In this session, we will unravel the potent capabilities of tools to streamline technology product development and elevate creative and strategic focus.
• Generative AI Overview: Dive into generative AI and its positive impact on SAFe roles, offering a competitive edge in the tech development landscape.
Speakers
Cheryl Crupi
Methodologist and SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
“SAFe has really helped bring the organization along its transformation journey. Its real value has been in the way it links strategy with decentralized execution, using metrics to enable a high level of transparency and fact-based decision making to focus on achieving business outcomes.”
–Natalie Field, Head of MyPost Consumer
Challenge:
Effectively deliver solutions that sustain and further enable Australia Post as a trusted services provider, and delight customers with personalized digital products and services.
Industry:
Delivery Services
Results:
100-fold increase in yearly production deployments with 98% cost reduction, enabling iterative product development
400% Agile Release Train productivity increase over 18 months
Strong overall delivery predictability of 80%+
First-Time Delivery rate improved by 7 percentage points
Net Promoter Score rose by 8 points
Increased employee satisfaction and engagement
Best Practices:
Establish a learning and improvement mindset – Place a primary focus on learning and continuous improvement across all facets of delivery to achieve consistent growth in maturity and effectiveness.
Measure outcomes – Enabling a metrics and measurement capability links teams to business strategy and is key to ensuring business outcomes are effectively achieved.
Align to DevOps principles – Building a strong technology delivery platform aligned to DevOps principles enables iterative and innovative product
Focus on the entire system of work – Build organizational advocacy and sustainability by facilitating change and enablement for shared teams that support and govern Agile Release Trains.
Introduction
Australia Post is Australia’s iconic postal services provider. For 208 years, the organization has been integral to how people and communities connect across Australia. Through a collective workforce of over 50,000 people, Australia Post serves communities, citizens, and businesses, from large corporations to government departments.
Like many organizations, Australia Post’s business has been disrupted and must transform to adapt to the digital era. Traditional business pillars such as letters are in persistent decline, while the company faces fierce competition, but also immense opportunity with the growth of ecommerce. For Australia Post, that opportunity lies in creating sustainable competitive advantage through trusted relationships between consumers, businesses, and government.
Given these forces, Australia Post needed a new way of working to both sustain and further enable the organization as a trusted services provider, and to delight its customers with personalized digital products and services.
SAFe: Driving Change with Lean Structure and Common Language
Over the past four years, Australia Post has invested in its technology, people, and culture to change the way it works to focus on customer experiences and continuous innovation. To help achieve this agility in business, Australia Post selected and adopted the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) not only as an operating model but as a tool for change. With SAFe, the organization aims to describe, communicate, and build an understanding of how to leverage Lean and Agile principles across the organization.
“The structure and discipline outlined in SAFe have been a powerful way to communicate a different way of working,” says Daniel Fajerman, Head of Digital Engineering. “Using an industry-proven framework offered a strong basis to start the conversation about working differently, providing a common language and consistent base to work off.”
Achieving Sustainable Change
The goal at Australia Post is sustainable, lasting change that fundamentally shifts how the organization approaches and delivers against its strategies. To do so, Australia Post must equip its people with knowledge and the ability to advocate for and be a part of this new way of working.
A broad and comprehensive training and enablement strategy was rolled out across the organization to build experience and maturity. With help from Mark Richards of CoActivation, a Scaled Agile partner, Australia Post trained more than 900 people in Leading SAFe® and SAFe for Teams® courses. This included key roles across executive leadership, within business functions such as finance, risk, architecture, security, marketing and sales, and of course technology leadership and teams.
From the beginning, Australia Post applied a persistent focus on cadence and synchronization – keys to building alignment and embedding disciplined delivery practices across diverse teams. With all of Australia Post on the same sprint (and then Program Increment) cadence, scaling teams and ultimately forming these into Agile Release Trains (ARTs) became a natural evolution.
Achieving sustainable change focused on four key interrelated areas of emphasis across the organization:
Cross-functional, long-running teams – Moving from transient project teams to cross-functional, long-running teams aligned to customer experiences was a foundational, critical change to the way people work.
Culture – Australia Post invested significantly in evolving the culture of the organization to one where curiosity, innovation, and a learning mindset predominate.
Technology enablement – Beyond cultural and process changes, improving delivery flow and time-to-value requires an effective build pipeline and deployment infrastructure aligned to DevOps principles.
System of work – Implementing a new way of working spans well beyond delivery teams to every part of the organization that supports the delivery of business initiatives. The change team worked closely with shared services groups to tailor approaches to enable and meet their needs under the Framework, including new innovative funding and governance models.
This multi-pronged approach formed sustainable building blocks for change and enablement. With the goal of implementing Agile Release Trains (ARTs), the early focus was on long-running teams and culture to allow maturity to build and grow. The greatest traction came with the advocacy and leadership of business sponsors and leads, who understood the increased business opportunity and had confidence in the delivery model.
MyPost Consumer – Creating a Platform for Personalized Services
Today, five ARTs now support Australia Post’s value streams and associated enterprise strategies. One of those trains, the MyPost Consumer ART, sits within Australia Post’s Consumer market segment value stream. Established in 2015 to play a significant role in the shift toward customer centricity, MyPost Consumer is creating an omni-channel platform to offer personalized services to customers. The train’s primary focus: the parcel delivery experience, which sits at the heart of Australia Post’s business.
The train is made up of 110 cross-functional roles, with each team responsible for specific components of the parcel delivery experience. As a multi-channel, multi-technology program, only 30% of features are purely digital. The most impactful features require changes to multiple channels and enterprise technology systems.
“Getting the job done right is about focusing as much on how we work together, as what we are working on,” says Natalie Field, Head of MyPost Consumer. “We know there are many unknowns in achieving our program strategy and we don’t, and won’t, always get it right. However we also know that by respecting each other, and staying committed to rapid learning cycles, we will always come up with great solutions. “
The train has achieved strong outcomes over the past couple of years. Australia Post attributes the success of the train to several pillars:
Create a customer-centric culture Building a customer-centric culture meant creating an environment that empowers the entire team to make fact-based, data-driven decisions and equipping everyone to be advocates for the customer experience.
Focus on metrics to drive business outcomes A strong focus on measurement has resulted in significant positive impact across the organization’s primary success measures. To help achieve this outcome, teams are equipped with technology tools and the ability to collect and report on data. This empowers teams to learn fast about in-market feature performance and make changes when necessary. The result is a data-driven approach to how the train identifies, prioritises, implements, and learns from each Program Increment.
Improve continuously for greater predictability and performance Success of the train hinges on an ability to improve continuously and focus relentlessly on evolving the experience to meet customer needs. The train adapts and responds to market demands, continually improving technology capabilities to advance the business across its digital channel, retail stores, delivery network, and call centre.
Raising Satisfaction and Throughput, with Lower Cost
A strong focus on measurement and learning to maximize business outcomes resulted in significant positive impact:
Improved first-time delivery – The First-Time Delivery rate jumped by 7 percentage points over 12 months.
Reduced cost – Australia Post reduced its infrastructure costs by 98%.
Predictability – The train consistently delivered on 80% or more of its objectives.
Customer satisfaction – The Net Promoter Score rose by 8 points over the course of one year.
Employee engagement – Employee satisfaction and engagement increased.
Industry accolades – The train was voted the Best Customer Centric Project in Australia / New Zealand by the CX Management Conference.
Australia Post continues to evolve and grow to meet the needs of its business. Its focus on continuous improvement means the organization ever challenges itself to create the next wave of trusted services for its customers.
“SAFe has really helped bring the organization along its transformation journey,” Field says. “Its real value has been in the way it links strategy with decentralized execution, using metrics to enable a high level of transparency and fact-based decision making to focus on achieving business outcomes.”
“Everyone hearing the same message from the same trainers at the same time was a huge enabler for alignment and a ‘one-team’ culture.”
—Em Campbell-Pretty, Context Matters
Challenge:
After the successful rollout of a new online banking platform, Westpac received numerous requests for additional features and needed to deliver quickly.
Industry:
Banking
Solution:
SAFe®
Results:
Westpac successfully took 150 people from waterfall to Agile in one week, and garnered positive feedback from teams
Team and business engagement went up
Cycle time and defects went down
Best Practices:
Get executive buy-in—Getting leadership on board—and participating—is essential to achieving team buy-in
Include all roles in training—Triple check that everyone is scheduled to get the training they need
One of Australia’s “big four” banks, Westpac serves approximately 10 million consumer and business customers across Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Challenge
In 2015, Westpac launched a new online banking platform. Though very successful—and award-winning—the launch resulted in a huge demand to deliver additional features quickly. The company wanted to take a scaled Agile approach to roll out new capabilities but lacked the quality training and know-how to apply it to this initiative.
Solution
Westpac reached out to Scaled Agile Partner, Context Matters, for guidance, leading to the decision to adopt SAFe, and form an Agile Release Train (ART) for the new features.
Before launch planning began, the company settled on a vision, a prioritized feature backlog, an approach to product ownership and a decision on capacity allocation.
At the time, teams were focused on delivering the final release of the in-flight program. If they were going to change the delivery approach for the next release, they would need to move fast. With a small window of opportunity, a SAFe QuickStart seemed the only answer.
To achieve launch in one week, Westpac began by training everyone at the same time. Midweek, they aligned all teams to common objectives, secured commitment and continued training during planning. By week’s end, they provided orientation for specialty roles, open spaces and tool training for teams.
Development teams would be available in six weeks, so Westpac grabbed that time slot—knowing the window would be tight. After buy-in from executives on the business and IT sides, they were ready for next steps.
To support their efforts, they also established Communities of Practice and hold monthly technical workshops for developers.
2 Days of Leading SAFe® Training
Next, 32 leaders across business and IT came together for two days of Leading SAFe training to discuss SAFe in the Westpac context, generating team excitement. Together, leaders came up with a theme for the train—Galaxy—with all teams receiving related names.
“Giving the train a shared identity helps create a bond across the team of teams that is the Agile Release Train, seeding the “one-team” culture that helps trains excel,” says Em Campbell-Pretty of Context Matters.
SAFe Scrum XP training brought together 60 people in one release train of eight teams over two days with two trainers in one room. The RTE additionally joined team-level training for both days, leading team members to note his commitment to SAFe.
“Everyone hearing the same message from the same trainers at the same time was a huge enabler for alignment and a ‘one-team’ culture,” says Campbell-Pretty.
The following Monday, Westpac launched the train. Some last-minute feature requests presented a hiccup, but the teams and leadership committed to a plan.
Results: Cycle Time, Defects Down
Westpac successfully took 100 people from waterfall to Agile in one week, and garnered positive feedback from teams. Team and business engagement went up while cycle time and defects went down.
Agile at Westpac continues to grow, with the company holding its third PI Planning session recently.
Additional Reading
For a deeper dive into this SAFe experience, download Em-Campbell Pretty’s presentation to AgileAustralia16.
RMIT University – SAFe Implementation for Business Agility Transformation
“The first Program Increment showed both the potential of the train to deliver value more quickly, and also the challenges facing its success. It also successfully delivered a number of features for release.”
—Em Campbell-Pretty, CEO, Pretty Agile
Industry:
Education
Solution:
SAFe®
Results:
Positive shift in employee NPS
Improvement in business engagement
Reduction in cycle time
Increase in release frequency
Overview
Since April 2014, Scaled Agile Partner, Context Matters (now Pretty Agile), under the lead of Em Campbell-Pretty, has been supporting the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (aka RMIT University) with implementing SAFe for effective business agility transformation. RMIT is Australia’s largest university and, as the name suggests, is known for its technology focus. On November 6, 2014, Catherine Haugh (the SAFe Release Train Engineer-RTE) and some of her team presented their success story at the ANZ Oracle Higher Education User Group conference.
At the time, the presentation at HEUG outlined the journey of a new Agile Release Train, describing the practices and approach of the train as well as the challenges met implementing this new way of working while introducing it to the wider organisation. A sister-presentation was delivered by the Academic Registrar, Maddy McMaster, outlining the experience of going Agile from the business point of view. Maddy is the business owner of RMIT’s Student Administration Management System (SAMS) and the business sponsor of the Student Administration Agile Release Train (StAART).
StAART came into being following a shift within Information Technology Services (ITS) at RMIT towards Lean and Agile practices and a recognition that the ability to scale capability would be critical to ongoing success. SAFe was chosen to address that need and the train stood up in June 2014.
StAART is the delivery mechanism for three major projects in the Student Administration Portfolio as well as day-to-day operational work requests made to enhance and support Student Administration systems. It is made up of seven feature teams which they call squads, supported by a delivery services team – about 60 people in all.
StAART works predominantly with Oracle’s PeopleSoft-Campus Solutions application environment, tailoring the software to suit the organisation’s student administrative requirements through configuration and development. RMIT’s customised Campus Solutions system is known as SAMS. PeopleSoft is a commercial off the shelf (COTS) application.
Early Results
The first Program Increment showed both the potential of the train to deliver value more quickly and also the challenges facing its success. It also successfully delivered a number of features for release. Even though it is early days RMIT has already seen a positive shift in employee NPS, an improvement in business engagement, a reduction in cycle time and an increase in release frequency. The overarching challenge has been one of cultural change – StAART commenced life in a distinct waterfall environment.
Thank you to Catherine Haugh (RMIT), Maddy McMaster (RMIT) and Em Campbell-Pretty for sharing their story with the SAFe community.
Update – October, 2015:
At the 2015 Agile Australia conference, Catherine presented an update on the StAART and its successes, including a dramatic improvement in NPS ratings from stakeholders. Her presentation includes video testimonials from the teams and ART stakeholders, as well as the data detailing the Net Promoter Scores before the ART launch and after.
Additional Reading
For a deeper dive into this SAFe experience, download the two presentations below.
Telstra is Australia’s leading provider of mobile phones, mobile devices, home phones and broadband internet. When Telstra’s Enterprise Data Warehouse delivery team began their SAFe Agile journey, they scaled from 1 to 5 teams in a matter of months and found themselves struggling to make the leap from agile projects to an Agile program. “After reading Dean Leffingwell’s Scaling Software Agility and Agile Software Requirements,” notes Mark Richards (Agile Coach) and Em Campbell-Pretty (General Manager, EDW Delivery), “we were inspired to establish Telstra’s first Agile Release Train.” Later, they both followed up with SPC certification to further enhance their knowledge and skills.
This presentation, from Agile Australia 2013 in June, covers how SAFe provided a recipe for success, reflecting on how Telstra translated Program-level SAFe theory into practice, transforming not only the delivery capability of the EDW team, but also the culture. Adopting Leffingwell’s Scaled Agile Framework, the Theory and the Practice.
Most importantly, they are getting great business results, including:
Average delivery cycle time down from 12 month to 3 months
6X increased in delivery frequency
50% cost to deliver reduction
95% decrease in product defects
100% projects delivered on time and on budget
Happy project sponsors
Happy teams
As we noted, Em and Mark placed an early emphasis on rapidly evolving the culture that supports Lean-Agile development, and they had some fun with it too, as you can see if you check out the The Power of Haka! on Em’s PrettyAgile blog.
“Working for an organization that practices SAFe means employees can be confident that their code will get to production and that their SAFe training will secure them transportable skills that add value to their career paths.”
Console Connect needed to deliver positive and on-time outcomes for its customers and partners and amplify its ability to attract talented technologists to the business.
Impact
Attracted and trained new staff in a competitive market
Improved business goal setting and ability to measure business value
Reduced the number of lower business value objectives to allow time for innovation
Quality
“SAFe brought a much-needed approach to scaling Agile and systems thinking that was critical to an organization of our size and complexity.”
—Brent Weaver, Director of Systems Implementation, CMS
CMS was charged with improving systems thinking within a deeply ingrained Waterfall culture. They sought a solution that could scale within the complex organization of the Center of Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ) and deliver on citizen expectations.
Impact
Improved quality – 55% decrease in help desk tickets from hospitals, demonstrating a direct impact on customer satisfaction
Budget shift to modernization versus maintenance – Now 60% of the budget goes toward innovation for the system, helping the agency deliver on citizen expectations
Happier employees – Surveys conducted before and after SAFe show a 27% increase in employee satisfaction
Time-to-market
30%
improvement in average process time for developing features.
Handelsbanken, a Swedish bank known for its innovative practices, wanted to cut its time to market and improve its customer offerings. They needed a collaborative partner to contribute to those goals. The bank explored SAFe and gained trust knowing that several large companies and banks in its region had found success with it.
Impact
With SAFe, Handelsbanken achieved its goal of enabling automated decisions for mortgages sooner than expected. The structure of the framework helped them think big, focusing on flow and results.
Six years ago, Mercedes-Benz had one or two product roll-outs a year in just a couple of markets. In 2022, they were able to introduce roughly 40 products in 34 markets. Moving away from Waterfall methods and adopting SAFe, they were able to launch better technology, better operating systems, AI and face recognition, integrate different data sources, and utilize better risk models.
Impact
SAFe allowed Mercedes-Benz to achieve the shift from hardware to software, master the electrification of vehicles, meet requirements for zero emission, and adapt to environmental, geopolitical, and consumer demands.
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