SAFe® at AT&T

Safe Business Agility Podcast Cover Image

What started with a small Agile group in 2012 has evolved into a growing effort to scale Agile across AT&T—a large enterprise with 200,000+ employees. In this episode, Mary Ellen Ferrara, who leads the AT&T Business Lean-Agile Center of Excellence, and Chandra Srivastava, an Agile coach in the AT&T Enterprise Agile Center of Excellence, share their SAFe journey at the company.

Click the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to the SAFe Business Agility podcast on Apple Podcasts

Share:

“Many people in organizations think they are just too complex to have that business agility. However, as a company, AT&T proved that we could pivot and establish new ways of working to meet an urgent need.”  —Mary Ellen Ferrara

What started with a small Agile group in 2012 has evolved into a growing effort to scale Agile across AT&T—a large enterprise with 200,000+ employees. In this episode, Mary Ellen Ferrara, who leads the AT&T Business Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE), and Chandra Srivastava, an Agile coach in the AT&T Enterprise Agile Center of Excellence (ACOE), share their SAFe journey at the company.

Tamara, Mary Ellen, and Chandra cover topics including:

  • What model the ACOE adopted to extend its reach  
  • How COVID created a new sense of urgency at AT&T
  • How the LACE identified its change champions
  • What’s next for SAFe at AT&T

Hosted by: Tamara Nation

Tamara is a results-driven servant leader. She has a proven track record of motivating high-performing teams to deliver positive outcomes in complex, matrixed environments. To help organizations achieve their goals, Tamara channels her unwavering persistence to face and solve complex challenges. Find Tamara on LinkedIn.

Guest: Mary Ellen Ferrara

Mary Ellen is a SAFe SPC leading the AT&T Business Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE). She taps into her extensive experience defining and leading enterprise-wide Agile transformations to help enterprises build trust, empower executives and teams to align and pivot to new ways of working, measure progress, and become self-sufficient in driving better business outcomes for their customers. Connect with Mary Ellen on LinkedIn.

Guest: Chandra Srivastava

Chandra is an experienced enterprise Agile coach at Eliassen Group, and a consulting enterprise Agile coach at AT&T. She enables digital transformation by leveraging Lean, Agile, and DevOps ways of working and helps shape outcomes that deliver value to customers. Connect with Chandra on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Looking for the latest news experiences and answers to questions about SAFe? You’ve come to the right place. This podcast is for you. The SAFe community of practitioners, trainers, users, and everyone who engages SAFe on a daily basis.

Tamara Nation:

Welcome to the SAFe Business Agility podcast recorded from our homes around the world. I’m Tamara Nation, your host for today’s episode. Joining me today are Mary Ellen Ferrara, who’s leading the AT&T Business Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE), and Chandra Srivastava, Agile coach in the AT&T Enterprise Agile Center of Excellence (ACOE). Thank you both for joining me today, Mary Ellen and Chandra, I’m excited to have you here.

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

Thanks, Tamara. We’re excited too.

Chandra Srivastava:

Thanks for inviting us, Tamara. It’s really good to be here.

Tamara Nation:

So today, you’re here to share your story about SAFe at AT&T. I am excited to hear this. Let’s get started. How did AT&T get started with SAFe and why?

Chandra Srivastava:

So, a small Agile group was founded at AT&T around 2012. This developed into an Agile center of excellence. After a few years, the Agile center of excellence started with SAFe to help the company adopt Agile at scale. Now AT&T is a very large enterprise with well over 200,000 employees. The size of the workforce means that a group like the ACOE is limited in how much of the enterprise we can help at any one time. So in the last couple of years, as part of our evolution, we have adopted a hub-and-spoke operating model at the ACOE in order to extend our reach to the whole company. We sit in the center of this model as the hub, supporting the development of different spokes across the enterprise that become Lean-Agile centers of excellence (or LACEs). Operating in this model, we are able to harness and grow the power of change agents in different pockets of the enterprise. This is how the ACOE fosters sufficiently powerful guiding coalitions, that form the LACEs, working on transformation backlogs of improvement items in their areas.

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

I absolutely agree with Chandra. Growing change agents across the enterprise using the hub-and-spoke network was really pivotal in our transformation to a new level at AT&T. I moved into the technical modernization and management department in May of 2021 to establish, build, and lead the AT&T Business spoke LACE. And as Scaled Agile indicates, creating a LACE is often one of the key differentiators between companies practicing Agile in name only. And those that are fully committed to adopting Lean-Agile practices and getting the best business outcomes. So, this was a huge undertaking, and we all know that accepting change is hard for many people, but defining what needs to change and leading an organization to mobilize and adopt new ways of working is even harder.

Tamara Nation:

So, how did you get started with that?

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

Fortunately, I was dedicated to the effort. I had a VP sponsor and the support of the Agile COE to help get the LACE off the ground. So how did I get it started? Well, that was easy. I used the SAFe implementation roadmap to define our path forward. As we know, reaching the tipping point is the first crucial step in the SAFe implementation roadmap. And at AT&T, like Chandra had indicated, we’ve been practicing various levels of SAFe and Lean-Agile for several years, but when COVID came, this gave us a renewed sense of urgency to react quickly and have the business agility to meet those changing needs of our business customers. When COVID hit in March of 2020, it was truly amazing how quickly AT&T Business pivoted to provide the connectivity needed by businesses, schools, hospitals, and the community. Our new and existing customers needed to establish and grow their online presence to survive and thrive. In our new reality, we didn’t have six to nine months to build out new offerings to meet the changing market demand. We had to be Agile, quick, and give our customers what they needed in the shortest sustainable time to be able to operate their businesses. This renewed sense of urgency was very helpful in gaining buy-in that we needed.

Tamara Nation:

I think that’s really amazing, those moments when the company can change because you don’t think a company of 200,000 people can pivot like that. I think that’s such a good story.

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

It really was amazing. Sometimes I find that many people in organizations think they are just too complex to have that business agility. However, as a company, AT&T proved that we could pivot and establish new ways of working to meet an urgent need. And now we need to take these learnings, establish a Lean-Agile culture, and consistently and predictably deliver faster, better business solutions for our customers. So how did we do that? The next steps in the roadmap are to train Lean-Agile change agents, train executives, managers, and leaders, and create a Lean-Agile center of excellence. I didn’t follow the steps in exactly that order. Instead, I started with the LACE toolkit and we performed a LACE workshop. We included key people on our leadership team in the workshop to define our charter, target our initial stakeholders, and identify our LACE members. As Chandra indicated AT&T is very large and AT&T Business is also a very large organization with approximately 46 VP areas. So it was important to level-set on which areas we would target first to get the LACE going and then pull in more areas. As we gained momentum, we were basically building the LACE minimum viable product. We started with six VP organizations, which were a mix of business teams and solution delivery teams. And we included members from these six organizations and trained them as SAFe Program Consultants, otherwise known as SPCs or SAFe trainers and coaches, to form a guiding coalition of LACE champions.

Chandra Srivastava:

So, Mary Ellen, as you spoke, getting to a tipping point to form a LACE can be crucial. Helping people get the training they need is a very important step. The Agile COE in collaboration with the AT&T Business LACE brought the Implementing SAFe course in-house, which was a first for us. Jennifer Fawcett from Scaled Agile and Charlene Newton were our instructors for this class. We trained 30 SPCs in this SAFe certification course. I’d like to share an experiment we adopted for this class. We set up coaching cohorts from the ACOE and with Mary Ellen for each of the five breakout rooms to enhance the virtual classroom experience for the learners. This is how we extended the ACOE’s reach and provided additional coaching support for the class. After the SPC class, there has been a great deal of interest in what’s going on with the AT&T Business spoke as part of the hub-and-spoke operating model. We at the ACOE hold monthly sync meetings to help all spokes across the enterprise to network and connect. Several groups in the enterprise are seeking out Mary Ellen for her advice on how to model their spokes and advance LACE formation in their areas.

Tamara Nation:

I think that’s pretty inspiring as you were talking about what happened in March of 2020 for you, the way you were able to pivot. I know I personally benefited from AT&T supporting us as we were moving to remote work in various ways through their mobile work. So, I’m really curious. How did you find the people who wanted to be change agents?

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

Well, our grassroots efforts only got us so far when you bring in a coach from an outside organization. A lot of time is spent understanding the organization, how it works and establishing trust with the organization before you can really make an impact. I decided to take a different approach to establish trust between the LACE and our VP organization and leaders. With the support from my VP sponsor, I reached out to the VPs and asked them to identify one to two people in their organization to take the SPC certification course. I did advise that these people would be responsible for championing the change within their organization. This gave the VPs the opportunity to select the people that they trusted as change agents. I honestly expected to only get five to 10 champions. I was amazed at the response and the different roles that stepped up and were interested in becoming champions.

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

We had people from AT&T Business take the SPC training along with others at AT&T in mid-October 2021. This included assistant vice presidents, directors, product managers, architects, RTEs, and scrum masters—a very broad scope of people. Additionally, we reached out to all SPCs across AT&T Business to join our guiding coalition. And currently, we have 46 LACE champions. Once trained, we established our meeting cadence, strategy, and initial goals before we pulled in our AVPs and VPs to show them the progress that we had made in three to four months. These LACE champions have become influencers and the organizations they’re guiding have just taken off.

Tamara Nation:

That’s pretty impressive, Mary Ellen. So, tell us a little bit more about how you were using these LACE champions and how they were leveraging the SAFe implementation roadmap.

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

Sure, Tamara. Following our SPC training, we had a VP organization ready to go SAFe. So, we trained their executives, leaders, and managers, and we followed up with the next step in the implementation roadmap: identify value streams and ARTs. Running a value stream and ART identification workshop was very rewarding. Going through the silos that impacted their flow of value was an eye-opening experience for the team. We all left with a collective view of the end-to-end operational value stream, the steps the organization supported in that end-to-end flow, and the systems and people that supported those steps. And we were able to define our development value stream and supporting ARTs, otherwise known as Agile Release Trains, to optimize team and ART size, minimize dependencies, and really improve the flow of value. We recognized that initially, we would slow down before we could go faster, and we were able to set expectations accordingly.

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

With a defined solution train, we set our launch date, created our implementation plan, and prepared for launch. The next step in the implementation roadmap was to train teams and launch the ART. I facilitated the SAFe for Teams class with 157 virtual learners. This was our first big room virtual training, and a little bit intimidating how we were going to do this. But what really made this successful was pulling in SPCs from our LACE and the Agile COE to help coach each of the nine breakout groups, similar to what Chandra had done in the Implementing SAFe class earlier. And these newly trained LACE champions launched a solution train with four ARTs and suppliers in February. It’s amazing to see the enthusiasm and drive when you equip your organization with the knowledge and framework to drive better business outcomes. And we were also very fortunate to have the Agile COE coaches to help us with our big room training.

Chandra Srivastava:

Yes, Mary Ellen, the Agile COE coaches that participated in this training workshop were instrumental in helping train such a large virtual group, and they enjoyed it. And this training has also been a key step in your implementation roadmap. The AT&T Business LACE has established momentum and has engaged their leadership successfully. And I believe this has been the secret sauce for them.

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

Absolutely. Engaging leadership is the main ingredient in the secret sauce to building a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition. Our LACE champions are excited and motivated to support the change, but you can only go so far without leadership leading the change. To engage our leadership, we performed a two-day Lean-Agile executive workshop for AVPs and VP executives across seven organizations in AT&T Business. And this was in early January of 2022. Our LACE sponsor kicked off the meeting with an inspiring discussion around, why SAFe, which I followed up with speed-to-market metrics for 2021 showing how SAFe improves speed to market by well over 50 percent. And that having the LACE support to grow that competency within each organization really supports their ability to drive better business outcomes. We had 24 people attend over the two days and they were focused and engaged.

Tamara Nation:

Well, that’s hard to do for anyone in this setting these days. How did you get that kind of commitment from so many executives and what did you do to keep them engaged over those two days?

Chandra Srivastava:

Magic, Tamara. I think the magic ingredient has been Mary Ellen’s ability to be very contextual and make things relevant to AT&T. She brought in customized material that the executives could quickly relate to. Also, our enterprises at an inflection point and is driving a new way of working. We have the rollout of a Lean portfolio management approach, and that has provided a sense of urgency and helped us pivot for transformation.

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

Absolutely. To demonstrate that SAFe is not a one and done, it’s a journey of relentless improvement, we performed a business agility assessment on day one of the Lean SAFe workshop. Establishing this baseline really provided a collective view of where we are as a LACE and as an organization. They’ve really enjoyed talking through the assessment questions to determine collectively where we were on the business agility scale. We also performed a silos exercise that looked at all the elements impacting flow so that the executives could clearly see what issues all the organizations were facing. And it was really telling that all the VP organizations were facing similar issues.

Tamara Nation:

So you’ve really come so far in this journey. What’s next for SAFe at AT&T?

Chandra Srivastava:

Well, we are encouraging all business units at AT&T to form LACEs and build their transformation backlogs very much like the AT&T Business LACE.

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

Yes, absolutely. And at the LACE level, we’re even taking it a step further and encouraging each VP organization to form their own LACE team and build their transformation backlog. We’re also using a business agility scorecard and assessments across AT&T Business to measure adoption outcomes, flow, and competency, and setting key performance indicators to measure and showcase the value of the AT&T Business LACE in driving these better business outcomes. I’m also working on becoming an internal AT&T SAFe SPC trainer. And currently, I hope to complete the nomination requirements by the end of this month. If I am selected and complete the certification requirements, that will allow me to train more Scaled Agile change agents across AT&T Business and the company using our hub-and-spoke model.

Tamara Nation:

Well, good luck in that journey to an iSPCT. That’s great, Mary Ellen. So, what have you learned so far and what advice do you have to give the folks listening to the podcast today?

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

This isn’t necessarily in order. Having seasoned SPCs that are dedicated to the LACE and each organization to coach, train, and drive relentless improvement—establishing trust and engaging varying levels of leadership as LACE champions. Following the SAFe implementation roadmap and leveraging the toolkits and resources that are available on the SAFe Community Platform. And last but not least, meeting teams where they are and working with them to become more Agile.

Chandra Srivastava:

Great points, Mary Ellen, it’s definitely a journey. What I really feel is that transformation needs to be intentional. Not only does it require supporting change agents in the enterprise, it also requires sponsorship and support from leaders along the business agility journey. We are constantly working to get buy-in from leadership in other business units, in order to keep moving forward.

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

Regarding leadership, we took the approach: build it, and they will come. So, get your LACE team trained as SPCs, and then encourage each organization to form their own internal teams to drive transformation forward by coaching and training internally. Having trusted champions in each organization is key. When the leadership starts seeing the results, they will come to you to understand more.

Tamara Nation:

Oh, Mary Ellen and Chandra, thanks so much for sharing your story. And we are really looking forward to hearing about the next chapter of SAFe at AT&T.

Mary Ellen Ferarra:

Thank you, Tamara, for giving us this opportunity and having us on your podcast. This was great.

Chandra Srivastava:

Yes. Thank you. It was really a great conversation.

Tamara Nation:

Thanks for listening to our show today. Be sure to check out the show notes at scaledagile.com/podcast. Revisit past topics at scaledagile.com/podcasts

Speaker 1: For more than 75 episodes. You’ve heard us mention how relentless improvement is in our DNA. That’s why we’re taking a break with the SAFe Business Agility Podcast to reimagine it for its next iteration. If you have a suggestion on how we can improve the show, drop us a line at podcast@scaledagile.com.

Designing the Digital Future at Porsche

Learn how the separate worlds of vehicle engineering and IT came together at Porsche to reimagine the sports car of the future

Share:

Revolutionary things can happen when pizza is being served. You’ll find out why when you join Porsche visionaries Mattias Ulbrich and Dr. Oliver Seifert for a candid discussion about transforming one of the world’s most iconic motoring brands into a digital-first pacesetter.

As huge technological advances usher in an automotive renaissance, Porsche is moving at top speed to meet the evolving needs of its customers. They are fully focused on making their cars a central element of their buyers’ lifestyles through digitalization, connectivity, and electromobility. This requires total business agility throughout the enterprise, a new mindset, and a new way of working together closely. It also requires vehicle engineering and software teams to collaborate closely and harmonize the differing speeds at which they traditionally work. This might have been daunting for any company that is as storied and successful as Porsche.

The most important thing is that you shouldn’t underestimate that the digital world is totally different from the physical world,” says Ulbrich.

But Porsche didn’t let this slow them down. To build bridges between the groups, the company created new opportunities for people to talk, learn, and understand each other with the help of SAFe. They created the Porsche “Takt,” the heartbeat that synchronizes the teams. They focus on results and communicate the vision in a way that motivates people to visualize opportunities for change.

Says Ulbrich, “If you look right now in a team, you couldn’t distinguish whether a person is from R&D, IT, sales, or marketing. They work together.

Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:

  • Mattias Ulbrich, Chief Information Officer of Porsche AG and CEO of Porsche Digital
  • Dr. Oliver Seifert, Vice President R&D Electric/Electronics /Porsche AG
  • Interviewer: Michael Clarkin, Chief Marketing Officer, Scaled Agile, Inc.SHOW LESS

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: CVS Health Customer Story

TV Globo – Adopting SAFe for Enterprise Agility Transformation

How Enterprise Agility Is Transforming the Largest Media Company in Latin America

Share:

TV Globo is Brazil’s largest TV network serving 100 million viewers in 130 countries.

Like many other media companies, Globo needed to accelerate its digital transformation journey. Their waterfall project approach did not support the speed that was needed to meet this challenge. They needed an Agile approach! But how do you implement Agile in a highly complex environment with hundreds of legacy solutions and a silo-based culture?

Both culture and technology had to be transformed. After some small Agile initiatives, TV Globo decided to adopt SAFe. They started bottom-up. The IT Director sponsored their first implementation of SAFe in two main business areas: Commercial and Content Production. The results after the first year of SAFe implementation were impressive. Leaving behind their “who is right” or “who is guilty” approach, business and technology areas were able to work more closely with a value-driven approach. The empowerment and engagement that resulted from aligning business and tech around the same purpose and company priorities resulted in significant improvements:

  • 20% cost reduction
  • 24% improvement in employee engagement
  • 86% improvement in customer satisfaction

Inspired by these early results, Globo expanded its practice of SAFe. New Value Streams were implemented in other areas, this time sponsored by the C-level, and Globo is designing its roadmap to expand the implementation throughout the company. It has been an exciting, challenging, and rewarding journey so far!

Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:

  • Luciana Povoa, Head of Content Production Solutions /Globo

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: Deutsche Telekom Customer Story

FedEx – Response to COVID-19 using SAFe and Business Agility – An Interview with CIO Rob Carter

How SAFe and Business Agility helped FedEx respond to the impacts and opportunities of COVID-19

Share:

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.

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: Chevron Customer Story

Nokia Software – Improving Predictability and Team Collaboration Using SAFe

Customer Interview: SAFe Improves Predictability and Team Collaboration at Nokia Software

Share:

Dean Leffingwell sits down with Juha Rossi and Johanna Reunanen to talk about leading an agile transformation inside one of the world’s most recognizable technology brands. In this candid interview, they share the story behind Nokia Software’s SAFe transformation, and what it’s like implementing and practicing SAFe in such a large and complex organization. They also describe the agility challenges of aligning 40+ ARTs and many solution trains, and how agile practices bring improvements in productivity, customer experience, and quality.

Presented at the Global SAFe Summit, October, 2020

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: NTT Data Customer Story

NTT DATA – Adopting SAFe for Business Agility Improvement

Customer Story – NTT DATA: Japanese Payment Services Leader Transforms Organizational Culture and Improves Business Agility with SAFe

Share:

NTT DATA brings the first Japanese customer story to the SAFe Summit audience. Headquartered in Tokyo and operating in more than 50 countries as a top 10 global IT services provider, NTT Data turned to SAFe to improve its ability to respond to market demands and stay ahead of a growing number of competitors. In his presentation, Product Manager Takenori Osada describes the difficulty of introducing Agile in Japan, how their culture transformed, and how they applied SAFe in their Payments Services Division and were able to see significant improvements in employee Net Promoter Scores, time-to-market, productivity, and quality.

SAFe is essential for us to be able to compete in the payment market. This resulted in an investment cost advantage.” —Director (Business owner)

Presented at the Global SAFe Summit, October, 2020.

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: Aegon Asset Management Customer Story

Allianz Global Corporate and Specialty SE – Reaching SAP Business Agility with SAFe

Customer Story – Allianz: AGCS’ SAFe Journey To Become a Data Driven Enterprise

Share:

After multiple mergers, our data systems were disjointed. To add to this, the newest International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS17) is set to go into effect in January 2023, making data management crucial from a regulatory perspective. We implemented the latest version of SAPHANA, a database management system in partnership with Accenture. This brought our data together under a centralized solution while offering near real-time data processing and better reporting and analytics.

SAFe provided the structure we needed to scale Agile in a complex SAP and non-SAP landscape. SAFe allowed us to organize around value and grow seamless integrated cross-functional teams aligned with the company’s long-term strategy. At Allianz Global Corporate our SAP DevSecOps automation pipeline helped to reach SAP Delivery Agility which paved the way to build the capabilities needed to reach SAP Business Agility. SAFe addressed the complexities and gave us the framework for building portfolios, roles, and jobs to achieve our goals for customer centricity, speed, and quality. DevSecOps is a mindset, an enterprise-wide culture and practice. We will showcase how Allianz Global Corporate applied the five core concepts of DevSecOps and Release on Demand across the five core concepts and become a Data-Driven Enterprise.

Presented at the Global SAFe Summit, October, 2020.

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: TV Globo Customer Story

Cerno – SAFe Adoption to Become a Total Agile Enterprise

“We collaborate more than ever with our customers by involving them in planning as much as we can. And we deliver frequent demos—even beyond customers’ expectations. Our customers have found communication to be more effective since the SAFe implementation.”

Sam Wu, Agile Head Coach and Training Director, Cerno

Challenge:

Deliver custom solutions faster and with higher quality for clients.

Industry:

Information Technology, Software

Results:

  • Delivery cycle time dropped by 58%
  • The rate of release failure went down from 0.6 times on average per release to 0
  • The interface automation level increased from zero to 70 percent
  • Reported defects decreased from 13 times per release to five

Best Practices:

  • Power through setbacks – Find solutions and don’t let them stop your momentum.
  • Assess regularly – Inspect & Adapt and DevOps health checks keep teams aware of progress and on track toward goals.
  • Choose a compatible partner – A partner with a business view, not just R&D, moved Cerno ahead with training and coaching.

Introduction

As a custom software factory, Cerno is poised for rapid growth as part of China’s expansive technology market. The company delivers technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, open source software, and IoT solutions for a diverse range of clients, from logistics to government.

Cerno - SAFe Implementation for IT

To compete effectively, Cerno set out to elevate the speed of delivery, reduce defects, and improve the quality of its solutions in the long term, with the ultimate objective of being more client-focused.

“We needed a next-generation software development method to meet customer needs and reach our goals,” explained Sam Wu, Agile Head Coach and Training Director, Cerno.

Cerno’s founders brought experience in developing software for the financial industry. They found the ‘weak matrix’ structure worked in HR outsourcing, but not so well in product delivery. (A weak matrix is an organizational structure in which the balance of power tilts decisively in the direction of line or functional management.)

And while the traditionally waterfall company had experimented with Lean-Agile development in the past, they lacked the training or business support to build momentum.

SAFe®: The Path from Strategy to Delivery

While attending Leading SAFe® training, a Cerno executive saw a promising path to Agile, leading Cerno to adopt the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe). “It was clear that we needed SAFe to make Cerno a total Agile enterprise, to expand Agile not only to product lines but also to the business and functional departments such as HR and finance,” explained Liu Yilei, VP, Cerno. “We saw SAFe as the model that would take us from strategy to delivery.

“SAFe provided a comprehensive toolkit and an easy way to move forward,” added Wu, who was hired at that time to lead the effort as the internal change agent. At the same time, the company brought in SAFe Gold partner Aura International for coaching and training.

Per the SAFe Implementation Roadmap, James Li, Principal Consultant from Aura, led the SAFe Executive Workshop. Jack Xu, Senior Consultant from Aura, delivered SAFe® for Teams training and helped prepare for the first Program Increment (PI) planning event. They organized teams, reconfigured the office to better support those teams, and reorganized the product plan with user-story mapping.

For the first Agile Release Train launch, they began with four Agile teams—the entire R&D team plus Infrastructure and Operations—on an existing initiative to digitalize a logistics solution for a client.

From that first PI, team leaders embraced the Lean-Agile mindset. They identified priorities based on business value and began allowing people to self-organize. Instead of waiting to be assigned work, developers identified the work based on business objectives, committed to the work in PI Planning, and moved forward with it.

More Stories in Less Time—Despite Setbacks

Though Cerno set out to follow SAFe by the book, they ran into roadblocks that forced mid-course adjustments. In middle of the first PI, the Systems Architect left, leading Cerno to assemble a team to assume his responsibilities.

Additionally, the customer cut some funding because of market forces. And when managers wanted to move some teams to another client project, it nearly stopped the train. Given technical and capacity challenges, Cerno chose to postpone 15 percent of the high-risk PI objectives and scale back the size of the train.

Developers also found it challenging to transition from private to public code, a decision made to reduce bottlenecks in bug fixes and hidden technical debt. As the project team transitioned away from three-week waterfall development, the coaching team helped set code standards. In time, they found that developers took more pride in their code because of its public nature.

Even with the early challenges, the Inspect and Adapt session after the first PI showed the teams had met PI objectives and reduced defects. The ART could produce 45 stories per two-week iteration, on average, by the end of the first PI, compared to 30 stories per three-week iteration in waterfall.

Routine DevOps Health Checks

When Cerno first introduced DevOps practices, the company lacked a SAFe DevOps Practitioner. Still, they made progress on a delivery pipeline and staging environment, supported a grayscale release of a product, and shortened the time to release future versions.

Additionally, they formed a new system integration testing (SIT) plan that shrunk testing time by 25 percent initially, and then by half, freeing the development team to put more effort into new features.

To expedite progress, they began conducting DevOps health checks. Early on, those checks uncovered opportunities to improve delivery. To stay on track, they now perform this exercise every PI. With the habit of regular checks, Cerno has made strides with automated testing and continuous integration/continuous deployment.

To support their efforts, they also established Communities of Practice and hold monthly technical workshops for developers.

Cerno - SAFe Implementation for IT

Delivery Cycle Time Down 58 Percent

Today, Cerno runs two ARTs with 80 people. These high-confidence teams agree on, and begin working on, requirements faster. They communicate and collaborate more tightly than before they introduced SAFe and are continuously improving.

When the ART completed work with one client, they simply switched the train to support another logistics client with a similar solution—effectively a plug-and-play release train. The company then added a second ART to deliver value to another client. Each train continues to serve a single client.

To date, Cerno has made remarkable progress:

  • Delivery cycle time dropped from 3½ weeks to two weeks, or 58 percent
  • The average offline time for a new production environment release decreased from 3½ hours to half an hour
  • The rate of release failure went down from 0.6 times on average per release to 0
  • The interface automation level increased from zero to 70 percent
  • Reported defects decreased from 13 times per release to five

Most importantly, Cerno realized its goal of becoming a more customer-centric organization.

“We collaborate more than ever with our customers by involving them in planning as much as we can. And we deliver frequent demos—even beyond customers’ expectations,” Wu said. “Our customers have found communication to be more effective since the SAFe implementation.

“This is the first SAFe transformation case I have coached in a local company in China,” Li said. “Although there’s still more to improve, it is really a great and wonderful start! It is a significant milestone for SAFe in China.”

Looking ahead, Cerno is building toward agility beyond solution delivery, into administrative management and marketing—to become a total Agile enterprise.

Back to: All Case Studies

Suggested Case Study: Amdocs

TV Globo – Accelerating Digital Transformation Using SAFe

Share:

To accelerate their digital transformation and remain competitive in a fast-changing market, Brazil’s largest TV network turned to SAFe. With 12,000 employees serving 100 million viewers in 130 countries, the media giant offers a full lineup of content: news, sports, entertainment, soap operas, reality shows, and more.

As they worked to overcome a complex software legacy, speed up innovation, and create new ways of working, the challenge has been enormous, but the effort has paid off. Today, TV Globo has established a common way of working for the business and technology areas that embraces a value-driven approach and empowers and engages teams around a common purpose. This has enabled the organization to integrate a portfolio view into decisions for evaluating competing initiatives and aligning them with enterprise priorities.

The results have been dramatic:

  • 20% cost reduction
  • 24% improvement in employee engagement
  • 86% improvement in customer satisfaction

View the video for the full story and see how deeply engaged TV Globo’s employees are in this company-wide transformation using SAFe. It is narrated in Portuguese with English translations.

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: MetLife Customer Story

Anthem – Adoption of Agile Mindset for Enterprise Business Agility

Anthem Agile Transformation Journey

Share:

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.

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: Easterseals Customer Story