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’ lifestyle through digitalization, connectivity, and electromobility. This requires business agility, a new mindset, and a new way of working together. It also requires vehicle engineering and software teams to collaborate closely and to 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. 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 DigitalDr. Oliver Seifert, Vice President R&D Electric/Electronics /Porsche AGInterviewer: Michael Clarkin, Chief Marketing Officer, Scaled Agile, Inc.SHOW LESS Back to: Customer Stories Explore more Customer Stories Next: CVS Health Customer Story Learn more about CVS Health
TV Globo – Agility Is Transforming the Largest Media Company 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 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 reduction24% improvement in employee engagement86% 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 Explore more Customer Stories Next: Deutsche Telekom Customer Story Learn more about Deutsche Telekom
Porsche Lean-Agile Transformation Journey How the legendary automotive brand approached Lean-Agile Transformation by building the Digital Product Organization Share: Porsche leverages the power of using one language for roles, routines, and artifacts as they bring thePorsche experience into the digital age. In this presentation by Porsche transformation leaders, you will: Get insights about the transformation approach and setupLearn about the critical success factors at the beginning of the transformationFind out more about over one year of a fully remote transformation experience and remote ART LaunchesGet to know how the LACE Team handles different transformation velocities within the organizationExperience “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 CompanyJan Burchhardt, Director Digital Transformation /Porsche AG Back to: Customer Stories Explore more Customer Stories Next: ZKH Customer Story Learn more about ZKH
Nokia Software 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 transformation, and what it’s like implementing and practicing SAFe in such a large and complex organization. They also describe the 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 Explore more Customer Stories Next: NTT Data Customer Story Learn more about NTT Data
Aegon Asset Management Aegon Asset Management Unites Executives and Global Teams to Deliver Faster and More Predictably Share: With roots going back 200 years, Aegon Group is one of the world’s leading providers of life insurance, pensions, and asset management. The global company operates in more than 20 countries with 26,000 employees and reports more than EUR 804 billion in revenue-generating investments. As part of Aegon Group, Aegon Asset Management (AAM) intends to retain its industry-leading position. AAM set some big goals, including digitalization and accelerating the pace of change. To achieve those objectives, and more, IT leaders realized that distributed teams in the UK, Netherlands, and the US needed to collaborate on a global level. AAM had begun bottom-up, informal efforts in Agile and DevOps, and yet, the teams still weren’t able to work together effectively. AAM turned to SAFe as a means to expand the company’s Agile efforts and keep teams synchronized across borders. They saw SAFe’s Portfolio level as a way to align enterprise strategy with Portfolio execution and were able to establish a single, global backlog reviewed and prioritized by C-suite stakeholders. AAM is a model for showcasing the importance of executive engagement, Lean Portfolio Management, consistent expectations, and how a successful transformation needs all levels of the organization. “We saw SAFe as providing a unifying structure to get our different units working together in the same way.”—Philip Johnson, Global Chief Change Officer, Aegon Asset Management Presented at the Global SAFe Summit, October 2020. Back to: Customer Stories Explore more Customer Stories Next: Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty SE Customer Story Learn more about
TV Globo Turned to 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 reduction24% improvement in employee engagement86% improvement in customer satisfaction View the video for the full story and and see how deeply engaged TV Globo’s employees are in this company-wide transformation. It is narrated in Portuguese with English translations. Back to: Customer Stories Explore more Customer Stories Next: MetLife Customer Story Learn more about MetLife
Deutsche Bahn “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 monthsCoverage 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. The partner that made it happen: See Partner Introduction 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 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 LogisticsDB Netze: Infrastructure/rail networkDB 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 profitsIteration over perfectionParticipation over hierarchy and silosTrust and personal responsibility over top-downActive 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, trainingand 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. Share: Facebook Instagram Twitter Reddit Mail Link Back to: All Case Studies Explore more Case Studies Suggested Case Study: TomTom Read the Case Study
Nordea – Agile Adoption with SAFe “To see a waterfall Program Manager embrace SAFe after only two days of participating in a PI planning session is remarkable. He is now one of our biggest ambassadors of promoting SAFe within Nordea.” Industry: Financial, Banking The partner that made it happen: See Partner Overview With branches in 19 countries, and over 11 million customers, the European banking giant, Nordea, set a goal to deliver a new digital banking experience for its retail customers. They determined that the best way to meet their goal was to adopt an agile development approach, and so in 2014 Nordea teamed up with Scaled Agile Gold Partner, Ivar Jacobson (IJI), and were introduced to SAFe. IJI kick-started Nordea’s SAFe introduction with a two-day session with management and stakeholders to establish a commonway of operating. They simulated how an agile-at-scale approach would work in Nordea’s environment, provided workshop style training for the staff involved, and one-on-one training for the Release Train Engineers (RTEs). They combined two existing delivery streams to form their Agile Release Train; a total of 80 people formed five development teams, one system team, and various cross-functional roles to represent architecture and user experience. By January, 2015 Nordea had made it through two 10-week Program Increments (PIs) and planning sessions. In both sessions, all members participated in visioning and planning; as a group, they identified inter-dependencies and were able to establish both Team PI objectives and Program PI objectives. Nordea’s fully-committed dive into SAFe produced immediate benefits, including: Increased efficiency with team members aligned and working togetherGreater creativity as teams are empowered to make decisionsManagement aligned and supportive of Agile teams The teams continue to evolve and improve their delivery system with each PI, and it has inspired other parts of Nordea to scale agile with SAFe. Of course, there is more to learn from their experience, so make sure to download the attached study for the rest of the story. Many thanks to the folks at Ivar Jacobson for providing the guidance, coaching and training that enabled Nordea to accelerate agile adoption with SAFe, and for sharing the story of their success. Download the Case Study Share: Facebook Instagram Twitter Reddit Mail Link Back to: All Case Studies Explore more Case Studies Suggested Case Study: Capital One Read the Case Study