“…people who work together in harmony and deliver the best service to the business customers, beneficiaries in happy relationships and all that? That’s what gets me up in the morning. I want to make sure that people are working together fine. And what frustrates me the most is to see within our government agency how so much energy is wasted in silos, wasted because people are not communicating properly and all this nice energy is lost. And so that’s really too bad.”
— Cecile Auret, Internal Change Agent and SAFe 6.0 Practice Consultant, France Travail
Industry:
Government, Public Sector
Quick Facts:
France Travail employs approximately 59,000 people, with 1600 working to develop digital services
The organization paid a total of 36 billion Euros to beneficiaries in 2023
They processed almost 8 million benefit requests in 2023
They saw 478 million visits to their website in 2023 (59% of those on mobile devices)
They processed 17 million phone calls to call centers
And, they saw 6.6 million in-person visits to local branches
After launching its first Agile Release Train more than six years ago, today, approximately 70 percent of France Travail’s software production is delivered through ARTs
Key Takeaways:
ARTs are not enough to cut through silos. Even when trains are working happily together, they can hit a ceiling if the silo mentality and culture above the trains doesn’t change.
Everyone is an actor in the transformation. By trying things and improving in their area, individuals can plant seeds for the rest of the organization. With persistence, at some point, it attracts sponsorship from the management level.
Change needs to happen on every level: middle managers, top managers, change agents, and the team level.
The Framework offers both stability and ideas for improvement, with the big picture as the main compass for the organization to navigate change.
Overview
France Travail is the French public employment service, a government organization that supports unemployed citizens and employers, offers financial benefits, and provides intermediation services. They offer assistance to people who are in transition, in between jobs, or looking for new employment. They also support small employers and recruiters that don’t have the infrastructure for recruiting.
France Travail is a big agency on its own, but in January 2024 it became part of a larger network of partners: The network for employment. Together, the network helps people not only find work, but also remove impediments to work, such as securing housing and finding daycare. France Travail also develops an IT platform of digital services for all the partners.
“Don’t accept the status quo. Try things… If you believe you can improve, try things. And don’t let others tell you that you shouldn’t try. Be confident and try… and eventually you’ll attract interest from top managers.”
— Cecile Auret, Internal Change Agent and SAFe 6.0 Practice Consultant, France Travail
A closer look at a successful transformation journey
“Ultimately it’s not about the SAFe framework. It’s about people. It’s about engagement. It’s about satisfying our customer that is ultimately what matters.”
— Hao Li, iSPCT, Allianz
Industry:
Insurance, Financial Services
Quick Facts:
With 159,000 employees worldwide, the Allianz Group serves more than 122 million customers (private and corporate) in 30+ countries
The BMP is organized around value streams in four business areas, with more than 95+ assets in its portfolio targeting over 66% of Allianz Group Property and Casualty Gross Written Premium
Key Takeaways:
Implementing SAFe allowed Allianz BMP to build trust, address five problem areas and find answers to:
Make data quality and measurement practices more consistent and transparent
Increase team delivery and predictability by addressing excessive work in progress
Improve alignment and address conflicting priorities across product segments, markets, operating entities, and stakeholder needs
Improve ownership and engagement to ensure clear connectivity between objectives and individual efforts
Decrease resistance to change with better change management structure
Overview
The Allianz Group is one of the world’s leading insurers and asset managers. Allianz is the world’s #1 insurance brand, ranking among the top 30 global brands according to Interbrand 20241.
Within Allianz, the Business Master Platform (BMP) represents one of the largest transformation programs in the company’s history. The BMP aims to simplify and scale products and processes across the property and casualty business units. The platform involves multi-year transformation initiatives that bring business and IT together to harmonize products and processes across 30 countries.
“Having data and tools in place of course requires that people are able to use them, use them in the right way effectively… Data is the driver of transparency. And transparency is fostering alignment, and alignment at the end of the day stimulates the clarity, and trust is built through clarity”
— Lucia Krajcovic, Head of Business Master Platform (BMP) Management, Allianz SE
“The Lean Portfolio Management is really unique for our business and now it’s being requested all over the place, because it really was a game changer. We outperformed in 2023 financially. We achieved our OKRs. The strategy was super clear. We had improved our quality significantly. So we didn’t have any major noncompliance… and most importantly we gained back the trust from the markets and the customers first.”
—Ruti Avitan, VMO Leader, EMR & CM, Philips
Industry:
Healthcare, Medical Devices, Technology
Quick Facts:
Philips Global has 18 businesses across multiple continents, including 5 informatics businesses, which have adopted SAFe
In 2021, Philips Global invested 1.8 billion euros in research and development across all its business units
The Philips EMR & CM informatics products alone improve the lives of 95 million patients every year
Informatics customers include more than 9,000 hospitals across 70 countries
Lessons Learned:
Transformation is possible in a highly regulated environment like healthcare. Philips EMR & CM assigned a person to each team who was dedicated to documentation and validation in order to reduce delays and meet the more than 27 different compliance requirements they faced.
By moving away from an endless backlog of service tickets and managing defects to developing new tools and services, teams create more room for growth and innovation. They do this by defining epics, MVPs, and understanding value streams.
People-centric innovation: Philips asked themselves, what do people (in this case, patients and clinicians, nurses and technicians, consumers) really need? And how can they best support healthcare professionals with their workflow?
Sometimes focusing on fewer projects allows for greater scale, more innovation, better quality, and better flow of value to the customer.
Overview
In the past decade, Philips has transformed from a household products company to a focused leader in healthcare technology. The company offers medical devices such as CT and MRI machines, healthcare devices for personal use such as toothbrushes, and informatic systems for hospitals.
Philips has five informatics or software business units ranging from electronic medical records (EMR) and care management to clinical informatics, radiology, cardiovascular, and more. They began their SAFe transformation within informatics. “When I joined, this business specifically was fully waterfall, very hierarchical, especially in the R&D organization,” says Ruti Avitan, VMO Leader of the EMR & CM informatics business at Philips. “It was a business in trouble. We had a lot of red projects because of delays. We have more than 25 projects running in parallel. Each one had a different delivery date. We had escalation from customers on quality, and so on. So the motivation to do something was really high.”
Beginning in 2022, SAFe allowed the organization to define a Lean-Agile way of working and move from the traditional hierarchy to cross-functional teams. They shifted from project to product centricity, enhanced their knowledge, reduced the backlog, and made room for innovation. The result is an enterprise that is people- and patient-centric, focused on scalable innovations that prioritize safety, patient outcomes, supply chain resilience, and quality.
“When I joined, this business specifically was fully waterfall, very hierarchical, especially in the R&D organization… It was a business in trouble. We had a lot of red projects because of delays. We have more than 25 projects running in parallel. Each one has a different delivery date. We had escalation from customers on quality and so on. So the motivation to do something was really high.”
“When we considered in fact switching to SAFe, we had this failure and we gained this information. We knew why we had to change the process instead of being waterfall and turn toward being a Lean-Agile organization.”
— Thomas Quartier, Principal Lean-Agile SPCT, Capgemini
Industry:
Government, Transportation
Quick Facts:
The French Ministry is made up of 12,500 driving schools, 84 public offices, and several hundred agents
The system serves 1.4 million driving candidates per year
The Ministry launched the first SAFe for Government station in France
Outcomes
SAFe allowed the Ministry to change the culture of the department by working with stakeholders, observing processes, and understanding the end user and their needs.
With SAFe, they improved lead time and accelerated flow of value to citizens without interruptions
They restored trust both within operations and between the government and citizens
ART mood scores registered 4 out of 5 over 17 PIs, which indicates high overall satisfaction among workers
Employee retention rates went from an average of 6 months to more than 2 years
ARTs and releases achieved predictability rates near 100 percent over 17 PIs
Key Takeaways:
Increase trust with stakeholders and teams by creating an inclusive and dynamic work environment
Build and maintain deep business knowledge, mission agility, and business agility
The public sector should strive for excellence and state-of-the-art practices in the same way private enterprises do
Overview
When it comes to implementing SAFe in a government setting, sometimes the value delivered to customers is measured in protected lives. Such is the case for the French Ministry of Interior, the government organization tasked with meeting the needs and expectations of safety and security for its people. The Ministry’s purpose is to define and implement road safety policy. This includes processes and systems for earning a driver’s license and for reducing accident rates.
“We have a simple mission. Our mission is to protect life, to save life and to protect users, car drivers, motorcycles, cyclists, pedestrians, scooters, everybody. So, the road safety is everybody’s concern,” explains Amine Fendri, RTE, Head of Business Applications at the French Ministry of Interior.
The driver’s license program is one of the biggest, most complex systems within the French Ministry. In 2013, the Ministry tried to update its systems using waterfall methods and suffered major failures. At that point, they understood that they needed to pivot and try something new. In 2015, they began developing a new information system using more agile practices. The Ministry opted for a long implementation schedule in order to fully learn SAFe, to experiment with proof of concepts (PoCs) and Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), and to comply with government requirements. In 2019, the Ministry launched its first Agile Release Train. By 2022, they launched a second ART. Today, they credit SAFe with helping them improve the culture of the department, get closer to their stakeholders, and deliver greater value in less time.
“Three words in Japanese that are stuck in my head… follow the rules, break the rules, then transcend the rules. It was very important, particularly in the public sector. So we strictly applied SAFe by the book during four increments and then… we observed that our teams were mature enough and have a strong agile mindset. So we moved forward and adapted… And with Covid episodes we learned how to work efficiently with a mix of remote and onsite, which was very important. We know now that this was possible thanks to a technology foundation of the program, which was clear, simple, and easy to maintain.”
— Amine Fendri, RTE, Head of Business Applications at the French Ministry of Interior
Learn how the separate worlds of vehicle engineering and IT came together at Porsche to reimagine the sports car of the future
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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
How Enterprise Agility Is Transforming the Largest Media Company in Latin America
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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
How the legendary automotive brand approached Lean-Agile Transformation by building the Digital Product Organization
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Porsche leverages the power of using one language for roles, routines, and artefacts as they bring Porsche’s experience into the digital age.Porsche experience into the digital age.
In this presentation by Porsche transformation leaders, you will:
Get insights about the transformation approach and setup
Learn about the critical success factors at the beginning of the transformation
Find out more about over one year of a fully remote transformation experience and remote ART Launches
Get to know how the LACE Team handles different transformation velocities within the organization
Experience “Porsche Takt” as the Heartbeat of the transformation
Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:
Alena Keck, Senior Manager / MHP – A Porsche Company
Jan Burchhardt, Director Digital Transformation /Porsche AG
Customer Interview: SAFe Improves Predictability and Team Collaboration at Nokia Software
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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
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.
“For Deutsche Bahn Digital Sales, SAFe is the framework for the strategic digitalization program … With it, we are delivering faster and more effectively on our objectives, which drives our ability to compete in the digital age.”
—Matthias Opitz, Senior Program Manager, DB Vertrieb, Deutsche Bahn
Challenge:
After privatizing the company, Deutsche Bahn faced new market forces, along with increasing competition from new transportation players.
Industry:
Transportation
Results:
Lead time dropped from 12 months to 3-4 months
Coverage of test automation improved from 30% or less to 80-90%
Greater collaboration among teams and better results have raised employees’ satisfaction levels
Best Practices:
Start ASAP – Begin, even if imperfectly. “It’s more important to give people a chance to work in this environment than to wait until everyone is trained,” said Thorsten Janning, SAFe Fellow, of KEGON.
Train extensively – That said, train management and teams as much as possible before the first PI Planning event.
Get expert help – DB worked with Scaled Agile Partner, KEGON, from the start and continues to do so for the support and experienced guidance a partner can bring. Progress is a continuous process of asking questions, which a partner can help answer.
In recent years, Deutsche Bahn (DB)—one of Europe’s largest railway operators—has faced unprecedented change. In 1994, the two railways of East and West Germany merged after the country’s reunification. While the company was adjusting to the Lean-agile transition, it was also contending with rising costs and greater competition than ever before from other railway operators, long-distance bus services and new, fast-acting players providing ride services and car-sharing.
Within this challenging environment, in 2014 DB embarked on a digital transformation to modernize the way their business units operate, from cargo transport to passenger ticket sales. It was up to each business unit to decide on a path forward to meet those goals.
Initially, the business units implemented Lean-Agile practices at the team level, on a small scope. Yet as they began trying to deliver on objectives, they fell short of targets—especially on larger solutions. The company struggled with lengthy decision cycles; fragmented responsibility; constant design, coordination and estimation; changing requirements; and many, many dependencies.
“In nearly every business unit, the transformation projects struggled to deliver large solutions,” said Matthias Opitz, Senior Program Manager, DB Vertrieb. “We were going around in circles analyzing, and the processes were so complex that the organization was not able to deliver simple minimum viable products.”
It was clear the effort would require a considerable overhaul of its long-established ways of working.
Full-Speed Ahead in DB Cargo
The company looked for a Lean-Agile methodology capable of handling its complex environment on a larger scale and found it in the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®).
Within each segment of the company, at least one business unit rolled SAFe out as part of the digital transformation initiative:
DB Cargo: Freight transportation and Logistics
DB Netze: Infrastructure/rail network
DB Vertrieb: Passenger transport
“For Deutsche Bahn Digital Sales, SAFe is the framework for the strategic digitalization program,” Opitz said. “It brought a continuous delivery process that keeps us on track toward our objectives.”
DB Vertrieb started its Lean-Agile transformation in 2015, when the business unit established an effort named ‘KAI‘ (an acronym for the German words meaning customer centricity, agility, and innovation), which stressed five attributes:
Customer excitement over optimization of profits
Iteration over perfection
Participation over hierarchy and silos
Trust and personal responsibility over top-down
Active participation instead of business as usual
To ease the transition, the company engaged Scaled Agile Partner KEGON as its primary provider for training and coaching. With KEGON, the DB companies began comprehensive training to prepare everyone who would be joining an Agile Release Train (ART), a team of teams in the Framework.
Lean-Agile leaders at DB Cargo and DB Vertrieb took the Leading SAFe® course, with others taking role-based training such as SAFe® Scrum Master, SAFe® for Teams, and SAFe® Product Owner/Product Manager. At least nine change agents at DB business units also earned SAFe® Program Consultant (SPC) certification in order to teach their colleagues. DB saw training as essential for helping people through the inevitable challenges that would come up, including resistance.
“Training was very important for giving us confidence and answers to questions that came up,” Opitz said. “Because we trained all participants, training also helped open discussions and convince skeptical people that this was the right way to go.”
Delivering on All Commitments
DB Cargo was the first division within the company to kick off the first ART with a Program Increment (PI) planning event. Managers of the other business units attended only to observe.
In that meeting, they accomplished several of their top objectives:
Clarified an incremental release strategy
Identified business epics regarding end-to-end processes
Prioritized business epics with weighted shortest job first (WSJF)
Analyzed business epics and identified features
Figured out dependencies and planned teams’ work for the coming PI
SAFe practices such as the Program Board gave participants clear insight, for the first time, into the company’s numerous dependencies. With that visual aid, they realized that changes to peripheral systems would affect the critical path of the initiative, allowing teams to coordinate appropriately.
As the PI got underway, leaders and team members alike hit challenges with breaking old habits. The governance and budgeting structures remained in a waterfall construct early on, but began to move toward Lean budgeting as DB Vertrieb kicked off PIs in 2017.
To bridge this gap, Opitz stresses that the business units had to ensure that SAFe and the new approach extended to the broader organization, beyond IT. Therefore, DB Vertrieb decided to establish a ‘Target Operating Model’ (TOM) for the business unit and to perform the transformation activities in a dedicated ART. Shared services departments such as HR, controlling, communication, training and support, and marketing were brought into the fold.
Any doubt or resistance soon faded away as teams delivered perfectly on target for their first PI. “At first, everyone looked at the committed backlog and said, ‘It’s too much,’” Opitz said. “But by the end of this first PI, we had delivered almost everything, which was a surprise to everyone.”
With SAFe, DB Vertrieb finally implemented a process by which to plan requirements, prioritize, and synchronize the various programs, and to break down the requirements and epics into features and stories. Additionally, automated epic and feature reporting brought critical transparency regarding implementation status.
“Just a year ago, it was a big challenge to do specifications,” Opitz said. “Now we have a process that makes it happen.”
Steps to Success
A number of steps and factors contributed to DB Vertrieb’s SAFe transformation. For one, DB leveraged Agile metrics to manage Portfolios and ARTs, and to help secure funding for them. In turn, management supported the effort by funding standing teams. They also invested in co-located and synchronous PI planning events for all ARTs in 2019.
The company performed a Value Stream analysis, which resulted in four Value Streams covering vertical products and horizontal services.
Toward continuous improvement of testing, teams performed system tests and implemented integrated development test servers.
Starting at the Portfolio level, they switched from a traditional requirements specification process to Agile requirements engineering.
DB Vertrieb found that self-organized teams were empowered to make decisions. In one case, a team detected an incorrect architectural decision when communicating with a stakeholder.
