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.
When empowerment and urgency come together, anything is possible.
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Join four Agile leaders from CVS Health to learn how they banded together to form teams out of existing trains in order to tackle their monumental, and ever-evolving COVID response with the help of SAFe.
What does it look like when all roles across an operational value stream truly come together without the usual complexity and roadblocks that come with being in a large organization? How did they show up, lead with heart, and truly live their values? And what lessons were learned that other organizations can take away from this extraordinary experience?
“Having scaled Agile in place already prior to this happening helps create a lot of clarity and transparency on where we should identify people who already had all the skill sets that we needed to really achieve this. And then it set up like a common language to talk about things like priority and how to sequence work. And honestly just really live the values of SAFe even more so than the process of SAFe which I think is just a beautiful place to be.”
Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:
Caitlin Clifford, Senior Director of Digital Health Services /CVS Health
Rebecca Davis, CVS Health Digital Lean Agile Practice Leader /CVS Health
Matthew Huang, Senior Product Manager of Immunizations /CVS Health
Randy Kendel, Release Train Engineer of Immunizations /CVS Health
Lean-Agile Mindset & DevSecOps in a Multi-billion Dollar Defense System
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How do you achieve unprecedented communication between contractor, government, and stakeholders in a large acquisition?
Northrop Grumman and US Air Force agile transformation leads describe how they have worked together to leverage SAFe and DevSecOps to scale Agile practices to refine requirements, enable customer and stakeholder collaboration, and facilitate technical planning for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) modernization program. The development occurs under a multi-billion dollar contract involving hundreds of companies and over 10,000 people across the US.
“GBSD’s 50-year mission is vital to our nation’s security and adoption of a Lean-Agile mindset is essential to meeting GBSD’s schedule and capability requirements.“
Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:
David Gellen, Agile Transformation Lead for GBSD /Northrop Grumman
Micheal Burkhart, Lead for Agile Transformation of the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program /U.S. Air Force
Reimagined technology and clinical workflows transform home care for members
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Kaiser Permanente is one of America’s leading not-for-profit health care providers and not-for-profit health plans serving 12.5 million members.
Driven by new technologies and evolving expectations for patient convenience, the golden age of care at home may be just around the corner. Reimagined technology and clinical workflows will transform coordinated and patient-centered care for Kaiser Permanente members in the comfort of their own homes.
In this video, Agile coach Steven Archer and IT leader Kari Powelson share their SAFe journey and the “ART” of making SAFe work at KP. They will describe how their Care Delivery Technology Services and Clinical Operations development teams came together to build new software and workflows and set out to prove that KP Care at Home is the future of healthcare and that it can be a great experience for members and clinicians alike.
Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:
Kari Powelson, Executive Director IT Leader Home Care /Kaiser Permanente
Steven Archer, Principal Agile Coach /Kaiser Permanente
How SAFe and Business Agility helped FedEx respond to the impacts and opportunities of COVID-19
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In this interview with Dean Leffingwell, FedEx CIO Rob Carter shares a rare look inside the world’s largest express transportation company. Rob describes their seven-year journey with SAFe and Agile, their approach to business agility and Lean Portfolio Management, and why alignment between the business and IT is so critical. Turning to the business impacts of the pandemic, Rob described how the company quickly responded to a dramatic increase in package volumes and application demand with a workforce working largely from home with the help of SAFe and Business Agility.
“One of the things that the pandemic has really presented to us is a set of rapid changes in marketplaces and needs, and frankly, you can’t fake it in the face of something like what we’ve all been through in this crazy world.” —Rob Carter.
Presented at the Global SAFe Summit, October, 2020.
Customer Interview: SAFe at American Express — What it Means to Keep the Trains on Track While Still Debating Value Streams
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Director of Enterprise Agility Success, Oden Hughes sits down with Dean Leffingwell to talk about what it takes to manage and nurture a large-scale application of SAFe at a company like American Express focused on providing the world’s best customer experience. She’ll discuss the challenges of establishing alignment between organizations with conflicting views, and why they run their Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) as a cost center. She’ll share patterns of success, how they’ve created a tailored approach to agility for improved results, and why success depends on much more than courses, workbooks, and SAFe principles.
Presented at the Global SAFe Summit, October, 2020.
Customer Interview: What Pandemic? Chevron Trades in Stickies and Yarn and Improves Productivity With a Fully-supported Remote Workforce
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In this interview, Chevron’s Popov Konstantin and Rochelle Tan discuss their SAFe journey and how Chevron was able to successfully navigate the challenges of COVID-19 and improve productivity at the same time. They’ll discuss how SAFe improved employee engagement and accelerated the speed of a massive cloud migration initiative, and how they had to quickly transform from an office-centric environment to a fully remote workforce. You’ll hear about their experiences as an early user of SAFe® Collaborate, lessons learned, and why they may never fully return to the office.
Presented at the Global SAFe Summit, October 2020.
“We began seeing value within weeks or months of launching the first release train. Leaders and business owners could very quickly see we were working on the things that were important to them.”
—Jeff Hallett, VP, Product Management
Challenge:
Tighten alignment between the business and IT in order to bring mission-supporting applications to users sooner.
Industry:
Healthcare, Non-Profit
Results:
Higher quality on a more predictable and reliable timeline
Lower defect levels
The highest employee engagement score in the company in the IT group
Best Practices:
Use a ‘velvet glove’ approach – Easterseals got leaders and business owners accustomed to the mindset and practices before introducing it as SAFe, which provided low-friction engagement for business stakeholders
Tie efforts to principles – They connected everything back to principles and shared values
Staff smartly – They put change leaders in key positions
Keep an eye on progress – Retrospectives with metrics demonstrated results
Introduction
Nonprofits are better known for their compassion than their innovation. But Easterseals Northern California is proving that being Agile contributes directly to its mission—to responsibly disrupt and transform home- and center-based health care.
For 90 years, the Bay Area nonprofit has been helping people with autism and other developmental disabilities address life’s challenges, achieve personal goals, and gain greater independence for everyday living.
In doing so, Easterseals Northern California administers an impressive level of care:
7,500 clients in an average month
96,000 clinical appointments per week
25,000 claims per week
1 million managed treatments a year
10,000 active health practitioners
To manage that volume, Easterseals depends on front- and back-office applications for clinical operations, case management, billing, and more. And it must do it all in a HIPAA-compliant security and privacy environment.
For the IT team, staying ahead of business needs has often proven daunting. In the past, staff and contracted team members across the U.S., Ukraine, and Vietnam used “scrum-like” practices, however, the different geographic groups didn’t work together or identify dependencies with other teams. And in the absence of stated priorities, teams were always tackling the most urgent ad hoc requests.
“It was a tyranny of the urgent,” explained Jeff Hallett, VP, Product Management. “Ad hoc requests were taken with no oversight or triage. We knew we needed better alignment.”
The Right Time for Real Transformation
For technology leaders, the vision was clear…
Tighter alignment between business owners and teams
Fewer surprises and reactive work requests
Less work-in-progress
More transparency
Consistency in portfolio intake, prioritization, and backlogs
And better accounting for capacity and business value
But the path to reach those objectives was littered with obstacles. Over the years, IT had pushed to adopt Lean-Agile practices, which included experimenting with the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®). However, early efforts at applying the Framework fell short—likely due to a variety of reasons, such as lack of business support and training.
But in 2018, the timing seemed right to try again. At that time, the nonprofit was beginning the transition from paper-based processes to electronic management systems. Concurrently, leadership was pushing for decentralized decision-making and network-based management. IT leaders believed in SAFe, but this time, they would take a different approach to rollout.
“Technology leadership liked the scalability and the business engagement of SAFe, and believed that it would make a difference,” said Hallett, who joined Easterseals at that time to help drive the transformation as a SAFe® Program Consultant (SPC).
First, Cultivating Mindset
For a renewed effort at transformation, Easterseals would introduce some of the practices of SAFe to members of the business, but leave out some of the SAFe-specific terminology early on. Transformation leaders emphasized mindset—using the Agile Manifesto—to get the business on board and begin changing the culture.
Instead of training leadership immediately, the organization first began involving them in activities such as portfolio management, prioritization, and epic grooming. Only later did they double back to train leadership and begin using terminology and practices with them. That was key to their phased, incremental approach to preparing for and holding the first Program Increment (PI).
Training started with the technology group and moved on to business roles. A few business members took SAFe® for Teams and SAFe® Product Owner/Product Manager to build understanding and excitement. When they offered SAFe® for Teams, they explained that this was the exact process they had already been following.
A Phased, Incremental Rollout
Easterseals took a phased approach to the SAFe transformation, like building layers of a cake. It all rested on a foundation of Lean-Agile leadership. To that end, they filled key positions with “change leaders,” which included dedicated Portfolio managers and Scrum masters.
They layered the rest on top of that firm foundation: Lean-Agile principles; teams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs) that embrace the core concepts of SAFe; cadence and synchronization; DevOps and releasability; an architectural runway; PI planning; system demos; inspect and adapt practices; and IP iterations.
To pave a path for success, they began with the Portfolio SAFe configuration to secure commitment from internal business partners, standardize requests, gather needs from the business, and analyze for value. About 75 people joined the first Program Increment (PI) planning event, from technology, clinical programs, business excellence, and the PMO.
At that first event, some grumbled about having to spend two days away from their regular work. However, by the second PI, they were so engaged that some people said two days wasn’t enough time. From the start, progress was clear. “I noticed an immediate benefit,” recalled Trista Travis, IT Program Manager and the nonprofit’s Release Train Engineer (RTE). “Because the second someone put a Post-It note that had a dependency up on our Program Board, they realized, ‘Oh, we really do need to collaborate across teams.’”
As teams became accustomed to the new way of working, some learned the hard way. After one team committed to 150 story points, they soon found themselves in over their heads. “We let them get to the point where white flags were raised,” Travis said. “Then we had a session where we took a step back, erased the white board, and started figuring it out from scratch. It was a lot of making the hard choices and throwing stuff over the side of the boat.”
Today: Excitement and Buy-in from Top to Bottom
In less than a year, Easterseals Northern California has successfully changed the organization’s mindset and way of working, and started seeing the fruits of their efforts.
“We began seeing value within weeks or months of launching the first release train,” Hallett said. “Leaders and business owners could very quickly see we were working on the things that were important to them.”
They now run two Agile Release Trains and five Value Streams. They are committed to holding ceremonies on cadence. Sprint goals are aligned with PI objectives. Teams are collaborating. They regularly use metrics and retrospectives to assess progress.
As Easterseals expanded its SAFe practices, leaders found that they lacked the tooling they needed as current configurations didn’t match the new ways of working. Thus, as they established a regular cadence and ceremonies, they implemented new tooling that worked in step with their practices.
Most importantly, they’re seeing excitement and buy-in across most teams and leadership. In fact, leaders have started asking to participate more after hearing positive feedback from teams.
In less than a year, they have achieved strong cross-team and cross-Value Stream collaboration, alignment, and management of dependencies—reducing unexpected requests for the IT team.
Business partners are involved in planning and conversations from the beginning, ensuring solutions are more on the mark—upping the satisfaction in delivered solutions and increasing value delivered:
Easterseals hit 83 percent for achieved objectives in its first PI
70 percent or more of the delivered story points in releases are directly traceable to items on the Portfolio strategic roadmap agreed on with the business
IT delivers also higher quality on a more predictable and reliable timeline
Defect levels are down
IT has the highest employee engagement score in the company
Ultimately, getting quality applications sooner enables staff and clinical practitioners to focus more on transforming home- and center-based health care.
“Now, there’s a direct line-of-sight between work in progress and how it helps with the Easterseals mission,” Hallett said.
Gaining C-Suite support for SAFe Enterprise Agility
MetLife is one of 12 Fortune 500 companies to thrive for over 150 years. Met has scale and a proud history … and the many challenges of incumbency including legacy systems and challenges to speed. Agile is quickly being embraced as the way to achieve speed in innovation.
In this 45-minute video, Cheryl Crupi shares the story of how a small team sold MetLife’s new CEO and his new executive group on SAFe Enterprise Agility. This short, immersive session enabled this executive group to experience Agile for themselves and resulted in a third of the group requesting individual follow-up on how they can embrace Enterprise Agility, including HR, Legal, Marketing and regional business presidents.
Lockheed Flying the F-16 into the Future with SAFe: Evolving the Falcon Factory
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Presented at the 2019 Global SAFe Summit, San Diego Oct. 2, 2019, The F-16 Fighting Falcon is the world’s most successful, combat-proven multirole fighter with approximately 3,000 operational F-16s in service today in 25 countries. In 2014, new production orders were drying out, and the F-16 production line was in danger of shutting down. Our solution to that problem was the adoption of SAFe to streamline the F-16 Product Development and Engineering in 2015. We overcame a lot of challenges along the way, and made rapid progress initially, but have plateaued. That should come as no surprise though. Our limited SAFe implementation showed us limited results. But we are turning this ship around! This year we have really taken stock of our Agile Transformation and implemented several ground-breaking initiatives that are changing our landscape. Lockheed has now started a new F-16 production facility in Greenville, South Carolina that is producing F-16s expected to operate to 2070 and beyond!
“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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