Topic: Training Strategy

Kantar Retail – Using SAFe for a Better Agile Approach

Kantar Retail - Benefits of SAFe in Retail

“Our time to market is impressive for an enterprise solution. It’s a competitive advantage in the market that we can make major product changes every two months.”

—Cédric Guyot, CEO, Virtual Reality at Kantar Retail

Challenge:

Implement a more formal Agile approach while preserving the company’s innovative culture.

Industry:

Technology, Retail

Solution:

SAFe®

Results:

  • Delivery of major releases down from 6 to 2 months
  • Time to market decreased from 9 to 3 months
  • Time to respond to client feedback down from 3 months to 1 month
  • 27.5% decrease in cost per epic
  • 41% to 28% decrease in the attrition rate
  • 36%-43% increase in team productivity due to clear job responsibilities and processes
  • Easier talent acquisition and retention due to openness and transparency

Best Practices:

  • Gain buy-in through results—To sell leadership on SAFe, managers frequently demonstrated value. “Once we started to improve and measure our results, upper management came on board,” Vavriv says.
  • Be patient—Change takes time. Once implemented, you’ll begin seeing progress, accelerating the pace of change.
  • Involve HR—Clearly define roles and performance standards (KPIs) for each role. Kantar Retail’s HR representative attended SAFe training.
  • Gradual implementation of SAFe framework—“Start implementation with basic things on the Team level after starting with the Program level and constantly improve Portfolio-level decisions,” Yevgrashyn says

Introduction

Kantar Retail develops Virtual Reality (VR) solutions that enable their retailer and manufacturer clients to research and design retail experiences to meet the needs of shoppers and keep up with the constantly changing retail landscape. Retail design and research in virtual reality drive time to market and more effective collaboration and is faster, more economical and more confidential than prototyping in physical stores.

Benefits of SAFe in Retail

Part of WPP Group, the world leader in marketing communications services, Kantar Retail is a leading insight, technology and consultancy company that works with retailers such as Walmart, Target and Marks & Spencer. They also work with global consumer goods businesses including Kimberly-Clark, Unilever & GSK.

In 2013, Kantar Retail set out to develop a new VR solution for the retail and consumer goods industry. The company had explored using Agile practices with small teams, but the effort was “disorganized and disjointed,” says Dmytro Vavriv, PhD, Delivery Unit Manager at Kantar Retail. As a small company that prides itself on innovation, members across the organization were concerned that a more formal Agile approach could stifle ideas.

Prepping for PI #1

When Kantar Retail began developing the latest version of its solution, the company made a key decision to build its capacity and chose to deploy the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) to support that effort.

Development teams are located in Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. For road-mapping the first Program Increment (PI), Kantar Retail engaged just one, a six-person team in Kiev. As the team prepared for its first SAFe planning session and PI, the Delivery Unit Manager and the Release Train Engineer (RTE) took the four-day Implementing SAFe 4.0 course and earned the SAFe 4.0 Program Consultant (SPC4) certification.

Leading up to kickoff, Kantar Retail faced some tough questions. First, they were uncertain how long the PI duration should be. While the business was pushing for a short timeframe, team members felt like they needed a longer window.

They also had concerns about the planning session itself. Past sessions typically covered just one sprint. This time they would need to cover seven sprints, decide on features and analyze dependencies with other teams. They also needed to develop a vision for the next two PIs. Would two days be enough?

“From a product perspective, the first PI was a challenge because the team had just started working on the product, and from a technical perspective the teams didn’t know the code well yet,” Dmytro Tsybulskyi, RTE says.

Ultimately, the group covered everything in a 2-day session. They settled on a 3½-month PI, but didn’t quite meet the planned scope on the first try—requiring 4½ months. Yet, they still delivered under the usual six-month timeframe and took away valuable lessons for the next round.

PI2 ran significantly more smoothly. Kantar Retail brought in more teams and trained all team leads beforehand. Prior to the PI boundary, teams discussed possible roadmaps and dependencies, as well as technical questions. That made it so that, in planning, they found it easier to put features on the program board and establish a vision for upcoming PIs. Plus, they had greater confidence in setting a shorter PI timeframe—this time 3 months.

Enhancing Innovation

As of now, half the company is trained in SAFe, and Kantar Retail has completed four major releases. “We started out with a small team of 6 engineers in Kiev and have grown to 30 now, including all aspects of software delivery, QA, Scrum Teams, and UI/UX,” says Paul Gregory, Chief Technical Officer, Virtual Reality at Kantar Retail.

With the help of experienced SPC and Agile coach Timofey Yevgrashyn, Kantar Retail has also implemented SAFe fully on the Team and Program levels. To their surprise, Kantar Retail found that teams were more proactive regarding innovation on the product—due to the sharing of responsibilities, and by separating activities on business deliverability and innovation.

“Participation of all team members in the Leading SAFe class helped to clarify roles and responsibilities and simulate key activities in the SAFe framework,” Yevgrashyn says.

The newly implemented SAFe methodology additionally resulted in a shared vision, more visibility and predictability, a higher-quality solution, and an increased ability to respond to market and customer demands.

“We’ve adopted an enterprise framework for agility, the SAFe framework,” says Eric Radermacher, Product Manager, Virtual Reality at Kantar Retail. “We’ve been more consistent. We’ve been able to articulate a roadmap to the business and to our clients and deliver in time and in full, which is a really positive milestone.”

Benefits of SAFe in Retail

Sharpening the Competitive Edge

With the help of SAFe, Kantar Retail brought the latest version of its product to market. Cloud-based Kantar Retail VR Infinity™ provides all the content for the creation of virtual store projects. It puts VR technology directly in the hands of the users, and connects teams and customers to understand issues and opportunities quickly, leading to faster and more effective retail decision-making.

The company measured very clear benefits from its Agile journey:

Delivery

  • Delivery of major releases down from 6 to 2 months
  • Time to market decreased from 9 to 3 months
  • Reduced time to respond to client feedback from 3 months to 1 month
  • Greater predictability, which enhances client satisfaction

“Our time to market is impressive for an enterprise solution,” Cédric Guyot, CEO, Virtual Reality at Kantar Retail says. “It’s a competitive advantage in the market that we can make major product changes every two months.”

Finance

  • 27.5% decrease in cost per epic

Human Resources

  • 41% to 28% decrease in the attrition rate
  • 36%-43% increase in team productivity due to clear job responsibilities and processes
  • Easier talent acquisition and retention due to openness and transparency

Given those metrics, top management is now fully behind SAFe.

SAFe not only elevates internal team satisfaction and hiring; the sales team now brings the company’s time to market into conversations with prospects.

“The sales team uses this as a way to engage with clients,” Dmytro Vavriv says. “We can say, ‘Here are stats showing our predictability and here’s our vision.’”

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Westpac – Implementing SAFe in Banking Services

Westpac - Implementing SAFe in Banking Services

“Everyone hearing the same message from the same trainers at the same time was a huge enabler for alignment and a ‘one-team’ culture.”

—Em Campbell-Pretty, Context Matters

Challenge:

After the successful rollout of a new online banking platform, Westpac received numerous requests for additional features and needed to deliver quickly.

Industry:

Banking

Solution:

SAFe®

Results:

  • Westpac successfully took 150 people from waterfall to Agile in one week, and garnered positive feedback from teams
  • Team and business engagement went up
  • Cycle time and defects went down

Best Practices:

  • Get executive buy-in—Getting leadership on board—and participating—is essential to achieving team buy-in
  • Include all roles in training—Triple check that everyone is scheduled to get the training they need
  • Prepare, prepare, prepare—A one-week launch takes significant pre-work

Overview

One of Australia’s “big four” banks, Westpac serves approximately 10 million consumer and business customers across Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Challenge

In 2015, Westpac launched a new online banking platform. Though very successful—and award-winning—the launch resulted in a huge demand to deliver additional features quickly. The company wanted to take a scaled Agile approach to roll out new capabilities but lacked the quality training and know-how to apply it to this initiative.

Solution

Westpac reached out to Scaled Agile Partner, Context Matters, for guidance, leading to the decision to adopt SAFe, and form an Agile Release Train (ART) for the new features.

Before launch planning began, the company settled on a vision, a prioritized feature backlog, an approach to product ownership and a decision on capacity allocation.

At the time, teams were focused on delivering the final release of the in-flight program. If they were going to change the delivery approach for the next release, they would need to move fast. With a small window of opportunity, a SAFe QuickStart seemed the only answer.

To achieve launch in one week, Westpac began by training everyone at the same time. Midweek, they aligned all teams to common objectives, secured commitment and continued training during planning. By week’s end, they provided orientation for specialty roles, open spaces and tool training for teams.

Development teams would be available in six weeks, so Westpac grabbed that time slot—knowing the window would be tight. After buy-in from executives on the business and IT sides, they were ready for next steps.

To support their efforts, they also established Communities of Practice and hold monthly technical workshops for developers.

Implementing SAFe in Banking Services

2 Days of Leading SAFe® Training

Next, 32 leaders across business and IT came together for two days of Leading SAFe training to discuss SAFe in the Westpac context, generating team excitement. Together, leaders came up with a theme for the train—Galaxy—with all teams receiving related names.

“Giving the train a shared identity helps create a bond across the team of teams that is the Agile Release Train, seeding the “one-team” culture that helps trains excel,” says Em Campbell-Pretty of Context Matters.

SAFe Scrum XP training brought together 60 people in one release train of eight teams over two days with two trainers in one room. The RTE additionally joined team-level training for both days, leading team members to note his commitment to SAFe.

“Everyone hearing the same message from the same trainers at the same time was a huge enabler for alignment and a ‘one-team’ culture,” says Campbell-Pretty.

The following Monday, Westpac launched the train. Some last-minute feature requests presented a hiccup, but the teams and leadership committed to a plan.

Results: Cycle Time, Defects Down

  • Westpac successfully took 100 people from waterfall to Agile in one week, and garnered positive feedback from teams. Team and business engagement went up while cycle time and defects went down.
  • Agile at Westpac continues to grow, with the company holding its third PI Planning session recently.

Additional Reading

For a deeper dive into this SAFe experience, download Em-Campbell Pretty’s presentation to AgileAustralia16.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Software – Enterprise Agile Expansion with SAFe

“With a proven framework, we can deliver solutions much faster and with less effort. SAFe® defines the roles, teams, activities and artifacts to apply Lean and Agile principles at enterprise scale, and provides outstanding training and coaching materials to increase our chance of success.”

—Peter Vollmer, Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

Challenge:

HP teams had experimented with Agile methods for years, but efforts were limited to individual teams with mixed results.

Industry:

Information Technology, Software

Solution:

  • SAFe®
  • HPE Agile Manager
  • HPE ALM

Results:

  • Teams run iterations within a number of weeks rather than months.
  • Typically, teams complete sprints within two weeks.
  • The company noticed a 20 percent drop in defects.
  • Company leaders are backing Agile globally as means of meeting strategic business goals.

Best Practices:

  • Start small – Start with one or two teams to reduce risk and create evangelists that will spread the news.
  • Use a light hand – Don’t force teams to go Agile but rather let evangelists share that Agile is fun and delivers better results.
  • Educate, educate, educate – Establish change agents and continuously educate. Many may assume they know what Agile is all about, but in reality may not.

Introduction

Created as a result of the split of Hewlett Packard into two companies in late 2015, the newly formed Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) helps organizations adapt to modern digital demands—to create secure, cloud-enabled, mobile-friendly infrastructures. HPE Software, one of four divisions within HPE, drives a significant percentage of the company’s overall profit.

Agile Expansion with SAFe

At HPE, business units span multiple continents, from the headquarters in Palo Alto, CA to Europe and the Asia Pacific. One product team may include members in up to five different locations.

The company’s journey to Agile began as early as 2001 when some HP teams began iterative development independently. In the years that followed, they went on to experiment with a mix of XP, Kanban and Scrum. However, their efforts, while approaching Agile in business, were limited to individual teams with mixed results.

To scale Agile adoption beyond a few scattered teams would require a more formalized effort and a methodical approach to ensure business continuity.

“We needed to respond more quickly to user requests and environmental changes, and reduce the cost of software development using traditional methodologies such as waterfall,” says Peter Vollmer, Distinguished Technologist at HPE. “Yet we could not risk compromising core business processes and KPIs.”

A Proven Framework for Faster Delivery

When team leaders evaluated the variety of Agile methodologies, they found the measured approach they needed in the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®).

“With a proven framework, we can deliver solutions much faster and with less effort,” Vollmer says. “SAFe defines the roles, teams, activities and artifacts to apply Lean and Agile principles at enterprise scale, and provides outstanding training and coaching materials to increase our chance of success.”

HPE began SAFe Agile expansion with a “coalition of the willing,” Vollmer says. The first to raise their hands, a team based in Fort Collins, Colorado, with members in India, became the first to begin SAFe training and training. With the Colorado team underway, a second-team at HPE’s headquarters in Sunnyvale began as well.

Beyond the Classroom

To help teams apply SAFe beyond the classroom, HPE provided some teams with access to a trainer to educate and coach them through the process. Coaches provide feedback to teams, ask questions and help them find the right answers based on context, culture and environment. To coach the first two teams, and now others, Vollmer ramped up on SAFe through a SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) course.

Success with scaling Agile at HPE has hinged on education and ensuring that team members understood SAFe clearly, including taking the effort to get on the same page regarding terminology. “We found a great deal of misunderstanding when it comes to Agile and its principles, which is why teams often struggle with accepting the change,” Vollmer says. “In order to get the most out of Agile practices, each team should have a trainer who educates and coaches them throughout the learning and adoption process.”

HPE Software - Agile Expansion with SAFe

20% Defect Drop

Early SAFe users evangelized their experience, increasing engagement and adoption. To date, several hundred team members have attended SAFe training and achieved certification. Those actively applying Agile methods numbers in the thousands, based on usage of an HPE-developed onboarding portal (Agile Manager), and continues to grow. Between 2014 and 2015, the number of registered users jumped by 50 percent as the effort gained momentum.

Though still adopting SAFe more broadly, HPE already sees an impact. “Our teams run iterations within a number of weeks rather than months, all while executing robust delivery processes,” Vollmer says. And with the change, teams run sprints in two weeks instead of four.

As SAFe practices expanded, the company also noticed a 20 percent drop in defects, as measured by its own defect-tracking application. Within the system, HPE can easily measure key performance indicators, including customer-encountered defects – insight that contributes to customer satisfaction and delivering higher-quality releases on schedule.

“Like most of our customers, HPE Software must adopt Enterprise Agile practices,” says Jerome Labat, CTO of HP Software. “Working closely with our HPE ALM (application lifecycle management) and AGM (Agile Manager) engineering teams allows us to continuously improve our product, scale out our software operations while keeping our costs under control. We‘ve seen tremendous benefits such as efficiencies, improved quality, and a reduction in time-to-market windows.”

Next Steps

HPE Software - Agile Expansion with SAFe

So far, HPE has run four Agile Release Trains (ARTs), all in one business unit. In the coming months, another business unit in Sunnyvale will quickly launch another ART.

Next, HPE Software targets training an additional thousand people on SAFe, which includes all R&D and product management roles. Toward that effort, HPE will establish an Agile transformation team and deploy up to three SPC-certified change agents in each major geographic area.

All these steps underscore the increasing importance of scaling Agile in meeting HPE’s broader strategic business goals.

“We have to get the whole of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, from a development perspective, adopting the Agile methodology, so that we can go faster and deliver more to our customers’ expectations,” said Martin Fink, CTO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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TomTom – Achieving Enterprise Business Agility with SAFe

Implementing SAFe in Consumer Electronics

“There is no doubt in my mind that without SAFe and Rally we would not have launched this in only 140 days. It is also our best new product ever.”

Industry:

Consumer Electronics

Introduction

Best known for being a global leader in navigation and mapping products, TomTom also creates GPS sports watches, as well as state-of-the-art fleet management solutions and industry-leading location-based products. They are the mapping provider for Apple Maps, and the maps and traffic data provider for Uber drivers in over 300 cities worldwide. Headquartered in Amsterdam, TomTom generates 1 billion euros in annual revenue, with 4,600 employees worldwide.

In 2012, the organization was facing a number of challenges:

  • Organised as waterfall projects
  • Many projects working in all parts of the code with minimal module or component ownership
  • Many releases are months-quarters late
  • Multiple code lines and branches
  • Negligible automated testing & no continuous integration
  • “downstream” teams spend 3,4,5 months accepting the code and often changing it
  • Poor visibility and facts-based decision-making

After reading Dean Leffingwell’s Agile Software Requirements—their SVP read it cover-to-cover on his vacation—they decided to transition to SAFe. Their first step was to provide SAFe training for their CTO, SVPs, and 50 CSMs and CPOs. From there they began reorganizing from the Scrum teams up, arranging product clusters and component Scrum teams around the idea of one Agile Release Train (ART) per product.

Six months into the SAFe transition, they were given a previously unheard-of goal of a 126-day launch cycle for their 4th generation of consumer navigation products. This put SAFe to the test, as it cut their development time down almost two-thirds from what was previously a 1-year cycle. Launching 5 ARTs—1 product each—they assigned 4-14 teams to each train, working across multiple locations.

Highlights of SAFe Benefits

  • Reliable and predictable releases of production code
  • Fail fast (<2 weeks) is better than after 6 months
  • Detect/prevent issues with each new submission
  • No bottleneck at the end
  • Reduces waste as others stay up to date
  • Improved transparency and info sharing
  • Teams establish ways of working & esprit du corps
  • Improves estimating by allowing historical comparisons
  • Team controls their own commitments
  • Sustainable development
Implementing SAFe in Consumer Electronics

Today SAFe is practiced by all of TomTom’s large product teams representing navigation software, online services, map creation and sports software. That represents approximately 750 FTEs, with 200+ trained and certified in SAFe.

Their 32-page case study is well worth the read as it summarizes their experience over a 5-year period, revealing both wins and challenges. Their breakdown of the “Good” the “Bad,” and the “Ugly,” makes it particularly interesting for any large enterprise wanting to understand the ins and outs of a real world SAFe adoption.

A special thanks to TomTom’s  James Janisse, VP Connected Navigation System, and Han Schaminee, SVP Location Technology Products, for sharing your story.

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SK Hynix Memory Solutions – Adopting SAFe to Improve Enterprise-grade SSDs Production

SK Hynix Memory Solutions - SAFe to Improve Enterprise-grade SSDs Production

Industry:

Technology, Semiconductors

Overview

SK hynix memory solutions (SKHMS) is a subsidiary of  the SK Hynix, Inc, which ranks #82 in the Fortune Global 500, and is the 5th largest semiconductor company in the world. Hynix memory is used by Apple, Asus, Google, IBM, Dell, and Hewlett Packard, as well as in products such as DVD players, cellular phones, set-top boxes, personal digital assistants, networking equipment, and hard disk drives.

Being a leading provider of custom system-on-chip (SOC) solutions for the solid state disk (SSD) storage market, SKHMS wanted to maintain their competitive edge via relentless improvement for producing enterprise grade SSDs. They teamed up with Scaled Agile Gold Partner, CPrime, to assess areas of improvement, and to understand the major impediments in their product delivery life-cycle. They gave careful attention to:

SAFe to Improve Enterprise-grade SSDs Production
  • How hardware was coordinated with firmware development.
  • How testing was conducted throughout the current PDLC process.
  • Departments involved in building and delivering the product.
  • How often these products were released to the customer and/or to the market.
  • Source code management and build deployment.
  • Tooling in place to support the Agile pilot.
  • The U-Curve optimization (analysis of transaction costs) for delivering work.

They ultimately chose SAFe as the Framework best equipped for agility transformation and to address the complex issues often associated with the firmware development. Kicking off a 1-year pilot program, they started with 5 Scrum teams with 50 people to support their first Agile Release Train (ART), and set their Program Increments (PIs) at 3 months, with a two-week iteration cycle.

Software and Hardware Align Through Program Level, Value Stream

They decoupled the Hardware group from the Firmware ART because their work was not conducive to two week iterations with the Scrum Teams. Instead, the Hardware group worked in a Kanban like fashion with SLAs on their work based on the Backlog prioritization. For example, knowing what features were coming down the pipe, they were able to prioritize their own work and in some cases, put out proto-hardware for testing purposes during the Program Increment. This coordination was possible because representatives from the Hardware group attended critical Program level meetings as stakeholders and because they were part of the Value stream for delivering the product.

Early Results Reveal Tangible Value

The Pilot was off to a solid start and teams were embracing the change, and seeing the tangible value of using SAFe. The overall metrics and feedback indicated:

  • 60% improved transparency
  • 55% defect reduction rate
  • 50% improved service delivery predictability

The 8-page study, provided below, is well worth the read, as it includes helpful detail and insights that include:

  • Their Preparation Checklist
  • Program Backlog Prioritization
  • Business Value
  • Timing Criticality
  • Opportunity Enablement/Risk Reduction
  • Feature Analysis & Architurecture Design
  • PI Planning
  • Continuous Integration

A big Thank you! to Johnny Lam, Director at SKHMS, and Dr. Sanjeev Raman Enterprise Agile-Lean Coach from cPrime, for sharing your SAFe experience.

Download the Full Case Study

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Nordea – Adopting Agility with SAFe

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.

Agile Adoption with SAFe

IJI kick-started Nordea’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 Nordea’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.

Nordea’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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