Category: Thought Leadership

Three Key Components of Healthy Agile Transformations

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Blog banner: Ensure your transformation lives a long life

Improving your health is important so you can live a longer life. The same goes for your Agile transformation.

Certain habits improve your transformation’s health. Like eating healthy and working out do for our bodies.

I’ve seen these habits improve and sustain Agile transformations in many organizations:

  • Change leaders pave the way
  • Strategy connects directly to the work
  • People strategies activate engagement

Each of these habits signals your organization embraces real change. And embracing change is the foundation of a sustainable Agile transformation.

Restating the three bullet points

Change Leaders Pave the Way

Leadership is the most important part of a healthy Agile transformation. I’d go as far as saying leaders can make or break transformation efforts.

So leadership teams must lead the change for it to stick. They do this by leading by example at all levels of the organization (from the portfolio to Agile teams).

Change leaders also follow SAFe® Lean-Agile Principles and Core Values when making decisions.

Principles and values guide decisions

Leaders should embrace and demonstrate the principles and values in their leadership roles. And consult them when making a change to one of their transformation strategies.

Easterseals demonstrates one way to apply this thinking in this customer story. The company applied SAFe starting with Lean-Agile leadership. They placed change leaders in key roles. And then added the principles and structures to guide their decisions.

Some organizations disregard the principles and values to tailor SAFe. They make this modification to fit SAFe into their culture. But this creates an anti-pattern.

These modifications may include:

  • Changing the names of the roles identified in the Framework
  • Picking and choosing which ceremonies to hold
  • Training leaders on SAFe without proper leadership coaching and guidance

SAFe is not a prescriptive framework. Yet it’s important to maintain its foundational principles and values. This ensures a healthy Agile transformation.

Read more about how to apply the SAFe Core Values in a work setting here.

Operational excellence objectives facilitate improvements

Change leaders extend their reach through Lean-Agile Communities of Excellence (LACE). LACEs should share transformation learnings across portfolios. This aligns each portfolio to Lean-Agile practices and leadership. It also helps to create a Continuous Learning Culture.

Transformation leaders in the LACE should also spearhead improvement initiatives within the organization. Also, they should focus on cross-training initiatives. This solves bottlenecks and other flow issues.

Leadership sponsorship extends beyond sustaining to accelerating change

In a healthy Agile transformation, leadership doesn’t stop at sponsoring the change. They go as far as participating in and accelerating the change.

When this does not happen, the following pattern can occur.

A Fortune 100 large enterprise pivoted from Waterfall to Agile. (Notice Lean was not even part of the conversation).

Leadership did not choose the method for this transformation. Instead, they pushed this decision to the leaders in each business unit.

You can only imagine what happened. Some business leaders chose SAFe. Others tried a hybrid approach and pulled practices from several Agile frameworks. Others decided to ‘baby step’ it and start with small teams. None of the teams in this ‘small team’ example took into account all the dependencies on the other teams.

Six months in, one leader asked: “Where can I get a holistic view of our product delivery and how we are tracking against all our initiatives?”

With so many frameworks and practices in play, there was no easy way to answer this.

Other impacts?

Business units often worked on initiatives with other business units. But they did not have a common cadence. Or alignment on dependencies or ceremonies. It became chaotic to figure out how to execute together to deliver on business requests.

If leadership selected one framework and language, that would have united the organization. And made the transformation smoother.

This example demonstrates why leadership needs to extend beyond sponsorship to participation. It ensures a transformation’s health and, thus, long-lived success.

Strategy Connects Directly to Daily work

Leadership is in place. Now what? Everyone in a healthy Agile transformation engages in their work. To improve employee engagement, show employees how their work makes a difference.

Make this connection through transparency about your strategies. Show how they align with your enterprise’s Vision and Mission.

How do you make this a healthy habit? By sharing updates during all hands or other standing company-wide meetings.

One way Scaled Agile, Inc. shows its employees how they’re impacting enterprise strategy is through color coding. We assign each strategic theme a specific color (on brand, of course). In System Demo, the agenda is color-coded by the corresponding strategic theme.

screenshot of recent system demo with color coding by strategic theme
Agenda from a recent system demo

This transparency is important, especially when the strategy must pivot. It’s important employees understand the following before any work stops or changes:

  • Learnings from the pivot
  • The reason for the pivot

Be thoughtful about how you communicate this information with your organization. This is work that many spend the majority, if not all, of their time on. It’s important to be sensitive to this.

Porsche shared an example of strategy transparency at the 2021 SAFe Summit. Their executive leadership committed to how they wanted to work. And which KPIs they would drive with their products. Leadership did this on stage in front of the entire digital division. This commitment launched the digital sector into its first ARTs and PI Planning.

This shared strategy gave employees a reason to stay engaged with their work. They knew they were working towards a common goal across the digital department.

Once employees understand company strategy, they can connect it to their daily work. This connection is important for improving engagement too. Engagement is the final piece of maintaining a healthy Agile transformation.

People Strategies Activate Engagement

One indicator of a transformation’s health is its most important asset: people. To keep your transformation healthy, you must keep your people happy. One way to do this is through actively engaging them in their roles.

Generate future-focused learning opportunities with paths for Agile roles

If employees see growth opportunities, they will likely remain at their current company.

See these recently updated articles for career development inspiration:

Each article includes role descriptions by category. These descriptions provide opportunities for growth in each of these Agile roles.

specific responsibilities for each Agile role

Organizations can create paths and learning opportunities based on these role-specific focus areas.

Refresh engagement strategies to align with the current workforce

When employees were asked, “What’s one thing that keeps you from being engaged?” they responded with the following reasons:

  • No autonomy
  • Lack of safe space
  • No clear career direction
  • Lack of vision and inspiration
  • Missing feedback

As mentioned in the previous section, engagement creates happier, more motivated employees. Happier and more motivated employees sustain a healthy Agile transformation.

If your engagement strategies need a refresh, try these suggestions:

  • Overhaul outdated engagement strategies
  • Align intent with your organization’s social purpose
  • Facilitate a relational and emotional connection with employees
  • Generate future-focused learning opportunities
  • Transform your ceremonies into learning socials
  • Connect individual contributions to the organizational vision
  • Minimize disruptions to allow for flow
  • Look for patterns of inattentional blindness
  • Meet people where they are
  • Co-create a path to re-engage

To learn more about people engagement strategies, watch my talk from the 2022 SAFe Summit. It’s on the SAFe Community Platform: In It to Win It! People Engagement Strategies to Propel your SAFe Transformation. (Tip: Command + F search the talk title or scroll to the Leading the Change section of the page.)

Connect people to the Vision, Mission, and each other

In a remote/hybrid post-COVID environment, it can feel like you’re working on an island. It’s hard to feel connected to the people you no longer share an office space with.

This connection is important for creating a healthy Agile transformation. Connect people to the following to remind them what they’re working for:

  • The organization’s Vision
  • The organization’s Mission
  • Each other

It gives them the drive to work through the uncomfortable parts of transforming.

Ways you can connect people in your organization:

  • Schedule volunteer opportunities for teams
  • Add standing mystery 1:1s to the company calendar
  • Share rotating appreciations for individual team
  • Highlight positive customer experiences, interactions, or success milestones
  • Champion learning networks

Conclusion

It takes work to maintain your health. Maintaining the health of your transformation is no different. Incorporate these three components into your Agile transformation. It will give you a strong foundation for sustainable change. And prolong your Agile transformation life.

Other resources to incorporate into your transformation routine. You can think of them like supplements if we’re sticking to the health metaphor:

About Audrey Boydston

Audrey Boydston is a senior consultant at Scaled Agile

Audrey Boydston is a senior consultant at Scaled Agile and an experienced SPCT, Lean-Agile coach, trainer, and facilitator. Her work focuses on continuous learning, building fundamentals, re-orienting around principles, and helping clients—from senior executives to developers—build networks and communities that support their transformations.

View all posts by Audrey Boydston

Adopting ABC – AI, Big Data, and the Cloud

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How the Business Agility Value Stream will prepare you to win in the post-digital economy with AI, big data, and the cloud.

Introduction

At the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, Dean Leffingwell presented the idea that we are at the threshold of a new technological revolution. A post-digital economy that’s being driven by the adoption of ABC: artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and the cloud. Dean further explained how the Business Agility Value Stream (BAVS) creates a system that will allow businesses to rapidly react to the insights provided by ABC.

If you’re anything like me, listening to Dean’s talk generated many different ideas. In fact, several weeks passed before I went back and re-listened to the keynote to identify the core intent of the talk.

Those insights are what I’m sharing with you today: an understanding of the BAVS and how the concepts of ABC fit into the future of organizations using SAFe.

The Business Agility Value Stream

The value stream construct has been discussed in every version of SAFe dating back to SAFe 2.5 (2013). However, the conversation wasn’t top-of-mind until SAFe5 and the introduction of SAFe Lean-Agile Principle #10, Organize Around Value.

Now, and rightfully so, every organization that seeks to embrace SAFe is challenged to identify and optimize how value reaches the customer via their operational value streams (OVSs). We then challenge organizations to go a step further and optimize the relationship between the OVS, its supporting development value streams (DVSs), and the Agile Release Trains (ARTs) that realize them by considering complexities of the business architecture, technical architecture, and how the people who support the systems are dispersed. 

We do our best to support SAFe enterprises and SPCs in this difficult conversation with the Value Stream and ART Identification workshop, and the newly released Value Stream Mapping workshop (both are available on the SAFe Community Platform). Even with the assets and expert consulting available, changing and optimizing the system to focus on outcomes instead of outputs is no small undertaking. And for what purpose?

Though optimizing these value streams is a goal, we must also consider why optimized value streams are so important and what to do with them.

Enter the BAVS.

business agility stream

Powered by optimized OVSs and DVSs, the BAVS puts those charged with strategy in a position to: 

  • Sense market opportunities
  • Formulate a hypothesis to exploit the identified opportunity via the Lean Business Case
  • Gain alignment and approval to pursue an MVP through Lean Portfolio Management (LPM)
  • Organize around value by introducing the MVP to existing ARTs (or if needed, standing up a new ART)
  • Leverage the tools of Agile product management and design thinking
  • Develop a customer-focused solution
  • Deliver the MVP in 2–6 months via the continuous delivery pipeline
  • Monitor the solution in LPM to determine if the hypothesis holds true or needs to be reconsidered
  • Continue to deliver value and learn until the business opportunity has been fully leveraged

What is ABC?

With the system optimized and the BAVS in place, you are likely now left wondering how the enterprise is expected to sense emerging business opportunities. Though expertise and experience continue to play a role in how opportunities are addressed, we can no longer afford to guess where the next opportunity lies. Partly because an uninformed guess is full of risk to revenue, team stability, and market reputation, but mostly because uninformed guesses could rapidly destroy a business. In the post-digital economy, the amount of time required for an organization to recognize an opportunity, ruminate about how to address it, and then put the plan into action is far greater than the window of opportunity will remain open.

This is where ABC comes in—its three elements power the modern decision engine. 

AI

There are bound to be some really cool applications for AI, but I suspect that the majority will be less dramatic than its portrayal in Hollywood. For many of our organizations, AI will be put to use to address customer service, mitigate fraud and other risks, optimize development processes, and identify emerging trends in data. In terms of the BAVS, when leveraged, AI will serve as the trigger that identifies market opportunities and threats that the BAVS will respond to through business insights, operational efficiencies, and intelligent customer solutions.

Big Data

For AI to work effectively, the algorithms require access to large amounts of data—the more the better. Fortunately, many companies have decades worth of historical data and are collecting more each day. The problem that many organizations are addressing is how to pool that data into an easily accessible common format, but that is a conversation for another day. 

Data is the answer. And for it to power organizations, it cannot be bound by organizational politics or structures. The key to enterprise success in the next digital age is in the organization’s data. We only need to ask the right questions of the data. 

Cloud

With so much data and so much analysis required to make sense of it all, we are fortunate to live in the age of infinitely scalable infrastructure via the cloud. Imagine 15 years ago the amount of work required to bring 100 new CPUs online to address a complex problem. An undertaking of this magnitude would have required new servers, racks, bandwidth, electricity, and a facility to store the new hardware. It would have taken months to a year or longer to bring online.

Today, we can scale our infrastructure to nearly infinite capacity with the touch of a button, and descale it nearly as fast. We have the capacity (cloud), we have the resources (data), and we have the capability (AI) to win in the post-digital economy. The only thing that stands in the way of exploiting those elements is changing our system of work to keep pace.

What Will You Do with ABC?

The purpose of the Scaled Agile Framework is to help organizations thrive in this technological revolution and those that are sure to come. The mission of SAFe is to work differently and build the future. The path to achieving our mission and purpose is constantly evolving with the world of business and technology. Though we don’t claim to have all of the answers, we’re confident that we can provide the tools and intent to help organizations solve for their own unique context.

The BAVS is the latest evolution of a perspective that started nearly eight years ago with improving the delivery of technology to the enterprise. We’re excited to see what organizations do with ABC and how their BAVS delivers value and change to the world. Especially as all we do becomes more interconnected and the true possibilities of the near-limitless potential of people become more apparent.

About Adam Mattis

Adam Mattis headshot

Adam Mattis is a SAFe Fellow and a SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT) at Scaled Agile with many years of experience overseeing SAFe implementations across a wide range of industries. He’s also an experienced transformation architect, engaging speaker, energetic trainer, and a regular contributor to the broader Lean-Agile and educational communities. Learn more about Adam at adammattis.com.

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The Unparalleled Value of Emotional Intelligence – Business Agility Value Stream – Part Two

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If you’ve read the first post in my blog series, you may have been inspired to think about how the emotional intelligence competencies manifest in every step of the business agility value stream. From identifying and sensing the opportunity to learning and adapting to ultimately delivering on the business opportunity. So, if we can measure emotional intelligence competencies, my hypothesis is that they, directly and indirectly, impact flow and outcomes as well.

Let’s go step by step in the business agility value stream and see how applying emotional intelligence directly impacts flow and outcomes.

business agility

Sensing the opportunity involves market research, data analysis, customer feedback, and directly observing customers in the marketplace. Applying your own self-regulation, empathy, and social skills can help you have more productive empathy interviews, obtain less-biased, face-to-face research, and control how you react to customer feedback. 

This key step in the organizational agility competency involves not only leaders applying ‘go see’, but offering the same ‘go see’ opportunities to other key roles in the development value stream so that they can better understand and reason about the problem to solve. This expands the social networks so that they can apply and evolve their emotional intelligence competencies to effectively communicate, pitch, reason, and articulate effective hypothesis statements that inspire and engage innovation.

Funding the minimum viable product (MVP) requires the motivation and social skills to help drive change, innovate, and communicate intent at scale. We all know this isn’t easy. It requires you to craft the “why” and use your social skills of influence and conflict management to negotiate and secure the funds. Some of the recommendations from the Lean Portfolio Management competency where we can leverage these social skills include:

  • Engage in participatory budgeting
  • Establish flow and stakeholder engagement through the portfolio Kanban system
  • Roadmap the portfolio
  • Integrate enterprise architecture and SMEs
  • Realize epics
  • Establish Lean budgets and guardrails 

Organizing around value requires even more of the social skills around communication, building new bonds, and fostering the information coherence necessary to build some of the world’s most complex systems. As well as the ability to connect to the customer so that our people embrace and understand what value they’re trying to deliver.

Team and technical agility and organizational agility not only aid in building these bonds but can leverage and grow all of the emotional intelligence competencies of self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. This can be amplified with the coveted help from our scrum masters and RTEs. 

Connect to the customer leverages our Agile product delivery and enterprise solution competencies and their design thinking skills to listen, reflect, empathize, and connect with the people for whom we’re designing solutions. 

This requires going deep into the empathy competency of emotional intelligence by leveraging our service-orientation mindset so that we can foresee, recognize, and meet customer needs. Diversity is also important for the ongoing development of opportunities and awareness in all societies and social circles. If we can evolve the empathy competency in all aspects of product and solution delivery, we have the opportunity to excel beyond our competitors in delivering value. 

Delivering that MVP calls upon our product and solution delivery folks to lead, and our social networks to collaborate, iterate, communicate, and deliver using their motivation and social skills. It also pulls highly on our social networks to have courage, collaborate and cooperate, take risks, and instrument rapid change so that we can learn and adapt to our ever-changing market landscapes.

Pivot or persevere pulls on the need for empathy when things don’t turn out as desired and the time comes to pivot or persevere. Our Lean portfolio management fiduciaries reason about the data, facts, and outcomes of the MVP and could quite possibly pivot to a direction of a higher cost of delay at any moment. This means we need to abandon our emotional attachment to what we created and turn to the next-highest value delivery. Self-regulation and empathy both play strongly in this step of the business agility value stream. Having the emotional awareness of why our folks are for or against any change in this step can help mitigate any delays in fostering rapid change and learning. 

Deliver value continuously imposes that our product and solution delivery people and ARTs always work together to share knowledge, build out that continuous delivery pipeline, and innovate. The continuous delivery pipeline and our DevOps mindset enable that fast-feedback loop to foster our continuous learning culture. Our iterative and incremental heartbeat also facilitates that continuous value delivery and learning cycle. All require using our social skills to grow and enable knowledge transfer and information coherence so that the social network can continue to thrive and innovate.

Our learn and adapt cycle is integral to the process, Measuring our emotional intelligence competencies will help us learn and grow our own selves alongside the SAFe core competencies. After all, if we don’t learn about ourselves, how can we show up with our truest authenticity to grow and foster that continuous learning culture?

Lean-Agile leadership enables the business agility value stream, as does the evolution of everyone’s emotional intelligence. Leaders model and leverage all of the emotional intelligence competencies so that our development value streams can evolve both their business agility competencies and their emotional competencies. If we don’t consider human emotion, we can inhibit flow, people shut down and lose their motivation, and thus jeopardize providing value to our customers.

business agility

Now, if the business agility value stream is a perspective across operational and development value streams, then the benefits, interactions, and human impacts that the emotional intelligence of the development value stream network provides to the operational value stream will propagate and evolve. The interactions and modeling of emotional intelligence will have a bi-directional impact that will engage and accelerate the operational value stream in delivering value. 

I hope I’ve provided a perspective that it’s not just mastering the SAFe business agility process competencies that enable business agility. The evolution of human emotional intelligence impacts the flow and outcomes of the business agility value stream every step of the way. As I mentioned in part 1 of this blog series, Goleman’s personal competencies of self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation fuel our human agency and our ability to manage our own emotions. The social competencies of empathy and social skills fuel how we handle relationships. Together, the evolution of emotional intelligence within our organization increases our ability to deliver value to our customers, as well as value to our individual people. What enterprise doesn’t want that?

At this point, you may be asking, “Well, how can I bring these into my SAFe transformation and journey toward business agility?” 

Here are a few techniques to get you started on your emotional intelligence journey:

  • Start with you. Allow time for self-reflection, self-work, and to recharge yourself. Leverage your retrospectives, your own personal plan-do-check-adjust cycles, and the teaming activities to evolve your emotional intelligence competencies. Integrate some emotional intelligence workshops with your leaders and teams to help evolve and experience the competencies, starting with self-awareness and self-regulation. This will help build trust so you can continue to unfold into the deeper and perhaps more sensitive competencies of empathy and social skills. 
  • Grow your own internal and external coaching network. In the same way that sports teams need coaches, our operational and development value streams and the individuals within them need coaches too. They help with all aspects of emotional intelligence, wherever folks may need or want assistance. They can provide the tools and techniques to become more self-aware, provide exercises for self-regulation and motivation, and practice empathy. Not to mention offer assistance to help people evolve their social skills. And even more powerful, coaches model the behaviors so that our social networks can lean into what they see and learn.
  • Create a community of practice around the competencies and practices. In the latest Leading by Example module that Scaled Agile released, one of the beautiful outcomes was a cohort that trusted each other and was willing to share their deepest challenges with authenticity. This type of network provides the power of a safe space that people can always come back to, to practice, share ideas and concerns, and grow without judgement or fear.
  • Help evolve assessments around Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence Competency Framework. And measure the evolution within your people and the enterprise. You’ll start to see some correlations between the SAFe measurements of flow, competencies, and outcomes.
  • Share with our community. We’d love to hear how evolving your enterprise intelligence will help your employees achieve their aspirations and help customers receive better products and solutions.

And, reach out to me. I’d love to hear how it’s going so I can learn and grow with you! I may not have been born with emotional intelligence but I’m passionate about learning and evolving with you. Find me on LinkedIn.

About Jennifer Fawcett

Jennifer is a retired, empathetic Lean and Agile leader, practitioner,

Jennifer is a retired, empathetic Lean and Agile leader, practitioner, coach, speaker, and consultant. A SAFe® Fellow, she has contributed to and helped develop SAFe content and courseware. Her passion and focus have been in delivering value in the workplace and by creating communities and culture through effective product management, product ownership, executive portfolio coaching, and leadership. She has provided dedicated service in these areas to technology companies for over 35 years. Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn.

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The Unparalleled Value of Emotional Intelligence, Part One

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Not everyone is born with emotional intelligence. Most people associate intelligence with IQ (intelligence quotient), a number that represents a person’s reasoning ability, measured using problem-solving tests. Emotional intelligence is a series of learned human behaviors that can also be measured.

And some of the science behind it confirms that emotional intelligence is a better indicator of how well a person will succeed in their career. It can also be a measurement of value that can determine whether or not a company is progressing toward business agility.

This blog post is based on Daniel Goleman’s work; he has about 16 books written on the topic. The one that I gravitated to was Working with Emotional Intelligence because it has a framework around the competencies that we can grow. That framework goes deep into self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. I’ve worked with all of those competencies to help evolve SAFe transformations. Why? Because evolving one’s emotional intelligence is germane to the critical roles, events, and activities that occur. Emotional intelligence competencies affect the human aspect of change, the natural resistance to change, and the ability to inspire everyone around shifts in direction, visions, and ultimately, value. 

I personally find the topic fascinating. In the title of Goleman’s book, “Working” is the key word. Emotional intelligence isn’t something we’re born with, and honestly, not everyone chooses to “work” with this type of awareness and the elements that support their growth.

Goleman categorizes five dimensions of emotional intelligence:

Self-awareness

Self-regulation

Motivation

Empathy

Social skills

emotional intelligence

And those five dimensions fall into two buckets: personal competence, and social competence. He cites each competency that supports them as independent (each makes a unique contribution to your job or life performance), interdependent (each draws to a certain extent upon others, with some strong interactions), and hierarchical (the emotional intelligence competencies build upon each other). Goleman goes on to say that they are all necessary, but not sufficient. In other words, having emotional intelligence does not guarantee that you’ll develop or display competencies such as collaboration or leadership, which are crucial in any SAFe transformation. Other factors such as your organization’s climate or culture or your personal interest in your job, will highly influence how the competencies manifest.

And finally, the dimensions are generic. They all apply to most jobs, yet some jobs will require differing competence demands. For example, you’ll leverage some of them for different career paths within or outside SAFe transformations. 

  • Product managers, product owners, and architects will mostly likely lean on their motivation and empathy capabilities to share and inspire others through their vision, backlogs, and value to customers.
  • Release train engineers will lean on empathy and their social skills to foster healthy, thriving, innovative teams.
  • Operations folks will leverage their personal motivation and social skills to reach out to developers and teams to see how they can help and evolve the CALMR side of our DevOps practices.
  • And our c-suite of leaders and business owners will absolutely lean on most, if not all, of the competencies. Either way, in respect to those we serve, these competencies all have a long-lasting impact on organizations and humanity as a whole.

Hard Skills, Not Soft Skills

Now, you may not think you care about what some refer to as “soft skills.” The reality is that emotional intelligence represents hard skills and they have a long-lasting impact on how the people around you will ultimately behave and perform. These skills are probably the most difficult to embody because you have to work on yourself, make yourself vulnerable, and be emotionally transparent and available. And you have to show up for those major events with perhaps your highest level of awareness and the associated intelligence on how you handle your emotions. Holding successful events such as PI planning, participatory budgeting, value stream identification workshops, visioning, inspect and adapt, are just some of the critical activities within SAFe that absolutely depend on you working with your emotional intelligence competencies.

Here’s a summary of Goleman’s emotional competencies, and some advice on how you can apply them in your world.

Personal competence

We use self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation to manage ourselves. And to recognize and understand our moods, emotions, and drives, as well as the effect they have on others. When we’re building our development value streams and designing our ARTs, this is critical. 

Self-awareness is knowing yourself, your internal states, your preferences and impulses, your cognitive resources, and your intuitions. Having self-awareness allows us to show up with humility and vulnerability around who we are and how we behave. This competency directly impacts our culture and how we learn together. 

Self-regulation builds upon self-awareness. It teaches you how to regulate and manage your internal states and your impulses. Being able to self-regulate enables you to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods—and to suspend judgment so that you think before you act. Self-regulation requires you, as a leader, to take time for yourself, recharge your batteries, reflect, and learn how you can improve. Self-regulation impacts SAFe implementations in many ways. Imagine you’re in that meeting where the in-house “un-self-aware” leader shows up with their own agenda and aggressively promotes their views—without listening, self-regulating, or empathizing with others. The result? Attendees shut down, feel disengaged, unheard, and even worse, not valued as humans. Now, imagine you’re in the same meeting where your most evolved, self-aware, and self-regulated leader shows up. This leader listens, empathizes, self-regulates their opinions, and engages the views inclusive of the entire group. People feel heard, appreciated, and excited to be a part of something. Which meeting do you think will have better outcomes?

Motivation includes the emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate us in reaching our goals. Motivation embodies a passion to work for reasons that go beyond money or status. This is our inner drive to pursue goals with energy and persistence. What motivates us to pursue a hobby or to give back? And how do we show up, lead, and inspire with motivation? Motivation directly impacts how we get behind a vision and mission, and invest our passions and emotions into delivering value to our customers.

Social competence

I mentioned that personal competence, the first area of emotional intelligence, is a foundation or prerequisite for social competence. That’s because self-awareness is critical to be empathetic and grow the social skills required to scale. Why is that?

In order to work with emotional intelligence and grow our personal competence, we need to know ourselves intimately and be self-aware of our own behaviors. Once we develop that human agency, which includes self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation within ourselves, we open up our personal aperture to model this behavior. And to help others and our organization authentically fuel and support that second operating system. That second operating system encompasses our social networks, our development value streams, and our Agile Release Trains (ARTs). Our development value streams are our people, aligned to a common goal or mission of delivering value to our customers.

Knowing yourself fuels the social competence dimensions of empathy and social skills.

These determine how we handle relationships. And in our SAFe enterprises, our social networks and social competence, and the development value streams in which they live, are critical for delivering value and the economics that fuel our enterprise mission. These competencies foster communication, knowledge transfer, and information coherence, which attempts to describe how much information in the current state of communication will remain after the state goes through the channel. The channel includes your teams, your ARTs, your developers, and ultimately, your business partners and customers. All are critical to delivering value to customers.

The first element within the social competence dimension is empathy. This is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It’s the awareness of others’ needs, concerns, pains, and what it is they want to gain. 

From a scaling Agile and business agility perspective, social skills competencies are probably most important because they shape proficiency in inducing desirable responses in others.

They are deep and include adeptness in influence, communication, conflict management, leadership, initiating or managing change, building bonds, and collaboration. They also create group synergy in our teams’ capabilities. Think about it. Aren’t these all learned behaviors that we encounter every day in our SAFe transformations?

The premise of this blog post is that emotional intelligence has an unparalleled value that can be measured. But how? Emotional intelligence seems like a personal journey. But if we know this is important personally, then it has to have an impact at scale. And when we look at SAFe measurements of flow, outcomes, and competencies, they seem logical to measure from an emotional competence perspective as well. After all, we measure all the other competencies, why not emotional intelligence?

Learn More

If you attended the Global SAFe Summit but didn’t catch my talk about emotional intelligence, watch it on-demand here. Read Daniel Goleman’s book Working with Emotional Intelligence to evolve your emotional intelligence journey.

In the next post in my blog series, I’ll discuss how the emotional intelligence competencies, directly and indirectly, impact SAFe’s Business Agility Value Stream. And how you can leverage them for better results from a flow and outcomes perspective.

About Jennifer Fawcett

Jennifer is a retired, empathetic Lean and Agile leader,

Jennifer is a retired, empathetic Lean and Agile leader, practitioner, coach, speaker, and consultant. A SAFe Fellow, she has contributed to and helped develop SAFe content and courseware. Her passion and focus have been in delivering value in the workplace and by creating communities and culture through effective product management, product ownership, executive portfolio coaching, and leadership. She has provided dedicated service in these areas to technology companies for over 35 years. Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn.

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Three Steps to Prepare for a Successful Value Stream Workshop – SAFe Transformation

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two people talking to each other at a Value Stream Workshop

The Value Stream and Agile Release Train (ART) identification workshop are some of the most critical steps to generate meaningful results from your SAFe transformation. That’s because it enables you to respond faster to customer needs by organizing around value. This workshop can also be the hardest step. It’s complex and politically charged, so organizations often skip or mismanage it.

A savvy change agent would invest in the organizational and cultural readiness to improve the chances of its success. Attempting to shortcut or breeze through change readiness would be the same as putting your foot on the brake at the same time you’re trying to accelerate. Get this workshop right, and you’ll be well on your way to a successful SAFe implementation.

Why Is It So Difficult? 

Aside from the complex mechanics of identifying your value streams, there is also a people component that adds to the challenge. Leaders are often misaligned about the implications of the workshop, and it can be tough to get the right participants to attend.  For example, a people leader could soon realize that ARTs may be organized in a way that crosses multiple reporting relationships, raising the concern of their direct reports joining ARTs that don’t report to them. 

In reflecting on my battle scars from the field, I’ve distilled my advice to three steps to prepare the organization for a successful workshop.

Step 1: Engage the right participants

The Value Stream and ART identification workshop can only be effective and valuable if the right audience is present and engaged. This is the first step to ensure the outcome of the workshop solves for the whole system and breaks through organizational silos.

“… and If you can’t come, send no one.” —W. Edwards Deming

The required attendees will fall into four broad categories:

  • Executives and leaders with the authority required to form ARTs that cut across silos.
  • Business owners and stakeholders who can speak to the operational activities of the business, including ones with security and compliance concerns.
  • Technical design authorities and development managers who can identify impacted systems and are responsible for the people who are working on them.
  • Lean-Agile Center of Excellence and change agents supporting the SAFe implementation and facilitating the workshop.

Use some guiding questions to identify the right audience for the workshop within your organization. Are the participants empowered to make organizational decisions? Do the participants represent the whole value stream? Is the number of attendees within a reasonable range to make effective decisions?

Step 2: Build leadership support and pre-align expectations

To support engagement and address potential resistance, I recommend performing a series of interactions with leaders in advance of the workshop. In such interactions, the change agent would socialize a crisp and compelling case for change in the organization, supporting the “why” behind running the workshop.

The change agent needs to be prepared to address leader trepidation about the possibility of having their reporting-line personnel on ARTs that they don’t fully own.  Most compelling is a data-based case made by performing value-stream mapping with real project data to expose the delays in value delivery due to organizational handoffs. 

Interaction opportunities can include one-on-one empathy interviews, attending staff meetings, internal focus groups, and overview sessions open to all workshop participants. 

I highly advise setting expectations with leaders in advance of the workshop. This will help them understand the workshop implications, help identify potential misalignment or resistance, and coach them in how to signal support for the workshop purpose.  

The following are useful expectations to set with the participants in advance to help shape how they view the upcoming workshop:

  • Allow the designs to emerge during the session. This is meant as a collaborative workshop.
  • Expect to be active and on your feet during the session, actively contributing to the designs.
  • Be present and free up your schedule for the duration of the workshop as key organizational decisions are being made.
  • Alleviate the anxiety of broad, big-bang change by clarifying that they get to influence the implementation plan and timing to launch the ARTs.
  • Address the misconception about organizational change by explaining that ARTs are “virtual” organizations, and that reporting lines need not be disrupted.
a group of office workers during a Value Stream Workshop

Step 3: Prepare the workshop facilitators

A successful Value Stream and ART identification workshop will have the main facilitator, ideally someone with experience running this workshop. Additionally, you’ll need a facilitator, typically an SPC, per every group of six to eight attendees. Prior to the workshop date, schedule several facilitator meetings to prepare and align them on the game plan. This will go a long way in helping your facilitators project competence and confidence during the workshop. Discuss the inherent challenges and potential resistance, and how the facilitators can best facilitate such moments. Share insights on change readiness based on the leadership interactions and empathy interviews. Finally, prepare a shared communication backchannel for facilitators, and build in sync points during the event to ensure alignment across the groups.

While these simple steps and readiness recommendations don’t necessarily guarantee a successful workshop, they’re a great starting point. You’ll still need to understand the mechanics of identifying value streams. This is what Adam will cover in the next post in our value stream series. Look for it next week.

In the meantime, check out the new Organize Around Value page on the SAFe Community Platform.

About Deema Dajani

Deema Dajani is a Certified SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT).

Deema Dajani is a Certified SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT).
Drawing on her successful startup background and an MBA from Kellogg Northwestern University, Deema helps large enterprises thrive through successful Agile transformations. Deema is passionate about organizing Agile communities for good, and helped co-found the Women in Agile nonprofit. She’s also a frequent speaker at Agile conferences and most recently contributed to a book on business agility.

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The SAFe® Coach

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a group of business professionals studying with a SAFe coach

Coaching appears in the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®), but there isn’t one place where we define the SAFe coach. According to our recent internal survey of 2,500 SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs), over 70 percent are actively engaged in coaching SAFe implementations. In general, a SAFe coach is a servant leader, someone who can facilitate both change and collaboration at scale. A SAFe coach embodies the attributes of our Lean-Agile mindset as well as a learning and growth attitude to lead by example, while continuously fostering positive change. 

A servant leader

There are many roles or labels the coach could play within a SAFe transformation, including Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer, and SPC. Regardless of the roles and functions inherently associated with a coach, coaching takes place throughout all of SAFe’s core competencies. And all of the competencies have one characteristic in common: to guide organizations in fostering better ways of working. So that we can compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative business solutions.

Within the competencies, servant leadership is unique. It’s a behavior designed to continuously serve the teams, enable product delivery, and benefit the overall enterprise. Using active listening and the collective mindset and principles of SAFe, a coach as a servant leader can become more aware, and more connected to the people within their organization. This approach brings neutrality to the enterprise. So that people feel safe in voicing their thoughts and opinions, and can collaborate to realize the benefits of shared understanding, innovation, learning, and growth. By embodying servant leadership, a SAFe coach can help the organization increase SAFe’s effectiveness and relentlessly expand collaboration, coordination, knowledge transfer, and consistent information flow. 

A facilitator of change

SAFe’s dual operating system enables efficiency, stability, and the speed of innovation. Another key benefit of this system is the ability to evolve the social structure organized around value: the Agile Release Train (ART). This is brilliant, and as referenced in The Power of Empathetic Leadership in an Evolving World, Chuck Pezeshki writes, “How you set up your social structure is THE critical factor in how knowledge and synergies in design will be created. Using Conway’s Law, one can predict a priori what the functional form of a design will be. It matters who talks to who.” 

By organizing around value and creating the social structure around the ART, we design a social structure that encourages knowledge sharing and helps us use empathy and design thinking to innovate around the value we’re creating for customers. Pezeshki further states, “Inside the social structure, empathy is the dynamic that creates synergies in design. While empathy is always valuable, even within the simplest social structures—people that connect are much more likely to transfer correct information to each other—it is essential in creative enterprises.” In our world of ever-evolving complexity, creating social structures can help us transfer information that is accurate, reduce risk, and continuously increase the speed of delivering value. 

Coaching these social structures or networks is part of SAFe’s approach to the dual operating system. These networks take the form of virtual organizations such as ARTs or Solution Trains. And within these virtual organizations, coaches need to have personal agency as their own values and behaviors, so they can coach empathetically and address change quickly. The coaches are empowered to serve the social structure by using these synergies, creating knowledge flow, and facilitating positive growth and change. 

a group of people having a meeting in a small office space.

A facilitator of collaboration at scale

According to Jean Tabaka, author of Collaboration Explained, Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders, there’s an intangible component of team and organizational power fostered by collaboration. That component brings out the best in people, and in turn, the value the enterprise delivers to its customers. 

As agilists, it may seem obvious that collaboration is a key component of building software and systems. It is, after all, called out in the third value of the Agile Manifesto: Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. If your leaders ask you why this is so important as a coach, there’s a deeper understanding of the why that’s reinforced in Jean’s book, and that has decades of history in Lean highlighted in Ikujiro Nonaka’s book The Knowledge-Creating Company. He calls out the tacit knowledge—the valuable and highly subjective insights and intuitions that are in people’s heads and difficult to capture and share. 

Collaboration is what helps make that knowledge transferable, or explicit, within your enterprise. Organizations also benefit from converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge because it represents a way to express the inexpressible. When building software and systems at scale, there is obvious complexity. There’s literally no one that has all the knowledge. It’s inherently shared across our valued people across the value streams and the enterprise. It takes thousands, if not tens of thousands of people to build today’s computers, cars, aircraft, and satellites.

This evolution of knowledge sharing helps you grow your business through a culture of understanding and aligning with your company’s overall strategic goals. The expanded mission of SAFe 5.0 is to enable the business agility that is required for enterprises to compete and thrive in the digital age. Facilitating tacit knowledge is critical and supported through the extension, behaviors, and mindset of all the SAFe competencies. It’s also measured through the latest Measure and Grow evaluations of how well the enterprise is progressing toward overall business agility. 

The SAFe coach in the enterprise needs to find ways to coach and continuously improve collaboration. Sharing that tacit knowledge through SAFe events is one of the most powerful ways to allow people to continually innovate and gain the knowledge and collective mindset to integrate and deliver the highest level of value. 

Coaches need coaches, too

A SAFe coach needs an extensive toolbox to evolve and accelerate their organization’s SAFe implementation. There are many tools to support coaches in learning how to be servant leaders and facilitate change and collaboration. None of this comes easy. Can you imagine intuitively knowing how to do all of this in your first SAFe coaching gig? Coaches need coaches, too. We learn from others and vice versa. If we model the SAFe coaching behavior we’d like to evolve, it will become a self-reinforcing learning experience that will enable coaches to help each other, cultures to evolve, and people to be happy and heard. All of this can help us truly become that relentless learning organization that solves some of the world’s largest problems. We could all use a little of that right now.

Here’s where you can learn more about evolving your SAFe coaching expertise: 

Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts on SAFe coaching.

About Jennifer Fawcett

Jennifer Fawcett - a retired, empathetic Lean and Agile leader

Jennifer is a retired, empathetic Lean and Agile leader, practitioner, coach, speaker, and consultant. A SAFe Fellow, she has contributed to and helped develop SAFe content and courseware. Her passion and focus has been in delivering value in the workplace and by creating communities and culture through effective product management, product ownership, executive portfolio coaching, and leadership. She has provided dedicated service in these areas to technology companies for over 35 years.

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Inspect and Adapt: How a 30-year-old PPM Company Became a Case Study in Agile Transformation

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Agile Transformation

In 2017, Planview (a Scaled Agile partner) realized that its customers and market were evolving beyond their traditional product lines. A leader in project portfolio management (PPM) solutions, Planview recognized the need to adapt both strategically and operationally and looked to Agile to power a much-needed transformation. (Read the full story in Harvard Business Review).

While the development departments had practiced Agile for some time, the larger Planview organization really began its forays into Agile starting in 2017 via the acquisition of a company with strong Agile DNA and a powerful Kanban product. Sporadic successes after the acquisition, however, didn’t translate to the change the company needed. Planview knew that real transformation required a top-down commitment, and in late 2018, established a company-wide goal to rewire its organization through a new Agile Growth Initiative.

The initiative focused on five key objectives:

  1. Infuse agility into the organization by increasing Agile DNA throughout
  2. Admit we couldn’t do it alone and bring in outside coaching support
  3. Embrace Agile practices and ceremonies from leadership to the teams
  4. Reorganize people and teams to focus on customer value
  5. Empower everyone to have a voice and do their best work

Led by the marketing department, Planview brought in external Agile experts as guides and kicked off its first Agile discovery session. When the team asked sales, marketing, and product leaders to list their top priorities, every department was different. It became clear that scaling across functions was the organization’s biggest challenge—and most promising opportunity.

Planview accelerated its Agile initiative by creating three cross-functional Agile teams that comprised the first Go-to-Market Agile Release Train. Through Program Increment (PI) Planning events, the teams shared, according to Harvard Business Review, “… some hard conversations that ultimately resulted in reorganizations and the realignment of people and funds.”

The result: a new emphasis on solutions vs. products that enabled the organization to provide value to their customers in meaningful, innovative ways. With Agile, Planview successfully shifted from a 30-year-old PPM company to an Enterprise Agile Planning Solution Leader. That’s true transformation, although for Planview, it’s simply one more step in a continuous process of inspecting and adapting.

Read the full story of Planview’s transformation in Harvard Business Review.

About Brook Appelbaum

Brook Appelbaum

Brook Appelbaum is the Director of Product Marketing for Planview’s Lean and Agile Delivery Solution. With nearly 20 years of marketing experience, Brook has led many different product and digital marketing teams. However, her favorite leadership role is that of a Product Owner. As part of an Agile marketing team inside Planview, Brook drives the campaign and product marketing strategy for the Lean and Agile Delivery Solution. And she thinks LeanKit is the coolest.

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