When empowerment and urgency come together, anything is possible.
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Join four Agile leaders from CVS Health to learn how they banded together to form teams out of existing trains in order to tackle their monumental, and ever-evolving COVID response with the help of SAFe.
What does it look like when all roles across an operational value stream truly come together without the usual complexity and roadblocks that come with being in a large organization? How did they show up, lead with heart, and truly live their values? And what lessons were learned that other organizations can take away from this extraordinary experience?
“Having scaled Agile in place already prior to this happening helps create a lot of clarity and transparency on where we should identify people who already had all the skill sets that we needed to really achieve this. And then it set up like a common language to talk about things like priority and how to sequence work. And honestly just really live the values of SAFe even more so than the process of SAFe which I think is just a beautiful place to be.”
Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:
Caitlin Clifford, Senior Director of Digital Health Services /CVS Health
Rebecca Davis, CVS Health Digital Lean Agile Practice Leader /CVS Health
Matthew Huang, Senior Product Manager of Immunizations /CVS Health
Randy Kendel, Release Train Engineer of Immunizations /CVS Health
Gaining C-Suite support for SAFe Enterprise Agility
MetLife is one of 12 Fortune 500 companies to thrive for over 150 years. Met has scale and a proud history … and the many challenges of incumbency including legacy systems and challenges to speed. Agile is quickly being embraced as the way to achieve speed in innovation.
In this 45-minute video, Cheryl Crupi shares the story of how a small team sold MetLife’s new CEO and his new executive group on SAFe Enterprise Agility. This short, immersive session enabled this executive group to experience Agile for themselves and resulted in a third of the group requesting individual follow-up on how they can embrace Enterprise Agility, including HR, Legal, Marketing and regional business presidents.
Pôle emploi is the French national employment agency tasked with providing and processing benefits for the unemployed and seniors, helping the unemployed find jobs, and providing employers with recruitment resources. They employ over 54,000 civil servants through 900+ agencies, and publish more than 4 million job offers annually.
Industry:
Government
Overview
In 2014, the agency processed 8 million requests for financial aid, distributing $31.7 billion euros in benefits.
In early 2015, pôle emploi was asked to develop a new process for job seekers, no small feat given that the organization was operating in a legacy environment which included a 1600-member IT Department comprised of Scrum and waterfall teams, working with new technology as well as COBOL systems, and integrating work from several external suppliers
They first met with key stakeholders to create the program context and agree on realistic scope, then explored options to fulfill the commitment, and sought a solution to meet the needs of these key areas:
What can we do to meet our commitments ?
What can we do to stay in sync?
What can we do to increase team collaboration?
What can we do to reduce integration risks on such a large scope ?
How can we maintain a good vision of the product?
How can we track the progress of so many teams?
In early 2015, pôle emploi launched a SAFe pilot program to see how the Framework would work within their unique context. As part of this effort, they launched an Agile Release Train (ART) with 5 Scrum teams running on 3-week sprints, managing five cross-functional initiatives. Through Program Increment planning, they brought together all the key actors in the same room to identify key features that needed to be integrated, and dependencies between the different software components. pôle emploi created a new role, Delivery Manager, to track overall progress, and used IBM’s Rational Team Concert (RTC) to track team progress.
After the first few months, they were able to identify where the Framework mapped easily to their context, where it didn’t, and how to reconcile some of those differences. For instance, they opted to move from the Delivery Manager role to a Release Train Engineer (RTE) role, as defined in SAFe and began using SAFe-recommended templates to increase the visibility of the new business requirements. They also decided to align ART with their business program.
Today, the IT organization operates with both agile and non-agile teams collaborating, and is transitioning the non-agile teams to agile practices through their participation in the SAFe ART. They are working within the Framework to identify areas for continuous improvement and address questions such as:
How do we manage to take the business further within Agility?
Could WSJF help our prioritization process?
Who should assume the Product Management role in our organization?
How can we move forward with the system team?
Should we organize PO sync?
Who can be assigned the System Architect role?
Who should deal with the enablers and stories?
Will we be able to dissociate PI from our quarterly IT releases?
What do we need to do to move more teams to an agile cycle?
Get the rest of the story—including the update—below.
Many thanks to the team at pôle emploi for providing the study, and sharing your experience with the SAFe Community: Cécile Auret (SPC4), Methods Engineer, Jerome Froville (SPC4), Methods Engineer, and Michel Levaslot, Manager.
“Working for an organization that practices SAFe means employees can be confident that their code will get to production and that their SAFe training will secure them transportable skills that add value to their career paths.”
Console Connect needed to deliver positive and on-time outcomes for its customers and partners and amplify its ability to attract talented technologists to the business.
Impact
Attracted and trained new staff in a competitive market
Improved business goal setting and ability to measure business value
Reduced the number of lower business value objectives to allow time for innovation
Quality
“SAFe brought a much-needed approach to scaling Agile and systems thinking that was critical to an organization of our size and complexity.”
—Brent Weaver, Director of Systems Implementation, CMS
CMS was charged with improving systems thinking within a deeply ingrained Waterfall culture. They sought a solution that could scale within the complex organization of the Center of Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ) and deliver on citizen expectations.
Impact
Improved quality – 55% decrease in help desk tickets from hospitals, demonstrating a direct impact on customer satisfaction
Budget shift to modernization versus maintenance – Now 60% of the budget goes toward innovation for the system, helping the agency deliver on citizen expectations
Happier employees – Surveys conducted before and after SAFe show a 27% increase in employee satisfaction
Time-to-market
30%
improvement in average process time for developing features.
Handelsbanken, a Swedish bank known for its innovative practices, wanted to cut its time to market and improve its customer offerings. They needed a collaborative partner to contribute to those goals. The bank explored SAFe and gained trust knowing that several large companies and banks in its region had found success with it.
Impact
With SAFe, Handelsbanken achieved its goal of enabling automated decisions for mortgages sooner than expected. The structure of the framework helped them think big, focusing on flow and results.
Six years ago, Mercedes-Benz had one or two product roll-outs a year in just a couple of markets. In 2022, they were able to introduce roughly 40 products in 34 markets. Moving away from Waterfall methods and adopting SAFe, they were able to launch better technology, better operating systems, AI and face recognition, integrate different data sources, and utilize better risk models.
Impact
SAFe allowed Mercedes-Benz to achieve the shift from hardware to software, master the electrification of vehicles, meet requirements for zero emission, and adapt to environmental, geopolitical, and consumer demands.
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