation narrative from tracking the adoption of SAFe practices to achieving measurable business outcomes through competency mastery.

What are the Disciplines of a Lean-Agile Organization?

SAFe is organized into five Disciplines, as shown in Figure 2. Each discipline forms a critical component of a Lean-Agile organization. The disciplines describe the knowledge, skills, and techniques required to achieve mastery. They provide the necessary information, learning resources, and practical guidance for success.

Lean Portfolio Management: Aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance. This discipline focuses on organizing portfolios to accelerate strategic work, validating investment opportunities to reduce waste, and managing balanced portfolios to align strategic goals with immediate needs.

Large Solution Integration and Delivery: Describes how to apply SAFe principles and practices to the specification, development, operation, and evolution of the world’s largest and most sophisticated software, hardware, and cyber-physical systems. This discipline focuses on coordinating large solution delivery, utilizing Lean Systems Engineering, organizing around value for large solutions, and roadmapping.

Product Development Flow: Enables organizations to smoothly release valuable product increments and respond swiftly to market changes. This discipline focuses on organizing teams and ARTs around value, accelerating product flow, creating responsive roadmaps, scaling Agile requirements, and measuring product performance. It also includes harnessing customer feedback and integrating product design.

Team and Technical Agility: Describes how to enable cross-functional Agile Teams to accelerate value delivery. This discipline aims to create great Agile Teams, launch Agile business Teams, and implement marketing with agility. Additionally, it covers developing quality software, continuously delivering value, and implementing the architectural runway.

Leadership and Culture: Explains how leaders can build a positive and high-performing culture where people and teams can achieve their best. This discipline describes how leaders must embody and exemplify new Lean-Agile behaviours alongside the practices to drive meaningful and lasting change across the organization.

Each SAFe Discipline is accessible from the top of the SAFe Framework and provides both a visual representation and a guidance article that explains the key elements of each one (Figure 3). The visual representation clearly shows the discipline’s end state and illustrates the operating model for this Framework area. Each icon on these images is clickable and provides a guidance article outlining its purpose and role in the discipline.

How to develop competency of a SAFe Discipline?

As mentioned at the start of this article, although many organizations are practicing SAFe, some are unable to master the new ways of working and therefore miss out on many benefits. The solution to this problem is that they need to deepen their competency levels.

To support this, each SAFe Discipline is accompanied not only by guidance articles but also by a series of competencies (Figure 4).

As shown in Figure 4, SAFe Competencies are designed to solve specific business problems. Indeed, the competencies have been developed to address the most pressing business problems as shared by SAFe Customers. 

Instead of just giving theory or advice, a competency gives a clear, structured path for learning, applying, and eventually mastering a specific area. For example, there are specific competencies dedicated to effectively harnessing customer feedback across products, validating new investment ideas, and accelerating development.

Each SAFe Competency contains:

• Knowledge: Gained through the reading or watching a set of connected SAFe articles and/or videos.
• Application: Achieved through the execution of actionable steps and techniques that create quick wins in the organization.
• Mastery: Achieved when the new knowledge and skills are successfully applied, resulting in a sustainable and repeatable application of the competency across the affected areas.
• Outcomes: Achieved through proof that the organisation has successfully integrated the new techniques, knowledge, and behaviours into day-to-day work.

An example of a SAFe Competency is shown in Figure 5 below.

While traditional views of SAFe might make it seem like a one-size-fits-all set of rules, the SAFe Competency approach is highly adaptable. This shift ensures that organizations stay focused on achieving measurable business outcomes and real value well beyond launching their first ARTs. 

The need to develop a specific competency to address a particular problem can be identified at all levels of the Framework by teams, ARTs, or specific individuals. 

Consider the following example. Product Management, in partnership with UX designers, may recognize that their Inability to integrate product design early and continuously was leading to fragmented user experiences for the work products developed by one ART in particular. In this case, the Product Manager and UX Lead for the ART decided to champion the Integrating Product Design Competency (part of the Product Development Flow Discipline). Over the next two PIs, they continued to apply more techniques from the competency. The ART tracked a 20% reduction in production defects related to usability and a measurable increase in the ease-of-use metric in their customer surveys. 

In addition to using the SAFe competencies to address standalone problems, organizations are also encouraged to create “SAFe Competency Journey Maps” to diagnose larger, more systemic challenges. This process is described in the next section.

How is a SAFe Competency Journey Map created?

A SAFe Competency Journey Map is a structured, tailored plan that identifies multiple competencies across a range of SAFe disciplines, designed to solve complex, connected business problems to achieve an organizational goal. The structure of a SAFe Journey Map is shown in Figure 6.

Creating a SAFe Competency Journey Map is a five-step process. 

1. Align on the Goal(s)
2. Identify and Prioritize Business Problems
3. Determine any Significant Organizational Challenges
4. Populate and Sequence SAFe Competencies
5. Identify Competency Champions

These steps are described in detail below. The steps are typically completed as part of an interactive workshop comprising informed and influential stakeholders. This group is often the ‘guiding coalition’ of change within the organization and typically includes senior organizational leaders, such as Executives and Business Owners, alongside change experts, including SPCs, members of the Value Management Office (VMO), and the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE). Local champions or subject matter experts who can speak to specific challenges are another important addition.

The steps utilize SAFe Competency Cards, which hold the following information:

Step 1: Align on the Goal(s)

The first step clarifies where the organization is going and what they want to achieve. The workshop attendees review the current company strategy, vision, and values, and consider key questions such as: Do we have a clear understanding of our company strategy and the values we desire to see lived throughout the organization? What is the organization trying to achieve or avoid?

Example: The Guiding Coalition at Global InsureCo—comprising the CEO, Business Owners, and LACE members—began by anchoring their SAFe Competency Journey Map to their goal of becoming the most “Customer-Centric Digital Insurer” by 2027.

Alongside identifying the goal, it can be useful at this point to start thinking about the larger, more systemic challenges that are preventing the organization from reaching its potential. Assessment data, such as the SAFe Business Agility Assessment (available from the link below), is a valuable source here. Asking each attendee to review the assessment data and then list their top three most persistent organizational, cultural, or systemic challenges is a good starting point.

Step 2: Identify and Prioritize Business Problems

This step begins by dealing all the SAFe Competency Cards to the group. Each person reviews the front and the back of the cards they are dealt. The aim of this step is to prioritize or discard each of the SAFe Competency Cards, as shown in Figure 8, to identify the business problems that are preventing the organization from achieving its goal or contributing to previously identified pain points. This process is described in more detail below.

Once the cards have been dealt, create a grid with the Urgency and Impact axes. These will be the dimensions used to prioritize the business problems. Urgency is the time sensitivity to resolving the problem. The following factors may help to quantify urgency:

• External Pressure: Are there external market deadlines, competitive threats, or upcoming business events that will penalize us if this problem is not solved within the next PI?
• Dependency Blockage: Is solving this problem a foundational prerequisite that, if delayed, will prevent us from solving other problems?
• Change Momentum: Will achieving a quick, visible win by solving this problem build momentum?
• Risk of Delay: Is the problem currently causing irreversible damage, for example, severe customer churn or regulatory non-compliance?

Impact is the size of the problem. It may be helpful to think of the impact by reflecting on:

• Organizational Scope: How many value streams, portfolios, or organizational layers are impacted?
• Strategic Impediment: Does this problem directly prevent us from achieving our goal?
• Financial Consequence: What is the estimated cost if this problem is not solved?

Playing the Cards

Each turn, a person can either place a SAFe Competency card or move a previously placed card. Once either of these things has been done, it is the next person’s turn.

If placing a card, they can place it either on the Impact/Urgency matrix in a relative position to other cards already placed. Alternatively, they can place a card in the Not Applicable area, indicating that this problem is not currently applicable to our organization or current problems, or in the Already Resolved area, meaning this problem has been sufficiently resolved and most, if not all, of the outcomes on the card are already achieved.

Instead of placing a card, they may move a card on the board to a different location, explaining why. Others do not debate the reasoning, though they should ask clarifying questions. This technique ensures everyone’s insights are heard while a consensus is being generated.

Play continues until all the cards have been placed and cards are no longer being moved. At this point, the highest priority business problems have been identified.

Two business problems surfaced as the highest priorities for Global InsureCo (Figure 7).

We often make investment decisions that lead to unrealized value and wasted effort: the rationale for placing the card so high was to help reduce the number of active, non-strategic efforts across the portfolio by 50% over the next 2 quarters. 

Rapid change is overwhelming our organization, and our leaders lack the mindset and skills to lead transformations effectively. The reasoning for this card placement was that solving this could increase the self-reported employee satisfaction score, which is currently very low in this area due to change resistance.

By placing the cards relative to each other, the Coalition rapidly aligned on two primary areas of focus: Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) and Leadership and Culture. While they also considered competencies within the other 3 Disciplines (such as slower value delivery than they would like and an inability to harness customer feedback), these were ultimately classified as the result of poor investment and disconnected leadership decisions, rather than the core issue itself.

Step 3: Determine any Significant Organizational Challenge(s) 

As a final step in the prioritization process, it can be useful to ask whether the highest-priority business problems are related to a significant organizational challenge that needs to be addressed. This often helps to create SAFe Competency Journey maps that are more coherent and tackle related problems.

Identifying a significant challenge can also act as a unifying communication tool when sharing the SAFe Competency Journey Map more broadly across the organization.

Step 4: Populate and Sequence SAFe Competencies

Based on the highest-priority business problems, typically 3-6 cards are selected for the next step. These represent the competencies that need to be developed to address these business problems. Start by populating a grid, as shown in Figure 10, that organizes the cards into rows for each SAFe Discipline, with priority from left to right.

In reality, dependencies affect the sequence in which problems can be solved and competency can be addressed. The attendees discuss and sequence the cards based on organizational change capacity, ensuring foundational prerequisites are not attempted in parallel to competencies that require them. This may lead to some low-priority competencies being addressed ahead of higher-priority ones. Additionally, they need to consider available capacity. It may not be feasible to tackle all three competencies at once.

Global InsureCo quickly recognized that any structural change needs to start with a new mindset and therefore sequenced the Leading Change Competency ahead of the Organizing Portfolios Competency. Additionally, they ensured that Validating Investment Opportunities and Transitioning to Value Stream Funding was sequenced after the portfolio was reorganized to avoid parallel capacity overload (Figure 11).

Step 6: Identify Competency Champions

This step represents the transition from planning to action. The group selects the first 1-2 competencies and commits to these as the immediate focus, and Competency Champions are identified by reflecting on some critical questions:

• Who has the organizational influence to drive cross-team behavioral change?
• Are they recognized experts or effective leaders in the Competency area?
• Can they inspire advocates to sustain new practices?
• Do they have the capacity to master and implement the assigned Competency?

The Global InsureCo Guiding Coalition selected its Competency Champions. The Head of the VMO will be the Champion for the Organizing Portfolios Competency. A VP of Finance was chosen as the Champion for the Validating Investment Opportunities Competency, and a VP of HR will champion Leading Change.

How to drive action with a Competency Journey Map

Once the SAFe Competency Journey Map has been created, there are some critical next steps.

Mobilize the Competency Champions 

The individuals identified as competency champions meet with the workshop stakeholders. Together, they deep-dive into the assigned competency and review the SAFe guidance for it.

Finalize and Communicate the SAFe Competency Journey Map

At an upcoming organizational meeting, like an all-hands or department meeting, share the SAFe Competency Journey Map. The SAFe Competency Journey Map is a tool used to summarize the workshop’s output. An example is shown in Figure 12.

Identify Quick Wins

Once the SAFe Journey Map has been committed to, planning and execution begin. Each Competency Champion will often assemble a team of local champions to support the work. It is recommended that they identify some quick, actionable steps to build momentum.

Global InsureCo VP of HR, who was championing the Leading Change competency, conducted a “Why We Adapt” roadshow with the Executive Team and their direct reports, focusing on illustrating how the organization would need to change if it wanted to achieve the goal of becoming customer-centric.

Apply a Continuous Improvement Approach to Each Competency

Each competency champion, along with the support of their team of local champions, must take ownership of the learning, application, and mastery of their assigned SAFe Competency. Their focus is on translating the competency into actionable steps. This is done in partnership with the ARTs and Agile Teams that may need to adapt to any change and adopt new ways of working. 

As part of this work, the Competency Champions should focus on:

• Execution: Break each competency into clearly defined actions for those affected and create a plan to execute them.
• Sustainment: Ensure the new practices become part of the organizational way of working and cultivate a network of advocates who will sustain the change.
• Measure Progress: Use self-assessments and objective metrics to measure progress against the business outcomes defined for that competency.
• Escalation: Surface impediments and data that indicate where the desired outcomes for their competency are not being achieved.

At Global InsureCo, the Head of the VMO is the Competency Champion for the Organizing Portfolios Competency. As part of ensuring successful execution, they decide to host monthly syncs to manage dependencies between the new portfolio structure and the legal and compliance departments. Additionally, they are publishing leading indicators, such as the proportion of existing ARTs that are now aligned with clearly defined Value Streams, which illustrates the progress towards mastery of this competency.

Manage the SAFe Competency Journey Map Holistically

As well as each Competency Champion focusing on a specific portion of the SAFe Competency Journey Map, a guiding coalition (most likely the same stakeholders from the workshop in which it was created) is accountable for the overall change journey and its role in both helping the organization attain its stated goal as well as addressing the larger systemic challenges they may have identified.

As part of this work, they should focus on:

• Alignment: Create and facilitate cross-competency syncs to drive alignment, measure progress, manage dependencies,s and share learning.
• Impediment Removal: Resolve systemic issues and conflicts that impede the mastery of the new competencies and achievement of the organizational goal.
• Outcome Tracking: Track and share publicly the achievement of measurable business outcomes across the organization.
• Celebrate Successes: Celebrating successes ensures that continuous improvement becomes a permanent part of the organizational culture.

Extend the SAFe Competency Journey Map Iteratively

Regularly measuring the impact of the changes also informs the strategic planning of the next iteration of the journey map. A recommended cadence for running the workshop described above is once a PI. This provides enough time to make meaningful change, but not so long that the organization cannot be responsive to new emerging problems or changes to the stated goal. When the workshop is run again, some competencies may still be a work in progress. This is a good opportunity to reassess whether work on them should continue and identify the next biggest problem to begin solving.

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References

[1] Kotter, John. Leading Change. Harvard Business School Press. 1996.