Becoming a SAFe Program Consultant — Studying for the SPC Exam

Students are always interested in some tips and tricks on preparing for the SPC certification exam, especially since it’s a non-trivial exam even if you attend a class with trainers that know what they’re doing and if you listen and participate throughout. Most of my students pass the exam, but it doesn’t hurt to know how to study.

Here are some ideas that seem to be working for my students beyond the guidance already provided as part of the class by SAI (Which is good guidance in my experience)

• Spend time perusing the Big Picture for the different configurations at http://www.scaledagileframework.com

• Review the whole workbook again. For topics you’re not sure about — find them in the big picture and read the relevant article

• For the Implementing chapters in the workbook, your homepage is http://www.scaledagileframework.com/implementation-roadmap/.
   It has articles that more or less align with the different lessons/stages.

• review the first and last slide of each lesson (learning objectives) and make sure you know to explain them.

• Review the glossary.

• Print the full big picture and implementation roadmap (on large paper if possible) and write down notes as you review. Just the act of writing helps you prepare.

• Try to draw the big picture and the implementation roadmap on your own from memory and see how much you can get right. Repeat until you like what you see :-)

• There are Kahoot quizzes created by my friend Inbar Oren (A SAFe Methodologist at SAI) a while ago that are publicly available. Some SPCTs (Including myself) run them during the Implementing SAFe class to help refresh topics from earlier lessons and drive some discussions about nuances/intricacies. You can run them on your own or get together with some others preparing for the exam and have more fun together :-)

• 2 — lean/agile mindset https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/60377928-5d32-4391-9237-8cda17cb2f13

• 3 — safe principles https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/84ffc33f-9e00-4348-971d-d87dafeab9e4

• 4 — experiencing PI planning A ( Building ARTs ) https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/0288bf37-e609-47d1-ba59-a6d4f7b1c9a7

• 5 -experiencing PI Planning B https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/3cd78066-5815-41b1-97aa-a0a7afb8c2c7

• 5 — program execution https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/d8b11dc3-720e-491b-a10a-c8e1b1d06024

• 7 — solutions (old 8 value stream level actually) https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/fa000fd6-cb7e-44da-98d6-2c5dc3d8ef2c

• 8 — portfolio (old 7 portfolio) https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/8caab32d-5d09-4638-96fb-20c99e16611f

• I created another Kahoot that covers some of the Implementing SAFe lessons as well as SAFe 4.5 stuff (The original Kahoots cover 4.0 — they’re still mostly applicable) https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/df65a590-d545-4cb9-bf9f-09d16f3d0906

If this is useful or if you have other tips you want to share, let me know in the comments.