PepsiCo’s UX-Led Approach – Scaled Agile Transformation

Presented at 2019 Global SAFe Summit, San Diego Oct. 2, 2019

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How do the User Design (UX) principles of Simple, Human and Connected guide an ART to interpret and incorporate user-centric design (UCD)? What is the ideal operating model for UX design that includes discovery, design and delivery tracks? This talk will provide an overview of the hypotheses applied to deliver user-centric design within the Scaled Agile Frameworkยฎ at PepsiCo.

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Anthem – Adoption of Agile Mindset for Enterprise Business Agility

Anthem Agile Transformation Journey

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Anthem chose to apply the Scaled Agile Framework incrementally, rather than a big bang rollout. Approaching the problem from both top-down and bottom-up, the SAFe transformation for the enterprise concentrated on one vertical slice at a time working with both Business and IT leaders in an area to enable Lean-Agile practices and provide hands-on coaching and education to drive the adoption of the Agile mindset.

They chose to apply the Scaled Agile Framework incrementally, rather than a big bang rollout. Approaching the problem from both top-down and bottoms-up, the transformation for the enterprise concentrated on one vertical slice at a time working with both Business and IT leaders in an area to enable Lean Agile practices and provide hands-on coaching and education to drive the adoption of the Agile mindset.

They worked closely with their partners to go beyond just the mechanics of training and coaching with a focus on sustaining the change and moving towards true enterprise business agility.

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SAFE Case Study – CMS – Approach to Scaling Agile Using SAFeยฎ

Nearly 140 million Americans rely on Medicare, Medicaid, the Childrenโ€™s Health Insurance Program, and the health insurance exchangesโ€”all programs administered by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). The agency pays out approximately $767 billion in benefits annually and employs 4,100 people to administer programs in partnership with state governments.

Challenge:

Isolated Scrum teams didnโ€™t make much progress within a deeply ingrained waterfall culture and against long-range planning and budgeting.

Industry:

Government, Healthcare

Results:

  • CMS shifted the budget from 100% dedicated to system maintenance to a 40/60 split between maintenance and innovation
  • Help desk tickets decreased by 55%
  • Surveys show a 27% increase in employee satisfaction

Best Practices:

  • Prepare for face-to-face events – CMS found the SAFe Implementation Roadmap and training invaluable to smooth-running PI planning events
  • Establish transparency – Stress the importance of open, honest discussion and engagement
  • Communicate the vision – In opening remarks at PI events, CMS reminded team members that their work directly impacts people’s health and lives

Introduction

Amid the pressures of increasing citizen expectations, the CMS environment is complex and ever-changing as budgets and legislation fluctuateโ€”making for a perfect setting to introduce Lean-Agile principles. A few isolated programs had begun using Scrum practices, but given the size and complexity of programs at CMS, Scrum did not lend itself well to longer-range planning and the identification and mitigation of dependencies among the Scrum teams. In addition, the organization still had cultural battles to overcome.

โ€œWe were still suffering from a โ€˜throw-everything-over-the-wallโ€™ mentality,โ€™โ€ explained Brent Weaver, Director of Systems Implementation at CMS. โ€œThe few Agile teams were requiring more of programs and that created more frustration on both sides. There was no vision or framework where everyone saw how they fit together. As a result, what they delivered was late, with defectsโ€”and not what the market needed.โ€

SAFe: Systems Thinking for a Complex Organization

In 2017, Weaver arrived with the charge of improving the Agile transformation for the Center of Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ) within CMS. In the search for a new approach, the Scaled Agile Frameworkยฎ (SAFeยฎ) resonated as the right option.

โ€œSAFe brought a much-needed approach to scaling Agile and systems thinking that was critical to an organization of our size and complexity,โ€ Weaver said.

In preparation to obtain buy-in and funding, Weaver built his knowledge of SAFe by taking some initial courses: Leading SAFeยฎ, and later, Implementing SAFeยฎ. Following the Leading SAFeยฎ course, he made the case for the Framework for leadership and earned the full support of Steve Davidson and Mark Plaugher, Directors of the Information Systems Group within CCSQ. Additionally, Debra Santos, Director of Hospitals, ASC, and QIO Systems was also willing to support the SAFe adoption for one of her systems.

SAFe case study

For help, Weaver tapped Scaled Agile Partner, Agile Six Applications, Inc. With Agile Six, CMS decided to implement SAFe first in a group brand-new to Lean-Agile concepts, rather than with those already using Scrum, for a chance to start from scratch. The first teams on SAFe would be those working on CMSโ€™s Hospital Quality Reporting (HQR) system, which healthcare facilities use to report data to CMS.

With leadership backing, they secured the budget and marked the calendar for the first face-to-face Program Increment (PI) planning eventโ€”to take place just six weeks in the future.

PI Planning Day One: Messy and Chaotic

To meet the timeframe, CMS decided to shortcut the recommendations from the SAFe Implementation Roadmap and skip SAFe trainingโ€”a decision that created significant challenges and that, in hindsight, they wouldnโ€™t recommend to other organizations. The fact that many team members were located outside the area, and many were contractors, played into that decision.

To help prepare for PI planning, HQR conducted a four-hour, half-day mock PI session with about 20 percent of team members to give them an idea of what to expect.

For the actual PI Planning event, CMS brought together more than 120 people, with approximately a quarter of them coming from out of town. The first day, unfortunately, proved to be chaotic and more challenging than expected for several reasons, according to Weaver and Ernie Ramirez, President of Agile Six Applications:

  • They underestimated the refinement status of the backlog and didnโ€™t follow all relevant parts of the SAFe Implementation Roadmap
  • They had a single Certified SAFeยฎ Program Consultant (SPC) in Ramirez (the recommendation is 3 โ€“ 5 per 100 development practitioners)
  • The agency skipped Leading SAFeยฎ, SAFeยฎ for Teams, and SAFeยฎ Product Owner/Product Manager training
  • They did not identify Value Streams
  • CMS simultaneously created the implementation plan and prepared for the Agile Release Train (ART) launch

โ€œIt cannot be overstated how horrible day one of that PI went,โ€ Ramirez said. โ€œWe didnโ€™t lay out an implementation plan as well as we should have, and the development contractor didnโ€™t have the resources or roles we thought they did.โ€

PI Planning Day Two: โ€˜Quarter-Million-Dollar Conversationsโ€™

Day two, however, could not have played out more differently. โ€œAt the end of day one, rather than throw in the towel, we rolled up our sleeves, and resolved to do better in day 2. We came out of day two with a plan that the teams would ultimately deliver on over the next 12 weeks,โ€ Ramirez said.

Ramirez points to a few reasons for the turnaround. After the first day, people returned knowing more of what to expect and came more prepared. Also, the two-day format created a sense of urgency to make progress. Additionally, Ramirez walked around troubleshooting any issues immediately as they arose.

โ€œAfter the first day, everyone had an opportunity to โ€˜sleep on it,โ€™โ€ he said. โ€œA lot of the frustration at the end of the first day kind of washed out and everyone came back with a renewed focus and commitment to get the plan done,โ€ Ramirez said.

Team members and program managers alike left the event more hopeful than ever before, believing they could actually hit the planโ€™s targets. Most promising, Weaver and Ramirez noticed productive discussions happening throughout the roomโ€”often between people who had worked together for several years, but had never actually met one another in person.

โ€œWe witnessed a lot of team and cross-team bonding that just cannot be replicated over WebEx, Hangouts or Zoom,โ€ Ramirez said. โ€œThere is something immeasurably valuable about being in the same room with someone, laughing, joking and yes, respectfully arguing. A lot of trust was earned and built on day two.โ€

โ€œQuarter-million-dollar conversations were happening all over the place,โ€ Weaver said. โ€œThatโ€™s what it would have cost to fix problems down the road if those conversations had not happened.โ€

SAFe case study

Communication, Collaboration across CMS + Contractors

Following that first PI, CMS began adhering to the SAFe Implementation Roadmap. They delivered Leading SAFeยฎ, SAFeยฎ for Teams, and SAFeยฎ Product Owner/Product Manager training. Unlike the first PI, they identified Value Streams.

โ€œFor the second PI, we found a lot of value in identifying Value Streams and ARTs, which helped people understand where they fit in and how teams fit together,โ€ Ramirez said.

Agile Six also delivered training to external contractors, including Leading SAFeยฎ, SAFeยฎ for Teams, and SAFeยฎ Product Owner/Product Manager. Several people at contractor organizations earned their SAFeยฎ Program Consultant (SPC) certification and began training their own peopleโ€”knowing that it is likely to give them one more strength to promote as they seek to win future contracts with CMS.

During RFPs, contract organizations routinely compete against each other. However, once on contract, they must work with team members from competing firms. As an unexpected benefit, SAFe helped unify CMS team members and contractors, as well as contractors from various companies. Face-to-face, they collaborate more effectively and come to personally know the people behind the roles, developing comfortable working relationships with each other.

โ€œItโ€™s fundamentally better for American taxpayers that teams work together and break those walls down,โ€ Weaver said. โ€œIโ€™m really proud of contractorsโ€™ ability to collaborate, share information, and work as a single team. Doing so has helped us reduce trouble tickets, so we know weโ€™re delivering higher-quality solutions.

Because of CMSโ€™s heavy use of contractors, each ART is comprised of people from numerous organizations. That required transformation leaders to be sensitive to job functions and responsibilities across the different companies on a single ART to foster trust and teamwork instead of competition. Having a single backlog for an ART creates further harmony among diverse team members.

27% Boost in Employee Satisfaction

So far, CMS has trained more than 200 people, including 25 โ€“ 30 Certified SAFeยฎ Program Consultants (SPCs). The agency has also since launched four more Agile Release Trains (ARTs).

With training and preparation, participants have been more engaged in PI Planning events after that first learning experience. Communication, says Weaver and Ramirez, has been critical to the acceptance of the new way of working. Especially in the early days, they had to communicate clearly and persistently to convince people to join in the effort and assuage fears about what this meant for their futures.

SAFe Case Study

โ€œWe really had to do a lot of selling on SAFe to get people comfortable,โ€ Weaver said. โ€œPeople were genuinely apprehensive about changing the way they have worked for so long, but as they have seen results, they have embraced it.โ€

And over time, HQR has implemented other SAFe concepts such as Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF). Well ahead of a PI, the primary stakeholder has time to weigh the value of work and prioritizeโ€”which takes some of the emotion out of the decision, Ramirez says.

They are also in the process of adjusting budgets to fit more with shorter-term planning. Instead of years in advance, they began thinking in terms of three-month increments, in which Ramirez called a halfway step between the traditional approach and the โ€˜wild westโ€™ of Scrum.

Higher Quality, Happier People

After a bumpy beginning, CMS points to measurable progress:

  • Budget shift to modernization versus maintenance โ€“ Instead of 100% of the budget going to maintain the existing HQR system, now only 40% is dedicated to it. A full 60% of the budget goes toward innovation for the system, helping the agency deliver on citizen expectations.
  • Higher quality โ€“ The HQR group reports a 55% decrease in help desk tickets from hospitalsโ€”demonstrating a direct impact to customer satisfaction.
  • Happier people โ€“ Surveys conducted before and after SAFe show a 27% increase in employee satisfaction.

While CMS canโ€™t yet measure customer satisfaction gains directly, they know that fewer quality issues and more innovation contribute to that goal.

โ€œSAFe provided a map that enabled us to shift to modernizing versus just maintaining the status quo,โ€ Weaver said. โ€œBeneficiaries will ultimately benefit from more user-friendly, human-centered design systems, which will allow us to reduce the burden on our providers.โ€

The groupโ€™s success has caught the attention of others, with trains now starting in other CMS groups. โ€œOther programs within CMS have approached HQR asking us how to drive the same outcomes,โ€ Santos said. โ€œItโ€™s a testament to how far weโ€™ve come in the past year.โ€

  • Transformation starts with leadership โ€“ Ideally, you need two to three leaders who are fully committed to the change. If possible, send them through SPC training.
  • Coaches are a MUST โ€“ CMS found substantial value in them
  • Agile contracting is necessary โ€“ Rigid contracts that have highly specific deliverables can be an obstacle to agility and to embracing shifting priorities as new data emerges
  • Use contractors that understand Lean-Agile principles โ€“ Hire teams that truly understand what this means, not just those who can talk the talk
  • Find collaborative work space โ€“ From PI planning events to day-to-day work, collaborative work space enables teams to capture the value of face-to-face interaction
  • Just do it! โ€“ โ€œIf we could time-travel and do it again, we would emphasize a sense of urgency to get going,โ€ Weaver said. โ€œSet a near-term date and follow the roadmap.โ€
  • Engage employees โ€“ Any effort is only as strong as its people. Approach the change with empathy for what your team is undergoing and leverage the support of management and coaches to keep employees engaged and excited.
  • Start with Essential SAFeยฎ โ€“ CMS found it valuable to simplify as much as possible and started with a program that lent itself to Essential SAFe. The learnings they achieved will influence larger programs, which will require multiple Value Streams.

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Suggested Case Study:

NHS Blood and Transplant

Easterseals – A Unique SAFe Journey in Healthcare IT

Presented at 2019 Global SAFe Summit, San Diego Oct. 2, 2019

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Easterseals Bay Area, as a non-profit provider of behavioral health therapy, provided a unique challenge and environment for adopting SAFe for its IT department. In order to overcome some of the unique challenges of our environment, we embarked on a year-long incremental approach rather than a traditional SAFe implementation, adopting techniques and practices as they supported our growth and learning in scaled agility. Additionally, due to a large number of conflicting and dynamic inputs to the teams, we started our SAFe journey at the Portfolio level to get our flow and capacity under control. At the same time, we developed the knowledge and maturity of our agile teams underneath. At Easterseals we will share with you how we took this innovative trail by focusing on mindset and principles that would enable the business and teams to partner with us without the initial intimidation of a radically new framework and terminology.

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Cisco IT – Adopting Agile Development – A SAFe Case Study

Cisco - SAFe for Agile development

โ€œContinuous delivery improved quality, increased productivity, and improved the employee experience.โ€

โ€”Ashish Pandey, Technical Lead, CSIT Team

Challenge:

Cisco wanted to shift away from waterfall, and replace periodic major releases with continuous delivery of new features.

Industry:

Information Technology, Telecommunications

Results:

Cisco achieved significant improvements by using SAFe on two major projects:

  • 16% drop in the defect rejected ratio (DRR)
  • 40% decrease in critical and major defects
  • 14% increase in defect removal efficiency (DRE)
  • Improved employee satisfaction by eliminating the need for after-hours work and reducing meetings/calls
  • 25 percent fewer quality assurance defects
  • Sprints that ran more efficiently each subsequent time

Best Practices:

  • Carefully build teams โ€“ Build teams with the best members from any location.
  • Assemble the right tools โ€“ Cisco realized it could not have conducted regression testing every two weeks without test automation tools.
  • Adjust as needed โ€“ For un-integrated or loosely integrated products, features or components, consider eliminating the Program level of SAFe.

Introduction

Cisco IT constantly looks for new ways to go faster and simplify. As part of its digital IT strategy, the Cisco Cloud and Software IT (CSIT) organization wanted to adopt more Agile development as a way to replace periodic major releases with continuous delivery of new features.

Cisco - SAFe for Agile development

โ€œOur goals are to speed up releases, increase productivity, and improve quality,โ€ says Ashish Pandey, technical lead for the CSIT team.

Although a few small teams had adopted Agile techniques, waterfall was still the norm for teams that were large, distributed, or working on complex projects.

To solve these challenges, CSIT moved to the Scaled Agile Frameworkยฎ (SAFeยฎ) and immediately began applying scaled Agile practices on two major initiatives: their Subscription Billing Platform, and the Webex app for Samsung tablets..

Ciscoยฎ Subscription Billing Platform Challenge

For its Subscription Billing Platform (SBP)โ€”which supports various subscription servicesโ€”the company originally formed different teams for design, build, test and deploy. In waterfall fashion, each team began work once the previous team had completed their part.

Cisco - SAFe for Agile development
  • The separate tracks bogged down the process
  • Release cycles exceeded three months
  • They got late closure on requirements documents
  • Teams missed delivery dates
  • There were quality issues due to late integration cycles
  • Teams worked long hours to make up for schedule slippage

The Solution

  • On SBP, Cisco launched three Agile Release Trains (ARTs) in 2015: capabilities, defects and fixes, and projects.
  • All three trains worked together to build and test small features within one SaaS component, while regularly delivering tested features to the system integration and testing team.
  • Every day, the delivery team met for 15 minutes and determined action items.

Results โ€“ 40% Defect Reduction

Cisco delivered the new release of SBP on time and with all planned capabilities. When the company compared this release to those using waterfall, it found a 16 percent drop in the defect rejected ratio (DRR). Plus, critical and major defects decreased by 40 percent.

Continuous delivery also increased defect removal efficiency (DRE) by 14 percent due to greater collaboration among international teams, and by helping members identify opportunities for improvement during daily meetings.

Cisco - SAFe for Agile development

The CSIT team attributes those quality improvements to several factors:

  • Improving team collaboration and focus
  • Enabling all team members to see current project status, promoting accountability
  • Helping the three teams see beyond their own track
  • Enabling teams to manage themselves

Additionally, the new way of working improved employee satisfaction by eliminating the need for after-hours work and reducing meetings and calls. Employees also saw how they fit into the bigger picture.

WebExยฎ App for Samsung

Challenge

In early 2014, the application for WebEx Meetings came pre-installed on Android tablets. Leading up to the release, developers had to work quickly to meet the release date, despite frequently changing requirements.

Solution

The team followed an Agile Scrum framework with three sprints for geographic rollout, the first two consisting of three weeks and the last of five weeks.

During planning, Cisco IT and others gathered requirements, and evaluated the readiness of environments, partners, and engineering and marketing teams.
Developers employed extreme programming, including test-driven development, where they first write an automated test case for a new function. Then they produced the minimal amount of code needed to pass the test and then refined code to make it simpler and easier to maintain.

Results โ€“ 25% Reduction in Quality Assurance Defects

On the WebEx app, Cisco reduced quality assurance defects by 25 percent. Plus, with developers checking code in several times a day, the business group reviewed new features sooner in the cycle than before. And each sprint ran more efficiently than the last.

Ultimately, Samsung sold more than 35 million tablets with the new app, creating wide exposure for the brand.

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Suggested Case Study: Royal Philips

SproutLoud

SproutLoud - A Case Study of Agile Planning with SAFe

โ€œSAFe helped us with a magic formula to bring alignment across all teams at an enterprise level, which we struggled to achieve previously. Scalability, visibility, predictability, and most importantly alignment, have improved drastically in the past year. SAFe has become integral to how we develop, deploy, and deliver our technology to customers. In short, SAFe helped us to re-define and invigorate our product development initiativesโ€

โ€”Ramesh Nori, SPC, Director of Agile PMO and AGILE Coach

Challenge:

For 10 years, SproutLoud experimented with Scrum and Kanban at scale, but it needed a new approach as its product and infrastructure became more complex.

Industry:

Advertising and Marketing

Solution:

SAFeยฎ

Results:

  • Upgrades on a two-week cycle
  • Higher code quality through continuous delivery
  • Improved collaboration between stakeholders, which resulted in better product definition
  • A focus on value delivery
  • Enhanced alignment between the business and IT
  • A higher priority on innovation and education

Best Practices:

  • Start with training โ€“ Train teams and leadership first
  • Assign SAFe roles โ€“ Identify roles such as Product Manager, RTE, System Architect, and DevOps. Also identify the Portfolio team and the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in an ART.
  • Start with an ART โ€“ Then use Inspect and Adapt techniques to improve

Introduction

SproutLoud launched in 2006 with six people and a vision: to change channel marketing. Since then, the company has done just that, and in turn, has grown to nearly 200 employees.

SproutLoud helps major brands be more successful selling their products through local channels with its platform of software, services, and support.

n 2009, as its client base and product offerings expanded, SproutLoud began experimenting with Lean-Agile practices, including Scrum and Kanban at scale. The very speed of its growth made scaling critical.

SproutLoud - A Case Study of Agile Planning with SAFe

Over the next few years, IT leaders tried various sprint lengths and increased the sophistication and size of their efforts, adding story-point estimation, cross-functional teams, and value-based management. While teams embraced some aspectsโ€”such as empowering teams to be self-organizingโ€”they resisted others, like day-long planning meetings.

In 2014, when the Florida-based company opened an office in South America, IT leadership knew it was time for a new approach.

โ€œThe models we had were not on par with our growth,โ€ explains Ramesh Nori, SPC, Director of Agile PMO and Agile Coach. โ€œAs our product became more complex, our infrastructure needed to be more robust, and we had to expand beyond IT. It was time to think about a scaling model to increase predictability, alignment, and performance across the enterprise.โ€

IT and the business finally align

In mid-2015, a search for scaling models led SproutLoud to the Scaled Agile Frameworkยฎ (SAFeยฎ). โ€œWhen we found SAFe, we thought, โ€˜Thatโ€™s a perfect match!โ€ Nori said. โ€œIt resonated very well with our needs and issues at that time.โ€

โ€œSAFe addressed our pain points, offered suggestions on allocating resources filling in new roles, and introduced a way to approach distributed decision-making, which we really needed at the time,โ€ adds Anjan Upadhya, CTO.

With backing from the executive team, SproutLoud moved forward quickly with deploying the Framework. Admittedly, nine years of work on Lean-Agile practices eased the transition as many were already familiar with the fundamental concepts.

One individual from SproutLoud headed to SAFeยฎ Program Consultant (SPC) training in Washington, D.C. Following that, teams went through SAFeยฎ for Teams while managers took the Leading SAFeยฎ course.

Even though many stakeholders were not yet certified as SPCs, SproutLoud held its first Program Increment (PI) planning meeting and launched its first Agile Release Train (ART) in 2015. โ€œWe began using the Framework immediately in our existing development process, which helped us scale from three to seven teams,โ€ Nori said.

They followed with Inspect and Adapt sessions at the end of each PIโ€”as well as at the end of each sprintโ€”to evolve the product development cycle constantly and adhere to the Framework on an iterative basis.

With the introduction of SAFe, SproutLoud brought together teams and business owners for PIs, creating new alignment between the two groups. โ€œBusiness owners explained the ask, making requests much clearer for IT teams,โ€ Nori said. โ€œThat was really fundamental.โ€

As SproutLoud brought on over 50 new employees from 2015 to 2018, SAFe helped the company absorb them much more smoothly than before. โ€œWith clearly defined roles, the team dynamic became very clear and easy to understand,โ€ Nori said. โ€œEven if we had to reconfigure teams, the Framework kept team members on the same page.โ€

Overcoming resistance, challenges

With the move to SAFe, SproutLoud team members began the process of becoming familiar with the Framework, adjusting to the new way of working, and over time began to embrace it and see the benefits.

The company also contended with having the right people in the right roles for the Framework to succeedโ€”a key step before the transformation begins. Looking at products in terms of strategic themes, Epics, and Features helped teams work through the transformation.

The fundamental change was with introducing two new teamsโ€”the Product team and the Engineering team to help with the business and technical sides of the products to be developed.

โ€œAlso, we now have a dedicated product team with a product manager and product owners working to help with artifacts such as Epics, Features, and Stories,โ€ Nori said. โ€œThis has helped ease the stress on the system due to poorly defined work items. It is a journey and we are making good strides in the right direction.โ€

Finally, the company also focuses on maintaining excellent code quality through the continuous delivery cycle. SproutLoud addressed these challenges by offering regular training sessions, along with making changes to the development cycle involving enhanced GIT-automated flows.

SproutLoud - A Case Study of Agile Planning with SAFe

Deploying regular product upgrades

Currently, SproutLoud runs one ART with 10 teams in the company. After about two years of working within SAFe, Nori and Upadhya credit the Framework with providing excellent insights into challenges related to misalignment, lack of prioritization, and lack of Lean-Agile principles at the Portfolio levelโ€”which has a direct impact on delivering value to clients.

SproutLoud now deploys upgrades to its platform on a two-week cycle, and clients gain instant access to those innovations. The ultimate goal is to have on-demand releases in place. The SproutLoud team is working diligently toward that goal while fully embracing the Framework and its recommendations.

โ€œPrior to SAFe, large batch releases stressed the system as a whole, not including the downtime effects,โ€ Nori said. โ€œBut post-SAFe implementation, we are doing smaller incremental releases, which has helped reduce the system downtime for launches.โ€

In addition, the Product team is now offering on-demand training to clients and stakeholders on all the new products that were delivered to production.

After many years of trying Lean-Agile practices without SAFe, leaders were pleased to see improvements quickly:

  • The development teams are more empowered and engaged than before with product development initiatives, which is directly attributed to having an exclusive Product team and an Engineering team
  • The emphasis on Agile metrics brought alignment among all tiers of the product development organization as everyone is speaking the same common language
  • The companyโ€™s focus is now set on PI objectives, which are directly attributed to value delivered to the clients
  • With a Lean-Agile mindset, innovation is continuous and SproutLoud introduced in-house hackathons
  • SproutLoud formed an exclusive Product Management team with product managers and product owners to help manage the product from concept to final delivery
  • The company formed an exclusive Systems Engineering team with systems architects and engineers to help manage the technical side (enablers) of the product being planned for delivery

SproutLoud also now extends beta access to clients to collect feedback before products hit the market, which contributes to improved quality.

โ€œAs a growing company that never took funding, itโ€™s a challenge to adopt the Framework while balancing costs,โ€ Upadhya said. โ€œWe worked on changing our mindset first and then getting people into the right roles. Weโ€™re still not 100% there with getting ideal roles filled, but weโ€™ve made significant progressโ€”and weโ€™re seeing the results.โ€

Most importantly, SAFe helped create essential alignment between the business and IT. โ€œSAFe helped us with a magic formula to bring alignment across all teams at the enterprise level, which we were struggling to achieve previously,โ€ Nori said. โ€œScalability, visibility, predictability, and most importantly alignment, have improved drastically in the past year. SAFe has become integral to how we develop, deploy, and deliver our technology to customers.โ€

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Suggested Case Study:

EdgeVerve Systems

Fannie Mae โ€“ Adopting Agility in Business Using SAFe

โ€œSAFe provided the agility, visibility, and transparency needed to ensure we could integrate with numerous other efforts, get predictable in our delivery, and ensure timelines are met.โ€

โ€“David McMunn, Director of Fannie Maeโ€™s Agile COE

Challenge:

Within three years, the organization would need to stand-up an entirely new business model that would change the way securities are issued to the marketโ€”and do so within aggressive timelines.

Industry:

Financial Services, Government

Results:

  • Releases now happen every month, instead of once or twice a year.
  • They integrate reliably every two weeks.
  • Fannie Mae reduced delivery risks.
  • The organization reduced the defect rate substantially.
  • Teams now deliver more than 30 attributes per sprint compared to 2-5 before.
  • Velocity increased from 10 story points to more than 30.

Best Practices:

  • Sync cadence โ€“ Establishing a common cadence was critical to success. Engineering practices must evolve in order to comply with biยญmodal governance.
  • Work on database modeling upfront โ€“ For any data-heavy effort, perform advance work on database modeling to avoid the impact of changes identified later in the sprint.
  • Develop a playbook โ€“ Such guidance reduces rework for multiple teams working in parallel.

Introduction

Fannie Mae is the leading provider of mortgage financing in the United States. Operating under a congressional charter, Fannie Maeโ€”and its sibling organization Freddie Macโ€”play an important role in the nationโ€™s housing finance system; they provide liquidity, stability, and affordability to the mortgage market.

Coming out of the housing crisis in 2013, Fannie Mae recognized that the lending environment it was moving into required it to be even more responsive to meet rapidly changing customer needs. Further, Fannie Mae recognized that agility was critical to achieving this objectiveโ€”not just in technology, but across the organization.

In January 2015, Fannie Mae was preparing to align with guidance provided by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and Congress, under a new joint venture named Common Securitization Solutions (CSS). As part of this effort, Fannie Mae undertook an initiative to transform some of their key internal business processes to align with CSS to build a universal securitization platform for the issuance and management of mortgage-backed securities.

SAFe for Mortgage Financing

Within three years, Fannie Mae planned to develop an entirely new business model that would change the way securities are issued to the marketโ€”and do so within aggressive timelines. More than 20 development teams, encompassing over 300 individuals, were needed to integrate development and testing efforts across 30 assets. As Fannie Mae prepared to implement this change, the organization encountered several challenges as the new model was being defined based on continuously evolving requirements.

โ€œWhen youโ€™re doing a large-scale integration with a lot of data, the number-one factor for success is early integration and early testing,โ€ says Atif Salam, Director of Enterprise Data at Fannie Mae. โ€œThe federal mandate required us to mitigate risk from the get-go, and we realized early on it would not be possible following a waterfall approach. There was no better way for us to mitigate that risk than to adopt Agile.โ€

Overcoming Initial Roadblocks

Enterprise Dataโ€™s efforts to adopt Agile uncovered several challenges, both internal and external:

Challenge #1: No Agile capability evident for the initial two teams at the outset of the Enterprise Data initiative.

The first Enterprise Data teams were brand new to Agile, the Scrum methodology and, having been formed specifically for this initiative, working with each other.

Prior to adopting SAFe, Enterprise Data developed a standard on-boarding approach and entrance criteria for standing up new teams. Additionally, external Agile subject matter expertise was brought in to train and work with the teams, and an Agile Mature Model (AMM) was created to baseline behaviors and practices, as well as identify areas for optimization.

Thereafter, once the decision had been made to adopt SAFe, the program began to work through the SAFe Readiness Checklist. The AMM was used to set target benchmarks that all program teams were required to meet in order to ensure there was sufficient capability in place from which to scale.

Challenge #2: At the outset of the Enterprise Data initiative, a Scrum team could only complete a single user story due to inflexible architecture, end-to-end testing challenges, and numerous build constraints. Further, it was typical for the work to be gated by subject matter expertise between developers who viewed data attributes as a data point, comprised of both sourcing and vending complexities, that could only be implemented sequentially.

In response, technical leads focused on eliminating constraints, reducing complexity, and optimizing workflow. Specifically, Technical Leads worked with the teams to leverage cross-functional team/paired programming constructs to augment technical expertise. As a result, the teams began to view data attributes not as a data point, comprised of both sourcing and vending complexities, but rather as having two distinct pieces of business value, specifically sourcing and vending.

Additionally, they made the effort to move system integration testing (SIT), as well as user acceptance testing (UAT), left into the Scrum team. As a result, and over time, each team began to complete multiple user stories within a given sprint. Additionally, the organization adopted an emergent design mindset, formed cross-functional Agile feature teams, and aligned to a common cadence that synchronized their activities (e.g. sprint planning, Scrum-of-Scrums, sprint reviews).

SAFe for Mortgage Financing

Challenge #3: At the outset of Enterprise Dataโ€™s journey, complexity was further complicated by the fact that teams were required to develop and integrate their code in the same mainline, thereby replacing branching as an accepted technical practice. Additionally, Fannie Mae required new release traceability management that would satisfy corporate and federal governance requirements.

To address these challenges, technical leads and shared services focused on building a continuous integration capability, across all teams, using the same codebase. The organization had always had application lifecycle management (ALM), however, it needed to reยญthink continuous integration to realize true efficiencies. Over the course of 10 months, the organization focused on leveraging automation to reduce the time to implement builds from once every six months to multiple times a day.

Additionally, Enterprise Data adopted behavior-driven development engineering practices for traceability, automated testing, and prototyping.

SAFe for Mortgage Financing

Challenge #4: Upstream technical dependencies specific to architecture, database design/modeling, and test data provisioning prevented the teams from completing a single user story within the two-week sprint cadence.

In addition to the technical challenges the teams were facing, there were also multiple upstream dependencies on architecture, data modeling, and test data management that they had to resolve before a User Story could be implemented by a team working in a two-week cadence.

Initially, working ahead of the teams, a group of business analysts were assembled and assigned to groom the program backlog sufficiently so that User Stories met, or exceeded, 80% of the sprint teamโ€™s Definition of Ready. Despite this focus, however, there was barely enough ready work in the program backlog for the teams to bring into their respective sprint planning. This was due to the lead times required to resolve upstream dependencies as well as the need to respond to continually changing requirements.

In preparation for scaling, Enterprise Data worked with their business stakeholders to create a roadmap of features spanning one business quarter. Simultaneously, they focused on optimizing backlog health, sufficient in depth to support the Agile teams, for at least two consecutive sprints. Additionally, adopting a system perspective, the entire value stream was analyzed to better anticipate, and mitigate for, internal/external technical dependencies.

Challenge #5: The organizationโ€™s culture was accustomed to working within a traditional implementation methodology.

At the outset, Fannie Mae had a traditional command and control culture, supported by a broader ecosystem of corporate functions that had to change to support Agile. Those leading the change made a significant effort to work with leadership and management to pivot from the traditional role of directing delivery to becoming Lean-Agile leaders and critical change agents, both supporting the teams as well as modeling the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto.

As already noted, leadership and management changed their focus to clearing impediments impacting the teams. Additionally, they influenced corporate functions to align in support of Agile, get the business integrated and involved, as well as to put the pieces in place to create an environment focused on continuous learning. โ€œHistorically we would have seen challenges as failures in requirements or development rather than opportunities to fail fast and learn, and improve,โ€ Salam explains.

While still new to their roles, the Lean-Agile leaders infused a sense of purpose in the teams and gave them autonomy to implement the work while decentralizing decision-making and minimizing constraints.

SAFe: Agility. Visibility. Transparency.

Although Fannie Mae had pockets of Agile capability up to this point, leadership understood that a scaled Agile methodology was required to achieve their objectives. Fortunately, individuals within the company had prior success with large-scale Agile deployments using the Scaled Agile Frameworkยฎ (SAFeยฎ).

Fannie Mae teamed up with an external Scaled Agile Gold partner to develop and mature its Scrum capability and then deploy SAFe. As the first to make the SAFe transition, the Enterprise Data division became the torch bearer.

โ€œWe had multiple waterfall efforts, third-party integration, and a hard regulatory mandate that made coordination and execution exceptionally difficult,โ€ explains David McMunn, the Director of Fannie Maeโ€™s Agile Center of Excellence (COE). โ€œSAFe provided the agility, visibility, and transparency needed to ensure we could integrate with the numerous other efforts, get predictable in our delivery, and ensure timelines are met.โ€

Fannie Mae applied a dogmatic approach to ensure the organization was developing a consistent set of practices across multiple teams at the outset. External coaches delivered Agile, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Leading SAFe (SA), and SAFe for Teams (SP) training. The SAFe training was then mandatory for every new team joining the effort.

Fannie Mae launched its first Agile Release Train (ART) encompassing six programs, across 12 teams, with more than 130 people, in June of 2015. Admittedly, that first Program Increment (PI) offered some learning experiences.

โ€œIn spite of all the preparation that went into the backlog, setting expectations, confirming attendance from stakeholders, and the training prior to planning, the first PI was somewhat of a chaotic experience,โ€ says Scott Richardson, Chief Data Officer at Fannie Mae.

Context setting provided by the business, product, and architecture leads took time away from team break-out sessions and, as a result, the teams struggled to resolve all of the open requirements and scope questions to complete their plans.

โ€œBut by the end of the second day,โ€ Richardson continues, โ€œwe started to see progress.โ€ The teams had mapped out their dependencies on the program board, resolved, owned, accepted, or mitigated (ROAM) all of the known risks in the PI and achieved a Fist of Five confidence score of 3.

โ€œThe session offered the very first opportunity for all stakeholders to work together on this multi-million dollar program.โ€ Richardson adds. โ€œA new way of managing large-scale integration efforts at Fannie Mae was emerging that would spread across the technology enterprise.โ€

Over the next few PIs, the organization knew more clearly how to prepare for the PI planning meeting and confidence scores began averaging 4 and higher.

Modeling Confidence in the New Methodology

During cross-team planning in an early PI, it became clear that several teams were not on track to deliver important capabilities within the targeted timeline. โ€œSome of my best new Agile team leaders offered to throw more people at the problem โ€˜just this once,โ€™ and crash the schedule like they did in the old days,โ€ Richardson says. โ€œItโ€™s in those moments that you need to model confidence in the Agile method, to be the calm in the eye of the storm.โ€
Instead, the Agile team leaders were encouraged to go back to the Product Owners regarding the change in priorities and empower them to devise a new minimum viable product. โ€œWithin a couple of hours, everything was back on track with planning, and ultimately all the teams delivered, and the external customer delivery was on-time,โ€ Richardson says. โ€œNow they carry this story with them, and are empowered to solve problems and make decisions in truly productive ways. Itโ€™s part of the culture.โ€

SAFe for Mortgage Financing

Gains across the Board

Today, Fannie Mae has come a long way. The Enterprise Data division delivered an integrated solution on time and with much higher quality than was expected for an effort of this size. From a broader perspective, the transformation to SAFe revolutionized how the organization plans for the delivery of large-scale programs.

Fannie Mae has seen improvements on multiple fronts:

  • Reduced risk โ€“ Fannie Mae reduced delivery risks through the relentless focus on innovation and automation to ship โ€œproduction readyโ€ code with higher and higher frequency. They significantly mitigated the risk inherent in complex integration between legacy and new architectures/applications, as well as between internal and external systems.
  • Faster feedback cycles โ€“ Enterprise Data delivers system demos and integrated code every two weeks. Releases now happen every month, instead of once or twice a year, for the largest application across the enterprise, with millions of lines of code.
  • Improved predictability โ€“ Teams, within the program and across the enterprise, integrate reliably every two weeks.
  • Boosted quality โ€“ The organization reduced the defect rate substantially.
  • Increased business value โ€“ Teams now deliver more than 30 attributes per sprint compared to 2-5 attributes when Agile was first adopted within Enterprise Data.
  • Better team progress โ€“ Teams undergo regular AHR (Agility Health Reviews) cycles and have matured to higher Agile Maturity Model levels.
  • Greater efficiency โ€“ Fannie Mae realizes significant efficiency through a reduction in technical debt.

After the initial deployment, the division rolled out SAFe to the rest of the organization, training up to 600 people on Leading SAFe, SAFe Advanced Scrum Master, SAFe Scrum Master, SAFe Product Manager/Product Owner, and SAFe for Teams, depending on roles. Several employees went on to achieve their SPC certification.

Currently, Fannie Mae runs three ARTs. The Enterprise Data ART recently completed its 13th PI. Additionally, there are more than 200 Lean-Agile teams across Enterprise IT, encompassing over 3,000 people. Functional and business portfolios are adopting lightweight Lean-Agile values and practices as part of their day-to-day activities.

โ€œThis way of working has spread across the organization,โ€ Salam says. โ€œItโ€™s changing the way we deliver for the customer, the way we hire and do our budgeting, and is continuously extending further and further into the business.โ€

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Dutch Tax and Customs Administration

Capital One – Benefits of SAFe for Financial Services

Capital One - Benefits of SAFe for Financial Services

โ€œThe products weโ€™re developing are bigger than one Agile team. For the teams to interact and plan together, we really needed SAFe as the foundation. It brings the practices and methodologies to coordinate multiple teams working on the same product at the same time.โ€

โ€”Mike Eason, CIO, Commercial Banking

Challenge:

Capital One sought to be more responsive to the market, to transform software delivery to an agile framework, and to do it at scale.

Industry:

Financial Services

Results:

  • Raised employee engagement by 15-20%
  • Employed Agile and scaled agile across the enterprise; business and tech.
  • Re-thinking the strategy on outsourced applications led to a drastic shift towards building internally

Best Practices:

  • Establish communities of practiceโ€”Peer groups for Scrum Masters, RTEs, and System Teams enable these individuals to learn from each other.
  • Support innovationโ€”Commercial Banking leads Innovation Renovations similar to the Shark Tank TV show, where individuals present ideas for improvement.
  • Recognize accomplishmentsโ€”Commercial Banking calls out specific individuals for their efforts at PI events, and enhances morale and a sense of fun by requesting that people write what they appreciate about others on โ€œwalking billboardsโ€ on each otherโ€™sโ€™ backs.

Introduction

One of the most widely recognized brands in America, Capital One is a diversified bank that offers a broad array of financial products and services to consumers, small businesses, and commercial clients. The company employs more than 47,000 people, and in 2016, reported revenue of $25 billion.

Benefits of SAFe for Financial Services

Since launching in the mid โ€˜90s, Capital One has been a disrupter. Smaller and nimbler than its competitors, it could react to market demands quickly. But as it grew, it lost some of that agility.

2010 began a transformation starting with the renaming of the Capital Oneโ€™s IT groups to Capital One Technology. โ€œThis was more than a name change,โ€ Capital One CIO Rob Alexander said.  โ€œIt was a declaration that we would no longer be a traditional bank IT shop.  From now that day on, we would be an organization working to transform Capital One into a technology company.โ€

In 2012, Capital Oneโ€™s Commercial Banking group set out to be more responsive to customer and market needs.  Knowing the organization relied on a lot of outsourced functions, the team set out on a transformational journey to bring IT development back in-house.

As the transformation picked up steam; it was clear, talent would be the lynchpin to execute against their development goals.  To maximize the transformation, the following was always the question:

โ€œHow do we work in a way that allows great talent to do great work?โ€ (Rob Alexander, CIO, Capital One)

The CIO of the companyโ€™s Commercial Banking Technology team, Mike Eason, explains the motivation for change.  โ€œLike many companies with outsourced technology, we knew we needed to gain control over our customer experience and become more nimble,โ€ Eason says. โ€œWe took a step back and said, โ€˜we need to build our own technology to respond more rapidly to the market.โ€™โ€

In 2013, the group began taking steps toward building an Agile workforce, however, Eason describes it as going through the motions. Development was largely still a waterfall approach. And while technology leaders were fully on board, opportunities remained to gain the full support of upper management.

SAFe: โ€˜A Well-Supported Framework with Clear Guidelinesโ€™

For the guidance it needed, Commercial Banking turned to the Scaled Agile Frameworkยฎ (SAFeยฎ).

โ€œWe looked at other frameworks for Agile, but SAFe offered a well-supported framework with clear guidelines, training, and experts to support us throughout the journey,โ€ says Anand Francis, Director of Agile Coaching Services, Capital One Commercial Banking.

โ€œThe products weโ€™re developing are bigger than one Agile team,โ€ Eason adds. โ€œFor the teams to interact and plan together, we really needed SAFe as the foundation. It brings the practices and methodologies to coordinate multiple teams working on the same product at the same time.โ€

With the decision to go SAFe, support from the Capital One Commercial Operations Leader was a key factor, helping to influence large scale buy-in from other executives. Moving beyond rhetoric of โ€œbusiness and ITโ€ alignment, Capital One business executives have agile teams dedicated to their products, services, and broader business strategies.

Goal: 100% Training

Prior to the first Program Increment (PI), all team members went through Agile 101 training. Today, half of the Release Train Engineers (RTEs) are SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs). Out of 50 Scrum Master roles, one quarter have achieved SAFeยฎ Scrum Master (SSM) Certification while 10 percent are SPCs.

โ€œOur goal is to have 50 percent of our Scrum Master population SAFe Scrum Master certified and 100% of our RTE population SAFe RTE certified by the end of the year,โ€ Francis says.

Capital One now includes Agile, Design Thinking, and SAFe training courses in its Capital One University. Employees can choose from a number of SAFe courses, including Leading SAFe, SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager, and SAFe Release Train Engineer.

Empowering Teams

SAFe for Financial Services

Capital One held its first Program Increment (PI) Planning meeting in 2013. In-house Agile coaches provided continuous guidance to Scrum Masters, RTEs, and Product Owners.

As Commercial Banking kicked off its first PI, a mindset shift was necessary for associates and to continue to move forward on two big themes: one, we as an organization needed to be great at delivering software; and two, we needed to be great at delivering data solutions that support how we make decisions for customers, how we interact with them, and how we make decisions internally. Christy Gurkin, the RTE on the first Agile Release Train (ART), found that while teams were initially resistant to the change, they soon began embracing the new approach.

โ€œI noticed that people who normally would not have talked together were initiating conversations on their own, without me having to push it,โ€ she says.

Eason also notes that, early on, teams lacked the autonomy to deliver independently because too many outside dependencies slowed down the process. Capital One addressed this by changing team structure. Instead of teams that focused on a single aspect, such as building an API, they transitioned to full-feature teamsโ€”equipping an entire team to deliver working software independently in a two-week sprint.

With this shift in team composition, and a greater focus on DevOps and continuous integration/continuous development, the company gained momentum.

Capital One additionally reduced team sizes down to seven or eight people. โ€œBy reducing team sizes, we improved team chemistry, which left them feeling like they had the autonomy to solve issues themselves,โ€ Eason says.

Commercial Banking also took a major step in moving from project-centric budgeting to team-centric budgeting. โ€œBefore, no one wanted the project to end because then the resources would be distributed somewhere else,โ€ Eason says. โ€œLeadership and teams are now aligned to products, and make decisions on how much to invest in the products themselves instead of justifying every single project.โ€

As a result, teams are more nimble to โ€˜turn on a dimeโ€™ as needed, without the pressure of having to see a specific project to the end.

โ€œTeams feel more beholden to the product theyโ€™re working on versus moving from project to project,โ€ Francis adds.

A Transformation Guided by Teams

In addition to performing Inspect and Adapt after every PI, Commercial Banking designed and developed an Agile maturity assessment to help trains and teams understand where they are on their transformation journey. Once a quarter, they ask individuals to react anonymously to neutral statements across five areas: sustainability, value delivery, scaled agile, culture, and technical health.

โ€œA lot of companies think theyโ€™re in one place, but theyโ€™re really in another,โ€ says Greg Jaeger, Agile Coach. โ€œOur goal was honest opinions and honest assessment because thatโ€™s the only way to help each member of the team, each team, each train, and each program get betterโ€”not only in being Agile or SAFe but in actual product delivery.โ€

Areas with low scores indicate the need for a discussion. In response, individuals at the Team and Program levels identify areas to improve for the next six sprints. Based on items chosen at those levels, Agile coaches formulate an Agile transformation path for every value stream.

Faster Delivery, Happier People

Benefits of SAFe for Financial Services

Today, Commercial Banking has 13 ARTs and seven Value Streams. Since deploying SAFe, the group has seen gains that benefit employees, partners, customers, and the organization as a whole:

Time-to-marketโ€” As we build out our physical campus, we have tried to create work spaces that enable that collaboration at the agile scrum team level, but also, we operate what is called the scaled agile framework.  That implies that we need to be able to be effective in collaborating at both the individual team level, but also across multiple teams.

Taking an iterative approach to frequently deliver to production brought about efficiency and speed not previously seen.  โ€œWeโ€™re truly able to deliver working software into production at the end of every sprint,โ€ Eason says. โ€œWhat took us six months to complete before, now we might complete in a couple of months. And by bringing development in-house, we have working solutions much faster than any vendor partnership could deliver.โ€

Commercial Banking turned the ratio of vendor-created applications to those built in-house upside down.

Engagementโ€”With employee engagement up 15-20 percent overall, morale and retention have improved.

Predictabilityโ€”With each PI, Commercial Banking sees greater predictability in what it can deliver. PI planning plays a major role in setting expectations and encouraging follow-through.

Customer satisfactionโ€”Eason says business partners prefer the new approach and would not want to go back to the old way of working. Likewise, the businesses that Commercial Banking serve have responded positively to the opportunity to see demos and progress along the way, rather than only having insight into fully completed projects.

โ€œItโ€™s been great to have clients with us on the design and test aspects of development,โ€ Eason says.

The journey continues at Capital One, with Commercial Banking continuously refining after every PI. Success so far, aided by SAFe, greatly fuels that momentum.

โ€œSAFe has enabled us to go to production in a safer and more scalable way more often than we would have normally,โ€ Anand says.

โ€œWe are in that journey, and it is important that as the leadership team in technology,โ€ says Capital One CIO Rob Alexander, โ€œwe are communicating to our whole organization that this is what excellence in software delivery looks like.โ€

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Intel โ€“ Implementing SAFe for Information Technology

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made a stunning observation: The number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every 18 months since their invention. He predicted the trend would continue into the foreseeable futureโ€”and it generally has. A billion transistors now fit on a chip the size of a pea.

Challenge:

In a complex, fast-growth industry, Intel must continuously innovate while controlling costs and maintaining quality.

Industry:

Information Technology

Solution:

SAFeยฎ, Agile and Lean

Results:

  • MVE delivered 65% more products with the same capacity.
  • Improved Commit-to-Accept ratios from 74% to +90%.
  • Everything is visible to everyone.
  • Scope change reduced to less than 5%.

Best Practices:

  • Choose the right RTEs โ€“ Intel found that effective RTEs have a combination of technical background and a deeper Agile mindset/experience
  • Train the Leaders โ€“ Business owners and Train Management should be required to attend SAFe training. It is critical that the leaders speak for the transformation, act as role models, and reinforce direction within the organization. Leverage advocates in the organization whenever possible.
  • Always end with Inspect & Adapt โ€“ Just get started and then learn and adapt. Favor โ€œprogress over perfection.โ€
  • Keep it Simple โ€“ Donโ€™t overcomplicate the process, and bring things back to the basics of Agile and Lean.

Introduction

Intel has been integral in pushing that pace of growth in the marketplace. Today, the company employs more than 100,000 people globally and reports net revenue of $59.4 billion.

But like most enterprises, as it continuously innovates and expands, Intel must balance cost control while maintaining high quality.

โ€œWith the complexity and number of the products skyrocketing, if we didnโ€™t adjust or adapt, other than adding more people, Mooreโ€™s Law would crush us,โ€ says Allen Ringel, Lean & Agile Transformation Leader, Intel.

Agile at Enterprise Scale

Agile at Enterprise Scale

Intelโ€™s Manufacturing Development Organization (MDO) division tests and validates Intel solutions, producing over two million lines of code every two weeks. In an effort to deliver more value, MDO began to adopt Lean-Agile practices in 2005, and by 2012 had small pockets of Scrum and a homegrown solution for scaling Scrum.

โ€œWe found the Agile approach attractive because it turns the Iron Triangle on its head,โ€ Ringel says. โ€œFeatures are negotiable but time, cost, and quality are not.โ€

Yet as more people and divisions were folded into MDO, Intel found it increasingly difficult to scale Scrum. Thus, a team of about 15 people tasked with driving Lean-Agile at Intel looked at industry frameworks for ways to scale more effectively.

In 2013, MDO discovered the Scaled Agile Frameworkยฎ (SAFeยฎ), which provided clear structure and roles for taking the company into the next phase of Agile. SAFe also aligned well with the companyโ€™s broader Lean approach as a learning organization focused on continuous improvement and waste elimination.

โ€œIn an organization as large as MDO we needed to standardize the planning and execution process we use to work together to deliver value,โ€ Ringel says. โ€œWhen we encountered SAFe it provided a proven, public framework, with well-defined roles and artifacts for applying Lean and Agile at the enterprise level.โ€

Those 15 Lean-Agile leaders prepared for the implementation by attending the SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) Certification training. After mapping the roles, principles, practices & tools to back to what currently existed in the organization, they had essentially created a trail through the forest with a visible plan for implementation. Then they jumped in with both feet.

Leading up to the first Program Increment (PI) planning event, Intel trained more than 1,500 people. Over the course of eight weeks, they launched eight Agile Release Trains (ARTs) with 170 Scrum teamsโ€”with Christmas and New Yearโ€™s in the middle. To ease the transition, the 15 Intel Lean-Agile coaches were embedded at the 14 different sites with MDO teams to answer questions and provide guidance.

At Intel, executive backing proved critical to the success of the rollout. Mohsen Fazlian, General Manager of the division, created a shared vision by communicating clearly about the reasons for adopting SAFe and scaling Agile. Intel also reinforced Scrum rules for teams to be properly sized, co-located, 100% committed, and cross-functional. Where co-location was not possible & budgets allowed, Intel brought together people in person for at least the first planning event.

That first PI, admittedly, demanded considerably more effort than subsequent events. Yet, the ability to see immediate value spurred momentum. โ€œThe planning events were essential for teams to align at the train level while highlighting dependencies and allowing risk mitigation early on,โ€ Ringel says.

Intel made a few enhancements to the typical SAFe deployment. They digitized the program board so they could see everything on a dashboard at all times and identify efforts quickly as progressing normally or abnormally. Lean-Agile leaders guided managers in looking at abnormal areas from a new perspective. If something turned red on the virtual program board, instead of managers saying, โ€œFix this,โ€ they ask, โ€œHow can I help?โ€

Training 2,000 Over Three Months

Fast forward to 2017. Intel has grown Lean-Agile practices at a pace that rivals Mooreโ€™s Law. The well-defined roles and terminology within SAFe serve as essential signposts for those new to the Framework.

The structure has kept the trains on track as the organization continuously expands. A merger with another groupโ€”now combined under the name Manufacturing Value Engineering (MVE)โ€”nearly doubled the size of the organization.

To fold in the new division, MVE trained nearly 2,000 people over three months and immediately organized them into trains. While the change came as a bit of a shock to some, the rapid integration enabled people to participate in the Agile system while trainers consistently communicated the value of the change, helping people experience it first hand and embrace their roles with the new way of working.

โ€œWe all feel part of a bigger thing and speak a common language that everyone understands,โ€ Ringel says. โ€œThereโ€™s clarity in the model we work in, which has definitely been something people latch on to.โ€

Ringel says that Intel has settled on an acceptable ratio of coaches to employees: 1:200-250. โ€œWe have shown management that we can deliver value with half a percent of the organization as transformation leaders,โ€ he says.

Agile at Enterprise Scale

One of the Largest Reported SAFe Deployment

Today, MVE has over 440 Scrums organized into 35 ARTs, including software and hardware engineers. MVE continues to widen the circle and is frequently consulted by organizations throughout Intel. Adjacent organizations at Intel interested in MVEโ€™s success have enlisted MVE to help with scaling Agile, leading to eight additional ARTs in partner organizations. In fact, Intelโ€™s effort is one of the largest publicly reported SAFe deployment based on number of ARTs.

While scaling has not been easy, it has been worth it. The impact of these efforts ripples across the company.

Increased Product Variants

  • Helped MVE to delivered 65% more product variants

Strong Performance-to-Schedule Discipline

  • Capacity-based planning and cadence provides a heartbeat and prevents schedule slips
  • Customers and upper management are changing their behaviors to protect the cadence set by Program Increments
  • Commit-to-Accept ratios improved from 74% to +90%
  • MVE minimized scope change in Program Increments to less than 5%

Increased Transparency & Visibility

  • The company identified bugs, impediments, weak tools and poor engineering habits
  • Transparency is invaluable and everything is visible to everyone
  • Communication & conversations are more valuable than tracking indicators in a tool
  • MVE now has a strong community with a common language

Institutionalized Process

  • Teams have demanded adherence when the environment becomes chaotic

Ultimately, Intelโ€™s Lean-Agile efforts help it maintain the industryโ€™s rapid rate of growth.

โ€œLean & Agile help us deliver more products without adding more people, so we can stay competitive and keep up with Mooreโ€™s Law,โ€ Ringel says.

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Vantiv โ€“ Lean-Agile Transformation with SAFeยฎ

โ€œSince beginning our Lean-Agile journey with SAFe, Vantiv has focused its strategic efforts and its execution. We have improved the predictability of product delivery while maintaining high quality, and have become even more responsive to customersโ€”resulting in higher customer satisfaction. And just as important, employee engagement went up over the past year.โ€

โ€”Dave Kent, Enterprise Agile Coach, Vantiv

Challenge:

Deliver solutions with more sustainable, long-term impact, and do so quickly to stay ahead in a competitive industry

Industry:

Information Technology, Financial Services

Solution:

SAFeยฎ v4.0

Results:

  • In 2015, Vantiv delivered 7 percent more features and capabilities with 9 percent less staff.
  • In response to an internal customerโ€™s request, teams delivered on timeโ€”if not ahead of scheduleโ€”with a significant positive impact to financial results.
  • Teams delivered on commitments 80 to 100 percent of the time.
  • Year over year, the number of changes in its solutions has doubled, yet the number of quality incidents reported by customers has not increased.

Best Practices:

  • Quarterly Business Reviewsโ€”Collaborative meetings keep product teams and the business on the same page.
  • Get experienced helpโ€”Agile coaches provided experience and practical examples that made a difference compared to previous efforts.

The partner that made it happen:


Introduction

Payment processing leader Vantiv Inc. powers more than $25 billion financial transactions every year, from the largest retailers in the U.S. to your local coffee shop. The company makes payments smarter, faster, and easier by partnering with software companies and technology service firms to embed payments processing in front and back office applications. Its commerce technology integrates into a broad set of point of sale systems, reaching merchants through an extensive partner network of thousands of point-of-sale software developers and value-added resellers.

Vantiv - Scaled Agile Business Solutions with SAFe

The company also offers a comprehensive suite of traditional and innovative payment processing and technology solutions to merchants and financial institutions of all sizes, enabling them to address their payment processing needs through a single provider.

Exceptionally responsive to customers, Vantiv creates many of its solutions specifically for individual organizations. While retaining its renowned enterprise service, the company sought to take a longer-term view by developing solutions to meet the needs of a broader range of its customer base. The goal is to deliver solutions with more sustainable, long-term impact, and do so quickly to stay ahead in a competitive industry.

SAFe: For Consistency and Continuous Improvement

In 2015, Vantiv embarked on several business transformation initiatives under a common umbrella called True North. True North seeks to create a culture of clarity, direction, and continuous improvement; and rewire the company for excellence in product, IT, marketing, and strategy.

For an objective view, Vantiv brought in a well-respected thought leader in product management and product development. The consultant made two key recommendations: take a more holistic view with a product-led strategy, and pursue a Lean-Agile approach for product development across the enterprise. At that time, there were pockets of Scrum within IT.

To address both those goals, the company started a Lean-Agile transformation of its entire enterprise, however, momentum was hindered by a lack of focus on people and teams and little understanding of Agile. For help, Vantiv turned to Scaled Agile Gold Partners, CA Technologies and Icon Technology Consulting, along with the Scaled Agile Frameworkยฎ (SAFeยฎ) for the structure and methodology needed to deploy Lean-Agile practices.

โ€œTo be successful with Agile, we realized that we needed a more concerted effort at the team level and more consistency in how we deliver,โ€ says Henry Noble, Program Director, Transformation. โ€œWe found SAFe the ideal framework for achieving that.โ€

1000+ SAFe Users

With the help of their partners, Vantiv held a series of โ€œAgile Awarenessโ€ roadshows around the companyโ€™s various locations. They answered questions and encouraged employees to talk about past Agile efforts.

Next, Vantiv employees attended a 2-week formation program with an introduction to Lean-Agile practices and tools. Dedicated coaches worked daily with the group that ultimately formed into seven teams. They began working in two-week sprints, but held off on forming their first Agile Release Train (ART) until they were ready to fully embrace the new way of working.

Though initially hesitant, teams soon embraced with the new approach. โ€œThe biggest misunderstanding that developers had was that if youโ€™re Agile youโ€™re fluid,โ€ Noble says. โ€œBut they soon learned there is quite of bit of structure required to be successful.โ€

Teams soon became more engaged, and after 6-8 weeks teams had matured enough to be ready to assemble an ART. For the first Program Increment (PI) planning meeting, in June of 2015, the event brought together 150 people.

โ€œWe see a common pattern where the first PI event for each newly formed train feels like theyโ€™re not ready, but post PI event every participant says itโ€™s one of the best planning meetings they have ever attended,โ€ Noble says.

From there, Vantivโ€™s Agile maturity accelerated with multiple Agile Release Trains containing multiple teams and all of the enterprise leveraging the SAFe framework.

Vantiv - Scaled Agile Business Solutions with SAFe

Collaborative Quarterly Reviews

Part of the transformation required improved alignment between business goals and product development.

โ€œOur quarterly business reviews were a great opportunity to provide greater transparency and feedback, and demonstrate how the whole organization adjusts and collaborates to help address customer needs,โ€ says Dave Kent, Enterprise Agile Coach at Vantiv. โ€œParticipation in this strategic planning by all stakeholders not only helps with product leadership, but also shows how powerful it is when product and IT strategy are aligned.โ€

Gains in Every Area

Eighteen months after deploying SAFe, the company has measured improvements:

Productivity

In 2015, Vantiv delivered seven percent more features and capabilities with nine percent less manpower. โ€œWe can comfortably say weโ€™re delivering more capabilities with less staff while going through a transformation at the same time,โ€ Noble says. โ€œWe do more with less by eliminating waste and focusing on core functionality.โ€

Time to Market

Vantiv has met its goal of becoming more focused on product deliveryโ€”creating innovative solutions ahead of market demand.

Predictability

At the ART level, teams delivered on commitments 80 to 100 percent of the time by focusing on incremental delivery and listening to the stakeholdersโ€™ feedback.

โ€œTo continue to stay ahead of the market, we focused on our responsiveness and predictability, resulting in firm commitments to our customers and providing transparency to the organization,โ€ says Henry Noble, Program Director, Transformation at Vantiv.

Quality

Year over year, the number of changes to its solutions has doubled, yet the number of quality incidents reported by customers has not increased. โ€œOur quality continues to improve, with quality now being built in from the smallest pieces,โ€ Kent says.

Employee Engagement and Retention

With greater transparency comes more trust and employee engagement, making for a real culture change. That led to a decrease in attrition over the past two years, and Vantiv has been voted Best Place to Work in Cincinnati.

โ€œSAFe provides alignment and transparency,โ€ Kent says. โ€œIndividuals feel like they truly understand their part in the whole, and how their work aligns with the goals of the company.โ€

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