Royal Philips – Adopting SAFe for Agile Transition

“Philips is continuously driving to develop high-quality software in a predictable, fast and Agile way. SAFe addresses this primary goal, as well as offering these further benefits: reduced time to market and improved quality, stronger alignment across geographically distributed multi-disciplinary teams, and collaboration across teams to deliver meaningful value to customers with reduced cycle time.”

Sundaresan Jagadeesan, Program Manager – I2M Excellence SW Development Program

Challenge:

Philips sought to transition from traditional development to Agile, as well as bring an Agile mindset to business units beyond software to address the needs of a dynamic customer environment.

Industry:

Information Technology, Healthcare

Solution:

SAFe®

Results:

  • Average release cycle time down from 18 months to 6 months
  • Feature cycle time reduced from >240 to <100 days
  • Sprint and PI deliveries on time, leading to “release on demand”
  • Quality improvements—zero regressions in some business units
  • 5 major releases per train per year on demand

Best Practices:

Philips recommends a straightforward, 4-step approach for any organization aiming to transition to Agile

  • Develop products in the Agile way with focus on basic Agile practices (Scrum)
  • Establish product ownership with a focus on enabling scaling aspects (SAFe practices)
  • Establish a release pipeline with continuous integration (supported by automation)
  • Adopt a DevOps culture with focus on continuous delivery (to production environment)

Introduction

Netherlands-based Royal Philips is a $26 billion medical technology company committed to making the world healthier and more sustainable through innovation. Their goal is to improve the lives of 3 billion people a year by 2025, so being able to achieve faster time to market has a direct impact not just on bottom line, but on millions of lives as well.

Royal Philip’s Agile Transformation Journey

In 2014, the company began exploring the use of Agile methods to improve processes and increase efficiency across the organization. With a traditional, project-based approach to software development, release cycle time averaged 18 months. Philips had to accelerate delivery to meet market demands.

“Changing customer expectations and the tremendous pace of market disruptions require a framework and processes that are quick, scalable and responsive,” says Sundaresan Jagadeesan, Program Manager at Philips Electronic India Limited. “The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) with its non-linear approach and adaptability, is the way of the future.”

Vigorously Deploying SAFe

At Philips, the SAFe initiative fell within a program called I2M Excellence Idea to Market. The program is part of Accelerate!, a multi-year, worldwide business-transformation program designed to change the way the company does business and unlock its full potential. To that end, the company formed a foundational core of Scrum, upon which it could build SAFe practices.

“We chose SAFe to meet our goals of reducing time to market, improving quality, strengthening alignment across geographically distributed multi-disciplinary teams, and collaborating across teams to deliver meaningful value to customers with reduced cycle time,” says Jagadeesan.

Philips is now vigorously deploying SAFe in its software businesses and is piloting its use in complex systems environments (hardware, software, mechanical engineering, customer support and electrical teams). What’s more, the company has brought SAFe beyond software development to the R&D activities of a number of businesses, particularly in the Business Group, Healthcare Informatics, Solutions & Services (BG HISS).

Royal Philip’s Agile Transformation Journey

Driving Feature Cycle Time Down 58%

To date, Philips has 42 ARTs running across various business units, making this one of the larger-scale SAFe implementations. With a focus on the systems business, the company has launched multiple ARTs there as well, including the first ART in Philips China.

The results:

  • Average release cycle time down from 18 months to 6 months
  • A greater focus on the customer mindset
  • Feature cycle time reduced from >240 to <100 days
  • Sprint and PI deliveries on time, leading to “release on demand”
  • Quality improvements—zero regressions in some business units
  • 5 major releases per train per year on demand, each catering to multiple products
  • 3700+ people engaged in a SAFe way of working
  • Around 1300+ trained and formally certified in Agile and SAFe
  • Process and tooling alignment

The results from the original pilots caught the attention of and acted as catalyst for many other business units in Philips.

Agile Transformation Journey

Offering Key Learnings

Through this process, transition leaders at Royal Philips learned what worked most effectively. They found it important to embed the Agile mindset and approach in other crucial areas of work—not just R&D, but in areas such as HR, Finance and Q&R—to ensure streamlined, efficient processes and quicker turnaround times.

Philips also found it critical to involve the senior management and leadership team of the organization in this SAFe transitional journey.

“Finally, to ensure an effective move to Agile, it is critical to change mindsets within the organization,” Jagadeesan says. “Agile implies continuous learning as enterprise behavior, decentralized decision-making, quick adaptiveness and more.”

“Any transformation program will be successful if you actively seek and solve business problems,” he adds.

Philips Royal recommends a number of organizational and cultural changes for any company making this transformation:

  • Create an environment that encourages proactive, feedback-seeking behavior
  • Motivate teams and give them the autonomy they need to function well
  • Engage in courageous conversations
  • Enable cultural change in the organization
  • Focus on building teams for the long run with emphasis on stability
  • Trust the team to solve problems by “teaching them to fish” instead of fishing for them
  • Enable teams and support them by removing impediments
  • Differentiate between outcome (value generated) and output (velocity-productivity improvements)
  • Identify value streams and optimize around value to help the alignment and effective collaboration across the team
  • Gain stakeholder alignment, and leadership commitment and support
  • Train and coach based on roles
  • Have a deployment strategy and change leaders’ coalition to help accelerate scaled Agile transformation

“Our Agile transformation journey is successfully underway,” says Jagadeesan. “It has been a tremendous learning experience, and we continue to deliver value to all our stakeholders and customers. Agile learning is an enriching and fun-filled journey!”

Back to: All Case Studies

Suggested Case Study:

Easterseals Northern California

Elekta – Adopting SAFe for a Successful Lean-Agile Transformation

Elekta is a human care company pioneering clinical solutions for treating cancer and brain disorders. They develop sophisticated, state-of-the-art tools and treatment planning systems for radiation therapy, radiosurgery and brachytherapy, as well as workflow enhancing software systems across the spectrum of cancer care. Headquartered in Stockholm, Elekta employs around 3,800 employees globally in 30 countries.

Industry:

Software

Overview

Every day 100,000 patients receive diagnosis, treatment or follow-up by an Elekta solution

Elekta’s development goal is to enhance patient and customer value by providing solutions that improve, prolong and save lives better and faster. With teams working in several time zones, and individual members having different backgrounds and history working on separate products, their challenge was to create an environment where teams could better align with global priorities and with each other.

Elekta - Adopting SAFe for a Successful Lean-Agile Transformation

In 2007, Elekta adopted Scrum, but in their attempt to scale up, they saw that the Scrum teams were operating in silos which created issues with dependency, integration, and visibility of the big picture, all causing lack of clarity on overall objectives and plan. Wanting to address all areas of the enterprise, Elekta took a holistic view and introduced SAFe to their Scrum teams, launching their first Agile Release Train (ART) in 2013. Soon thereafter, they expanded to the Program level and trained all of their teams.

Today, Elekta is running 4 ARTs with 20 teams across three continents. Their SAFe journey has delivered significant gains and improvements in several areas, provided valuable lessons learned, as well as a roadmap to refine their value streams, and tackle ongoing challenges, including a deeper integration of Lean-Agile practices at the Portfolio level. Here are the highlights:

Introduction of SAFe Led to Key Changes in the Organization

  • Introduced Rally for Agile project management
  • Adopted organization and roles for SAFe (RTE, PM/PO, UX, EA, Agile coaches)
  • Streamlined development tooling and processes
  • Updated the Quality System for Agile development
  • Simplified project time reporting

Gains Made Through Introduction of SAFe

  • Improved quality
  • Cross site and cross functional collaboration
  • PI Planning provides both vertical and horizontal alignment
  • Transparency through Rally, reports, and  SAFe ceremonies
  • Agile Portfolio estimation & planning drives realistic Portfolio plan

Elekta’s Top 3 Tips for Starting up SAFe

  • Get buy-in from management—this is not isolated to development
  • Plan for a lot of training and exchange of practices to ensure an understanding of the principles behind (the mechanics are easy to learn). Bring in consultants/experts!
  • Use Agile to introduce it (don’t wait until everything is planned and in control, just start!)

Take a moment to read the Speaker notes in the PowerPoint; you’ll see that Elekta has been generous with sharing some of the context and nuance that can be especially helpful for anyone going through a SAFe transformation.

Many thanks to Elekta’s Director of Engineering, Petrine Herbai, Manager of Engineering, Lars Gusch, and our Gold Partner, Rally Software; we appreciate all the great information you have shared, and look forward to hearing more about your continuing journey of SAFe transformation.

Many thanks to Elekta’s Director of Engineering, Petrine Herbai, Manager of Engineering, Lars Gusch, and our Gold Partner, Rally Software; we appreciate all the great information you have shared, and look forward to hearing more about your continuing journey of transformation.

Share:

Back to: All Case Studies

Suggested Case Study: Royal Philips