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What is Dual Operating System in SAFe?

What is Dual Operating System in SAFe?

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In SAFe, the concept of a dual operating system was introduced. The purpose of this operating model is to help organizations compete and develop in the digital age. The good thing about this model is that it has proven its efficiency in many instances. Now, it has turned out to be a method with a meaning for separating the concerns of not only developing but also launching innovative new solutions. Even, it aids with efficiently running and improving a business that benefits from those solutions. Here, the former is the responsibility of the network, while the latter is the responsibility of the hierarchy.
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Responsibilities of Dual Operating System:

You can better understand the responsibilities of the SAFe dual operating system from the picture below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Source: Scaled Agile

Business Agility:

Business Agility is nothing but the ability of a business to compete and improve in the present digital age. A business can achieve agility when it quickly responds to the changes in the market. Also, it should emerge opportunities with digitally-enabled business solutions and innovations. For a business to achieve agility, every person involved in the solution delivery should use Lean and Agile Practices. Only then, they can continue to deliver high-quality and innovative products and services. Further, they can do it at a faster pace as compared to the competitors. Here, the participants include security, compliance, support, finance, marketing, legal, IT operations, development teams and business and technology leaders. Businesses face hardships with achieving agility. This happens due to different reasons. But, as a solution, John P. Kotter in his book XLR8 introduced the dual operating system as one of the key concepts. This concept or model, as mentioned earlier, helps businesses achieve agility with ease.

Why do Businesses Strive to Achieve Business Agility?

In organizations that follow traditional approaches, the leaders are aware of the threat of digital disruption. Nevertheless, many leaders fail to make the transition take place. When talking about the reason for the unwillingness for this transition, John Kotter explains one thing. Successful organizations do not start cumbersome and large. Nevertheless, they instigate an adaptive and fast-moving group of motivated people. They pay attention to responding to the customer. They are also highly focused on new business opportunities coming their way moving forward.

In general, reporting relationships and roles are fluid. People in organizations associated with each other organically. They do this for exploring potential business opportunities and to collaborate with customers. They do these things to deliver value in any way they can. With customer-centricity as the key component, they go for a flexible entrepreneurial group of people. They do this for grabbing the opportunities as you can understand from the picture below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: Scaled Agile

When a business starts to succeed, it naturally expects expansion on its success to grow. In other words, the responsibilities of individuals should turn clearer. Only then, it will be possible to make sure that crucial details are carried out without overlooking. In this process, businesses hire specialists for their expertise and they engage in department creation. Even, they establish procedures and policies for making sure of compliance and legality. Also, they pay attention to driving cost-effective and repeatable operations. Businesses begin to organize things based on function and this leads to the formation of silos. At the same time, with parallel operations, the group continues to look for new opportunities. They do this intending to deliver customer value.

The hierarchy faces ongoing development to achieve an improvement in the economies of scale. Nevertheless, considering the responsibilities and practices of large businesses, they start to experience conflicts with the entrepreneurial network. With the authority of present profitability and revenue behind it, the hierarchical organization faces hindrances with a more adaptive and faster-moving network. The outcome will be that the network crashes in the process. One of the casualties of this network crash is the attention on customers.

Still, as long as the market remains stable relatively, the economies of scale provide a hindrance against competitors. The business can continue to enjoy growth and success. Nevertheless, when a disruptive technology comes up or when customers need a dramatic shift, the business will lack the speediness to respond. In turn, the years of profitability and market dominance gained so far can vanish overnight. As a result, the very survival of the business comes to a point of stake.

Even, when this happens, the organizational structure that has been built over the past few years will do a great job of offering time-tested policies, practices and structures. They underwrite the growth, retention and recruitment of thousands of employees across the world. In other words, their service is needed still. However, the question here is how to organize and reintroduce the entrepreneurial network again? As a solution to this problem, Kotter suggests not trashing what the business already knows and starting everything from the first again. Rather, he suggests the introduction of a second system. He calls this solution a dual operating system. As mentioned earlier, this second system aims at restoring the speed and innovative ideas of the entrepreneurial network. But, it does not leave the hierarchical system as such but it benefits from the advantages and stability of the traditional system. Now comes the question of how to create a dual operating system. Here is the answer:​​​​​

How To Create A Dual Operating System?

SAFe offers a solution for businesses to pay attention not only to customers but also to growth, innovation and products. This is possible by arranging the second operating system close to value streams as against departments as given in the image below:

 


Source: Scaled Agile

The second operating system is built on time-tested SAFe and lean practices and it is flexible. It can help with organizing and swiftly reorganizing without entirely disrupting the present hierarchy. This is what business agility expects. To achieve the same, organizations need a considerable degree of expertise across 7 digital-age core competencies. You can get the same easily with the image below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: Scaled Agile

Each of these competencies can indeed deliver value on its own. In addition, they are also interdependent. The reason is that true business agility is possible to achieve only when an organization achieves a meaningful state of mastery in all of these 7 competencies.

Each of these competencies offer behaviors, skills and knowledge that provides the opportunity for enterprises for achieving business agility.

Seven Competencies of Business Agility:

1. Lean-Agile Leadership:

This competency describes the method followed by Lean-Agile leaders to drive and retain organizational change by making individuals and groups competent enough to reach their highest potential. They achieve the same by forerunning by example, adopting a lean-agile mentality and forerunning the change to new working ways. The outcome will be more engaged employees, increased innovation and productivity and successful organizational change.

2. The Continuous Learning Culture:

This competency explains a set of practices and values that motivates individuals and organizations to improve innovation, performance, competence and knowledge continually. Businesses turn into a learning organizations by committing to continuous improvement and promotion of culture of innovation.

3. Team and Technical Agility:

The competency explains the crucial lean-agile principles, skills and practices. These are used by high-performing Agile teams and groups of Agile teams for the creation of high-quality solutions for their customers. The outcome is predictable delivery of value, faster time-to-market, better quality and increased productivity.

4. The Agile Product Delivery Competency:

This is a customer-centric approach for explaining, releasing and building an ongoing flow of valuable services and products to users and customers. This competency helps organizations to provide  solutions that outperform the competition, reduces risk, lowers developmental costs and delighting customers.

5. Enterprise Solution Delivery:

This competency explains how to apply Lean-Agile practices and principles to the operation, deployment, development and specification of the most sophisticated and the largest software applications, cyber-physical systems and networks.

6. Lean Portfolio Management:

The purpose of this competency is to align strategy and its execution by applying Lean and System thinking approaches for investment funding and strategy, Agile portfolio governance and operations. These associations give the business the ability to align strategy for the execution and meeting the present commitments dependably and give way for innovation.​​​​​​​

7. Organizational Agility Competence:

It explains how lean-thinking Agile teams and people improve their business processes. Even, it explains strategy with decisive and clear commitments and quickly adapt the organization as required for capitalizing new chances.​​​​​​​

Measuring the Business Agility Value Stream:

These competencies work with each other for aiding with business agility. Nevertheless, to achieve it, the right things should be evaluated at the right time. The Scaled Agile dual operating system addresses this via three measurement domains. They can be applied to any value stream. They are competency, outcomes and flow as you can understand from the picture below:


 

 

 

 

 

 


​​​​​​​Source: Scaled Agile

Here, the Flow metrics aid with the identification of how quickly the value stream works for the creation and delivery of value. It is denoted by flow predictability, flow efficiency, flow load, flow time, flow velocity and flow distribution.

The outcome metrics aid with making sure that what has been delivered brings value to customers and to the business. For the measurement of these results, value stream KPIs are used basically.

​​​​​​​Evaluating the level of organizational competency is done using a couple of individual assessment mechanisms. Each of this mechanism is designed for considerably different purposes and audiences. For instance, the SAFe Core Competency Assessment mechanism helps Agile release trains and teams for improving the business and technical practices. They aid the portfolio in the achievement of larger goals. The SAFe Business Agility assessment mechanism is designed for the portfolio and business stakeholders to evaluate their overall progress on the ultimate objective of true business agility. 

 

Simpliaxis is one of the leading professional certification training providers in the world offering multiple courses related to SAFe methodologies. We offer numerous SAFe related courses such as Leading SAFe® (6.0) Certification Training, SAFe® 6.0 Scrum Master (SSM) Certification Training, SAFe®6.0 Product Owner/Product Manager Certification Training,SAFe® Advanced Scrum Master (SASM) Certification Training, Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) Certification Training, SAFe® 6.0 Architects Certification Training, SAFe® for Teams Certification Training, SAFe® 6.0 DevOps Certification Training, SAFe® Agile Product Management Training (SAFe® APM) Certification Training and much more. Simpliaxis delivers training to both individuals and corporate groups through instructor-led classroom and online virtual sessions.

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