The core issue described is teams debating dependencies and struggling to plan, which often stems from poorly refined Features. Unclear Features lead to ambiguity, making dependency identification and story breakdown difficult during the time-boxed PI Planning event. The most leveraged action for an SPC is to coach the key roles (PMs/POs) upstream on the proper refinement of Features, which includes clear acceptance criteria and preliminary dependency identification. This addresses the root cause and empowers the ART to improve its own process.

Systems thinking involves understanding the whole organization as a complex, interconnected system that delivers value. The best demonstration of this is to start the ART launch by analyzing the organization’s value streams—the sequence of activities needed to deliver value to a customer. This ensures the ART is aligned to how the business actually works and delivers value, rather than being imposed on arbitrary organizational boundaries. It optimizes the entire system, not just individual parts.

The Inspect & Adapt event is specifically designed for this situation. Its structured problem-solving workshop is the formal, built-in mechanism for the ART to address systemic obstacles. The correct step is to leverage this existing ceremony, guiding the ART (including teams and stakeholders) through root cause analysis using tools like the 5 Whys or fishbone diagrams. This is a collaborative, improvement-focused approach that aligns with SAFe’s values of transparency and relentless improvement, rather than top-down mandates or superficial fixes.

Lean-Agile Leadership is fundamentally about leaders changing their own behavior. Their primary responsibilities are to learn, model, and teach the Lean-Agile mindset and SAFe principles. More concretely, they must work to create an environment of psychological safety, remove systemic impediments, and optimize the entire value delivery system for flow. An SPC’s coaching must focus on this behavioral shift. The other options describe leaders engaging in tactical team-level activities, which can undermine team autonomy and is not the primary focus of this competency.

SAFe emphasizes measuring outcomes and the flow of value at the system (ART) level, not individual or team output. Measuring individual team velocity or developer productivity can create local optimization, unhealthy competition, and undermine collaboration. The SPC should educate stakeholders on better metrics that reflect the ART’s overall ability to deliver value predictably. Program Predictability (planned vs actual BV) and Flow Metrics (like flow velocity, time, load, and efficiency) provide insight into the health of the entire system and align stakeholder focus on value delivery.

The SAFe implementation roadmap is a sequential guide. After training the initial cadre of change agents (SPCs), the next critical step is to train the people who have the authority to change the system: the executives, managers, and leaders. Without their understanding, commitment, and behavioral change (embodied in the Lean-Agile Leadership competency), the transformation is likely to fail. They must understand the ‘why’ and their new role before moving on to tactical steps like identifying ARTs.

Unplanned work is a reality, and it disrupts flow. The most systemic solution is to make the invisible work visible and plan for it. By establishing a standard, agreed-upon capacity allocation for unplanned work (support, defects, etc.), the ART acknowledges the reality and plans its iteration and PI commitments more realistically. This increases predictability and reduces the demoralizing cycle of missed commitments. While a support team (option D) is a pattern, it can create a knowledge silo and is not always the first or best solution. Option C builds the practice of accounting for interrupt work into the planning discipline of all teams.

The four aspects are Continuous Exploration (CE), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment (CD), and Release on Demand. Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of taking features from the Continuous Exploration aspect and developing, testing, and integrating them into a production-like environment. The core goal of CI is to build quality in and ensure that all new functionality is stable and works together, forming a deployable release candidate. It focuses on the ‘development to staging’ part of the pipeline.

Effective PI Objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART) to create clear alignment and enable objective evaluation at the end of the PI. ‘Improve code quality’ is vague. The SPC should coach the team to refine it into a measurable outcome. Linking it to a specific, relevant metric (like reducing complexity, increasing test coverage, or reducing defect rates) makes it a true objective that can be unambiguously reviewed during the PI System Demo and Inspect & Adapt.

The core issue described is teams debating dependencies and struggling to plan, which often stems from poorly refined Features. Unclear Features lead to ambiguity, making dependency identification and story breakdown difficult during the time-boxed PI Planning event. The most leveraged action for an SPC is to coach the key roles (PMs/POs) upstream on the proper refinement of Features, which includes clear acceptance criteria and preliminary dependency identification. This addresses the root cause and empowers the ART to improve its own process.0