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

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Revolutionary things can happen when pizza is being served. Youโ€™ll find out why when you join Porsche visionaries Mattias Ulbrich and Dr. Oliver Seifert for a candid discussion about transforming one of the worldโ€™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 buyersโ€™ 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.

โ€œThe most important thing is that you shouldnโ€™t underestimate that the digital world is totally different from the physical world,โ€ says Ulbrich.

But Porsche didnโ€™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 โ€œTakt,โ€ 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, โ€œIf you look right now in a team, you couldnโ€™t distinguish whether a person is from R&D, IT, sales, or marketing. They work together.โ€

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

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TV Globo – Adopting SAFe for Enterprise Agility Transformation

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

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TV Globo is Brazilโ€™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 โ€œwho is rightโ€ or โ€œwho is guiltyโ€ 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

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Porsche Lean-Agile Transformation Journey

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 โ€œPorsche Taktโ€ 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

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Nokia Software – Improving Predictability and Team Collaboration Using SAFe

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 worldโ€™s most recognizable technology brands. In this candid interview, they share the story behind Nokia Softwareโ€™s SAFe transformation, and what itโ€™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

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TV Globo – Accelerating Digital Transformation Using SAFe

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To accelerate their digital transformation and remain competitive in a fast-changing market, Brazilโ€™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 Globoโ€™s employees are in this company-wide transformation using SAFe. It is narrated in Portuguese with English translations.

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Deutsche Bahn โ€“ Lean-Agile Transformation Story

Agile Planning for Transportation

โ€œFor Deutsche Bahn Digital Sales, SAFe is the framework for the strategic digitalization program โ€ฆ With it, we are delivering faster and more effectively on our objectives, which drives our ability to compete in the digital age.โ€

โ€”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 employeesโ€™ satisfaction levels

Best Practices:

  • Start ASAP – Begin, even if imperfectly. โ€œItโ€™s more important to give people a chance to work in this environment than to wait until everyone is trained,โ€ 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:


Introduction

In recent years, Deutsche Bahn (DB)โ€”one of Europeโ€™s largest railway operatorsโ€”has faced unprecedented change. In 1994, the two railways of East and West Germany merged after the countryโ€™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.

Agile Planning for Transportation

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 targetsโ€”especially on larger solutions. The company struggled with lengthy decision cycles; fragmented responsibility; constant design, coordination and estimation; changing requirements; and many, many dependencies.

โ€œIn nearly every business unit, the transformation projects struggled to deliver large solutions,โ€ said Matthias Opitz, Senior Program Manager, DB Vertrieb. โ€œWe were going around in circles analyzing, and the processes were so complex that the organization was not able to deliver simple minimum viable products.โ€

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 Frameworkยฎ (SAFeยฎ).

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

โ€œFor Deutsche Bahn Digital Sales, SAFe is the framework for the strategic digitalization program,โ€ Opitz said. โ€œIt brought a continuous delivery process that keeps us on track toward our objectives.โ€

DB Vertrieb started its Lean-Agile transformation in 2015, when the business unit established an effort named โ€˜KAIโ€˜ (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 SAFeยฎ course, with others taking role-based training such as SAFeยฎ Scrum Master, SAFeยฎ for Teams, and SAFeยฎ Product Owner/Product Manager. At least nine change agents at DB business units also earned SAFeยฎ 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.

โ€œTraining was very important for giving us confidence and answers to questions that came up,โ€ Opitz said. โ€œBecause we trained all participants, training also helped open discussions and convince skeptical people that this was the right way to go.โ€

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 teamsโ€™ work for the coming PI
Agile Planning for Transportation

SAFe practices such as the Program Board gave participants clear insight, for the first time, into the companyโ€™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 โ€˜Target Operating Modelโ€™ (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. โ€œAt first, everyone looked at the committed backlog and said, โ€˜Itโ€™s too much,โ€™โ€ Opitz said. โ€œBut by the end of this first PI, we had delivered almost everything, which was a surprise to everyone.โ€

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.

โ€œJust a year ago, it was a big challenge to do specifications,โ€ Opitz said. โ€œNow we have a process that makes it happen.โ€

Steps to Success

A number of steps and factors contributed to DB Vertriebโ€™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.

Agile Planning for Transportation

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.

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Nordea – Adopting Agility with SAFe

Nordea - Agile Adoption with SAFe

โ€œTo 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.โ€

Industry:

Financial, Banking


The partner that made it happen:


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.

Agile Adoption with SAFe

IJI kick-started Nordeaโ€™s SAFe introduction with a two-day session with management and stakeholders to establish a common
way of operating. They simulated how an agile-at-scale approach would work in Nordeaโ€™s environment, provided workshop-style SAFe 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 PI planning; as a group, they identified interdependencies and were able to establish both Team PI objectives and Program PI objectives.

Nordeaโ€™s fully-committed dive into SAFe produced immediate benefits, including:

  • Increased efficiency with team members aligned and working together
  • Greater creativity as teams are empowered to make decisions
  • Management 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.

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Suggested Case Study: Capital One