“Our customers have told us they’re getting the products and services they have always wanted. We’re connecting with them to understand and solve their pain points at a pace previously unheard of in Fletcher Building”
—Wayne Armstrong, GM Digital & Marketing at PlaceMakers
Industry:
Construction, Manufacturing, Recycling
Quick Facts:
Approximately 150 people trained and practicing SAFe
2 ARTS, 5 Value Streams
Fletcher Building followed the full implementation roadmap to ensure all their people (including multiple partners across multiple geographies) were trained and aligned before launching each of the trains.
They also focussed on gaining buy-in from executives of the business units as well as IT leadership through a Leading SAFe course. This helped them understand the theory and enabled buy-in to the radical change in approach.
Including the Business Change team in the ART created the organization’s first cross-functional business team with marketing, operations, digital team, and digital support.
Outcomes & Lessons Learned:
Improved reliability (~ 94% predictability) and frequency of releases as well as accelerated development into market enabled better comms and created a competitive advantage
Creating a cross-functional alignment helped to drive digital adoption.
Following human-centred design and focusing on solving customer pain points was integral to achieving the organization’s goals.
They shifted conversations from time/cost/budget to customer experience and prioritisation (fixed capacity) and benefit realisation.
They did discovery in parallel to development, which enabled a relentless improvement of products.
The transformation resulted in a more than 90% customer satisfaction in products. Customers are more highly engaged than ever before.
Ecommerce revenues jumped from $0 in 2019 to $300+ million in 2022
Over time, the teams created strong bonds, took ownership of the objectives, and created their own innovation features, which accelerated development and ensured that Fletcher Building achieved its initial $100m sales target a year ahead of schedule.
Overview
SAFe helped Fletcher Building transform their large, complex portfolio organisation by completely changing how they implement technology solutions. They moved from siloed teams and waterfall technology practices to customer-led cross functional teams aligned around delivering prioritised business outcomes.
The company faced initial challenges, such as getting buy-in from a decentralized IT department and overcoming the organizational mindset that “going fast” was a problem for IT to solve. Additionally, there was a six to seven hour time difference between Fletcher Building and their software development vendors, which made it more challenging for people to align and communicate.
“There is always resistance to change,” explains Wayne Armstrong, GM Digital & Marketing at PlaceMakers, the retail trading arm of Fletcher Building. “Initially there was a belief within parts of the organization that this is a nice theory but would never work in our highly complex, fragmented organization with a huge number of disparate systems and vendors.”
To overcome this, Fletcher Building worked with a dedicated partner, Pretty Agile, and focused on ensuring the culture of the teams was strong with a very engaged leadership who actively addressed some of the risks quickly. Pretty Agile was able to challenge the organization’s thinking and help set them up for success leading up to launch.
In the end, SAFe helped Fletcher Building to halve the time and cost to implement technology, exponentially increase digital revenue, and make a step change in staff engagement and customer satisfaction.
“I think our story has resonance with lots of other people, probably like myself, who find themselves in positions of leadership in today’s world and maybe don’t have the background in technology particularly. That’s one thing I will say, and I think this is sometimes controversial, but I often get nods when I say it. Technology is not the main event.”
—Saima Satti, Head of Global Exams Business Improvement, British Council
Industry:
Education, English language, and Cultural Sectors
Quick Facts:
Founded in 1934, the British Council has focused on building connections for 90 years.
It is a UK charity governed by Royal Charter and a UK public body. Most income comes from partnership agreements, contracts, philanthropy, teaching and exams, and they also receive grant-in-aid funding from the UK government.
The Council is currently present in 100+ countries.
As part of their growth and development, the British Council’s Global Exams Business Improvement team created a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence and embedded a SAFe think tank.
Most of the team’s leadership is SAFe certified.
Outcomes & Lessons Learned:
It’s not all about technology. The adoption of SAFe enabled the development and delivery of over 150 initiatives including a balanced proportion of both Technology and non-tech improvements that deliver value across the world.
SAFe enabled the delivery of value more efficiently and more broadly across the globe.
The adoption of LPM and work on multiple portfolios with an overarching Portfolio of Portfolios was game changing for the teams, stakeholders and ultimately the realisation of value. Even though we realised we were already working at portfolio level when we started our SAFe journey we adapted and embedded accordingly ensuring SAFe worked for us .. and it did! Key lesson there is to try and find a way through and not get overly worried that your context is already more complex.
With SAFe, they were able to shift their focus to “people, passions, and pivots” and accelerate the flow of value.
Critical to success was culture and it was important to foster a culture of safety through communication events, peer support, and sharing vision and strategy across every level.
Involve everyone, from the most junior person to leadership. Respect your people and culture.
Work toward alignment, transparency, and continuous improvement.
If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the business and they will take care of the customer.
Overview
The British Council is an organization that works for a more peaceful and prosperous world by building connections and trust between people in the UK and countries worldwide. Working with people in over 200 countries and territories and with presence on the ground in more than 100 countries.
Uniquely combining the UK’s deep expertise in arts and culture, education and the English language, global presence and relationships in over 100 countries with unparalleled access to young people, creatives and educators, and their own creative sparkle, the British council will reach 650 million people this year alone.
One of the focus areas of the organization is administering examinations, helping people gain access to trusted qualifications to support their career and study prospects. About 5 million exams are administered at more than 850 locations worldwide.
The British Council’s Global Exams Business improvement team, dispersed across 23 countries, implemented SAFe to help break down silos and to reduce wasted time in handovers between tech teams, systems teams, process, and implementation. They also wanted to align their culture around a shared strategy and vision and were able to do so with SAFe.
Join us for our next Community Welcome Webinar, exclusively for new members. We’ll review what you need to know in order to succeed as a newly certified SAFe professional.
When:
December 4, 2024, 10:00 am – December 4, 2024, 11:00 am MST
The Power of 1%: How Small Improvements Drive Big Business Outcomes Webinar
Join us for this insightful webinar to explore the power of a 1% improvement and how these incremental gains can significantly enhance your business performance over time.
When:
October 22, 2024, 11:00 am – October 22, 2024, 11:30 am MST
Whether you’re looking to increase efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, or boost revenue, small changes can compound into major shifts in outcomes.
In this session, we’ll cover:
How the principle of marginal gains can be applied to business – Real-life examples of businesses that saw significant results with small changes
Strategies to identify and implement 1% improvements in key areas
Tools and techniques for measuring and tracking these improvements Discover how focusing on just a 1% improvement today can transform your business tomorrow!
Who Should Attend?: This webinar is ideal for business leaders, managers, and anyone responsible for driving growth and efficiency within their organization.
Real options promote flexibility in decision-making and enable organizations to pivot, change course, or seize new opportunities as circumstances evolve.
When:
May 21, 2024, 12:00 pm – May 21, 2024, 1:00 pm MST
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Consultant, Director, LACE Member, Program or Project Manager, SAFe Program Consultant, Transformation Leader
This immersive experience in Zürich will be packed with networking opportunities and content focused on pivotal themes, such as: • Agile Leadership • Business Agility • Improve & Accelerate • Measure & Grow
Laurens is an Agile Trainer & Management Consultant and a mentor to leaders creating resilient organizations at any scale. He has a strong background in IT with experience in almost every role. Laurens takes great pride in his work, and it shows in the recommendations he has received over the years. As a Professional Scrum Trainer and SAFe Practice Consultant, he helps to improve the profession of software delivery as well as marketing, human resources, and finance. Laurens brings his experience in enterprise IT since 1999 and on Scrum Teams since 2006 to his teaching, is a driving force in the Agile community, and a sought-after speaker at conferences and events.
Audrey Boydston
SAFe Fellow and SPCT (Scaled Agile, Inc.)
Audrey Boydston is a SAFe Fellow and Strategic Advisor at Scaled Agile and an experienced SPCT, Leadership Coach, and Master Facilitator. Her work focuses on continuous learning, community building, strategy development, and helping leaders create exceptional experiences for their employees and customers. Audrey spent her early career working in leadership roles at financial institutions, including GE Capital, Citigroup, Discover, and Capital One. While at Capital One she transitioned from strategy and product management into Agile coaching, where she successfully rebooted her business unit’s Agile transformation through coaching, re-training, and establishing mentoring programs. At Scaled Agile she co-created a program to help leaders understand their critical role in leading enterprise Lean-Agile transformations. She also co-created a virtual edition of the Training from the BACK of the Room! course with Sharon Bowman and 10 other Certified Trainers around the world.
I’ve been a SAFe® Product Owner (PO) for two years and I’ve learned that showing up well in this role is more than just a skill set you build. It becomes an art that deserves practice, consideration, professional development, and your authentic personality.
As a PO of a very busy team that is charged with understanding and delivering on customer journeys with SAFe learning content, my daily work life can include:
In short, my day can hold many twists and turns. Over the last two years, I’ve developed some habits and practices that help me bring my best self to this role as often as possible:
Treat the work as an important teammate
Treat yourself as an important teammate
Know whose opinions matter most to you
Practice setting boundaries
Form a great bond with your team’s Scrum Master/Team Coach
In the following sections, I’ll explain these practices in more context and share resources to help you accomplish them on your team.
SAFe® Product Owner Tip One: Treat the Work as an Important Teammate
POs often face competing priorities, needs, and opinions.
This means I may hear from someone in one part of the organization why we need X and then hear from someone on my team why X is a terrible idea. I can learn why someone desires to work on something new and learn why we won’t be pursuing that idea in the same hour. I often do.
One way I resolve this is to treat the work as a teammate that deserves respect, care, and consideration.
Here’s an example of how this works.
A high-performing team member shared she was interested in enabler work towards researching and selecting upgraded tools. However, her work in the upcoming PI was heavy in iterations one, two, and three. This planned work was for committed deliverables in iteration four.
Architecture also approached me to help get alignment on having that team member work with them on this tool selection. They proposed several longer-than-average meetings with this team member in iterations one, two, and three as well as asking for exploration work from this team member in iterations three, four, and five.
I knew my team member was invested in choosing the right future tool for our work. I also knew we would miss our PI objectives and delivery of products without the crucial work she was planning in the early part of the PI.
I thought of my teammate and the work as equals, having needs and deserving a thoughtful decision. I worked with Architecture and the teammate to craft expectations for this PI and an extended timeline for the enabler work so the team’s work, the teammate, and Architecture all had a path forward.
SAFe Product Owner Tip Two: Treat Yourself as an Important Teammate
SAFe Product Owners and Scrum Masters/Team Coaches have specialty roles AND are a part of the team. This can be confusing sometimes. Should you add items to the team retro or vote in estimating poker? What happens when you have a family emergency or take vacation? Can you plan stories?
Having a different title or being a decision-maker can serve to distance you from teammates. In my first two PIs as a PO, I felt this keenly and decided to think about it differently. My skills help the team deliver value and understand who will consume it and what they need. Once I started thinking about myself as a contributor rather than a “distanced person with a different role,” it made it much easier to decide: Yes, and.
YES, I should add items to our Team’s iteration retrospective! AND maybe I should mind my airtime and let others go first when the team is discussing which actions or changes they’d like to pursue in the next iteration.
YES, when we take team assessments such as the Team and Technical Agility assessment, my voice matters, AND if I have areas of disagreement, I’ll wait for my Scrum Master/Team Coach to facilitate conversations.
YES, I can vote in estimating poker when we’re sizing stories, AND if the person doing the work has a strong feeling or the rest of the team disagrees with my estimate, I’ll cede my opinion.
YES, I can take a long vacation AND find ways for my team to move stories through our Kanban while I’m unplugged.
YES, I can write stories! If there are areas of expertise I can leverage to help us develop our products, I can and should write stories! AND, when I have the opportunity to learn more about how others on the team are completing work, this builds my T-shaped skills and helps me plan work on our team with more knowledge and empathy.
Since making this shift, I’ve become more equipped to
Know what work we’re doing
Understand the how and why
Help our team reach out cross-functionally in the ART or to work with customers
Our team has been on a high-performing trajectory since this shift. While correlation isn’t causation, I intend to continue this mindset.
SAFe Product Owner Tip Three: Know Whose Opinions Matter Most to You
I like to joke about what I do for a living because (let’s be honest) parts of my family struggle to understand what I do at work. Sometimes I tell people I solve problems just-in-time for a living. Sometimes I tell people I negotiate and set boundaries for a living. Often I tell people I make someone unhappy nearly every day for a living.
Making people unhappy is one of the hardest parts of being a SAFe Product Owner. Because I’m involved in a team executing product development, maintenance, and delivery while acting as an interface with other teams we need work from or need work from us as they execute, misaligned needs and timing will arise.
Every decision I make, negotiate, share, or support, can potentially frustrate a teammate, someone on another team, someone on the extended product team, our business owners, or any combination of these folks.
People’s work is personal. This is their career, their time away from their family, their commitments, and the products they love and use. Their feelings about work are valid.
I’ve learned to accept and sit closely with someone having uncomfortable feelings about a decision. I put intense work into validating feelings, no matter how strong they may be and regardless of my agreement about that person’s wishes or ideas.
It can be challenging to stay calm with someone in an emotional situation. This is even harder to do without talking them out of their experience. I can’t do it unless I hold deep and important knowledge—I’m ok even if people disagree with me today. Not everyone’s opinions of me need to shape me in every moment.
I extend unconditional positive regard for people while building a working relationship with them. I assume good intent. And after that, the people who really stick with me respond to my brand of being me and getting work done.
This means I can live with some people who are unhappy with the news, decision, or strategy I’ve just shared. I can stay calm, professional, and empathetic without agonizing over the interaction.
It may sound like I care less about some people. However, what results from this approach is room for me to care deeply about the people I work with most frequently and maintain room for my own work, their needs, and new work relationships to grow.
Early in my life as a PO, carrying everyone’s thoughts and feelings kept me up at night and sometimes prevented me from saying things that needed to be said.
Rejecting this mindset has made me a better, more decisive, and more reliable PO.
SAFe Product Owner Tip Four: Practice Setting Boundaries
SAFe Product Owners often need to tell their team, Product Manager, an engineer or architect, other teams, ART, or Business Owners “no.” No feels like such a scary word. No can sit on the tip of my tongue and raise questions like, “Will this cause anger? Disappointment? Personal dislike?”
In the end, saying no to some things allows teams to say yes to others, and to take meaningful action on those commitments. It’s what allows us to create quality products. Conversely, saying yes to everything leads to poor quality, missed commitments and objectives, and personal and professional disappointments.
I decided to take a deep dive into setting boundaries. I started by considering how I could say “no” or “maybe” with clarity.
These are a few of the ways I trained myself to respond so I could communicate boundaries without shutting down necessary conversations.
For some time, I had these on a sticky note on the wall behind my desk. I rehearsed them and queued myself to remember to use these phrases.
After several PIs, my team started asking how I got so measured and productive at setting boundaries. We now brainstorm as a team ways to set boundaries before we go into PI planning. Here are some of the boundary-setting phrases our team has come up with:
The truth is these phrases are useful outside of PI planning throughout iterations. The bigger truth is they’re helpful in day-to-day life outside of work.
SAFe Product Owner Tip Five: Form a Great Bond with Your Team’s Scrum Master/Team Coach
I am lucky to have the kind of relationship with my team’s Team Coach where we happily grab taco dinners together. I don’t think all POs must be buddies with their teams’ Scrum Masters/Team Coaches. But it does help the work and team for POs to have good working relationships with the person in this role on the team.
As a SAFe Product Owner, you have your eyes on the needs of the customer (i.e., anyone who consumes your team’s work) and the work. I like to say, “I’m not the boss of anyone. I represent the work.”
The Scrum Master or Team Coach has their eyes on team performance, work progress, and delivery. I’ve found that having a great working relationship with the Team Coach on my team means we can coordinate to support the team and work and fine-tune our team and technical agility.
Ways I’ve coordinated with my Team Coach to support the team include:
Proposing breaking our Agile team events up differently
Devising ways to handle things asynchronously when we have scheduling traffic jams
Asking me powerful questions when I’m facing hard decisions on priorities and moving the work forward
I can also go to our Team Coach and propose agenda items for our team events, ask for help getting data and metrics, and collaborate on thinking through team challenges and needs.
It’s so rewarding to have a relationship with our Team Coach where I can talk candidly about where we’ve been as a team, where we’re headed, and the ways we can both leverage our skills and perspectives to help the team succeed.
This makes it enjoyable to collaborate on planning team celebrations. We’ve worked together to coordinate
A “game show”-themed gathering
Gift bags
Creative ways for the team to learn about one another and appreciate each other more
A remote cookies and hot cocoa gathering
Team meals
By far, the best part of working so well with my Team Coach is that we can support and challenge each other. When my Team Coach had a professional development goal to become an SPC and SAFe Trainer, I covered team events and cheered him on.
Likewise, he got creative with ideas for story acceptance and team events I usually handle so I could take a long vacation. We also push each other to look at our team’s metrics, consider new ways to engage the team in Agile team events, share successes and improvements with the ART, and share our talents beyond the team level.
In this relationship, each of us has grown into our roles and pushed ourselves and each other. The team has also been recognized as high-performing in qualitative and quantitative ways.
Enhance These Tips with Some PO Resources
I hope including these tips, practices, and mindsets helps you consider your own development as a PO and how your work positively impacts your team’s work. Lean into the art of being a PO in your own way as you try some of these ideas out:
As a writer and education nerd who loves processes, Christie seeks to move the needle on what learners can do and what educators and trainers will try with learners. She designs and delivers compelling content and training and builds communities of avid fans using these resources as a Scaled Agile, Inc. Product Owner. Connect with Christie on LinkedIn.
Discover SAFe® 6.0 – The Next Evolution with Dean Leffingwell
Here at Scaled Agile, we were thrilled to announce the launch of SAFe® 6.0 and SAFe Studio this month. These new updates will deepen SAFe’s impact, help you build resiliency and reshape the way you approach transformation. On 30 March, Dean Leffingwell is joining us for a deep dive into what these changes mean for you in the APAC region.
When:
March 30, 2023, 11:12 am – March 30, 2023, 11:25 am
The Scaled Agile APAC team is thrilled to host our Co-founder and Cheif Methodologist, Dean Leffingwell, to share his insights about SAFe 6.0. Learn directly from Dean about how these updates enable you to work differently and build the future.
11:30 am AEDT 6:00am IST 8:30am SGT 8:30am CST 9:30am JST
Recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on Lean-Agile best practices, Dean Leffingwell is an entrepreneur and software development methodologist best known for creating SAFe®, the world’s most widely used framework for business agility.
His best-selling books, Agile Software Requirements, Scaling Software Agility, and SAFe® Distilled, form much of the basis of modern thinking on Lean-Agile practices and principles. Founder of several successful startups, including Requisite, Inc. (acquired by Rational), Mr. Leffingwell also served as Chief Methodologist to Rally Software, and prior to that, as Sr. Vice President at Rational Software (now part of IBM). He currently serves as Chief Methodologist to Scaled Agile, Inc., which he co-founded in 2011.
