Accenture – Benefits of SAFe in Professional Services

Introduction

As many companies struggle to implement Agile at scale in distributed environments, this case study describes Accenture’s experience enabling faster delivery and speed-to-market by implementing Agile programs using SAFe, along with adoption of DevOps principles. 

In the provided case study, Accenture shares its insights on addressing process, organization, and tool challenges, including:

• Solution misalignment between teams
• Integration of Agile with Waterfall
• Different timezones, customs, and cross-team activities
• Different DevOps tools between teams

Early Quantitative Benefits

The early benefits are compelling:

• 50% improvement in merge and retrofit (based on the actual effort tracked)

• 63% improvement in software configuration management (effort to support SCM activities)

• 59% improvement in quality costs (percentage of defects attributed to SCM and deployment)

• 90% improvement in build and deployment (process and effort to raise deployment requests)

Early Qualitative Benefits

• Improved demand management and traceability from portfolio through to Agile delivery teams

• Granular configuration management and traceability

• Integration with Agile lifecycle tools to allow story-based, configuration management driven from meta data

• Real-time traceability of status for build and deployment

• Automated build and deployments, including “one-button deployment”

• Developer efficiencies as a consequence of improved tool interaction times and processes