Topic: Learning from Failing

The Ongoing Story of SAFe at a Major European Telco

Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies, with some 242 million mobile customers, 27 million fixed-network lines, and 22 million broadband lines.

Deutsche Telekom IT has moved from 0 to 130 ARTs in less than three years. Now a new phase is beginning. Here, alignment, consolidation, and relentless improvement take center stage. In this session, Agile coaches Richard Butler and Manfred Becking take you on this journey of highs and lows, what helped or hindered them, and what they learned along the way. Topics include:

• The results to date around collaboration, speed, transparency, and focus
• Going forward: fusing and consolidating
• Transformation learnings:
  • Understanding and Cognition
  • Growing realization of things that need to be done
  • Relativity
  • No speed fits all
  • Need for KnowYou can’t travel to the stars SAFely unless you know how It’s a complex and unique universe – things don’t fit together by chance.
  • Mindset – Agile behavior doesn’t just happen
• Black Holes:
  • Methodology Disconnects
  • “Resilofication” will occur without alignment
  • No Value-Stream, No Agility
  • If it’s not E2E there won’t be smooth flow
  • Inertia – Where the inertia is the highest, so is the gravity
  • Mirage – You might call it SAFe but it doesn’t mean that it is SAFe
  • It’s the Mindset
  • Linear solutions don’t solve dynamically complex problems

Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:

• Manfred Becking, Agile Coach, SAFe Consultant /Deutsche Telekom
• Richard Butler, Agile Coach, SAFe Consultant /Deutsche Telekom