By reducing the routine, repetitive tasks that create toil for the individual contributor, Gen AI tools enable more ‘time in zone’ for higher-order, critical thinking work.
When:
December 13, 2023, 10:00 am – December 13, 2023, 11:00 am MST
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Agile Coach, Consultant, Product Manager, Product Owner, Program or Project Manager, Release Train Engineer, SAFe Members, Scrum Master
In this session, we will unravel the potent capabilities of tools to streamline technology product development and elevate creative and strategic focus.
• Generative AI Overview: Dive into generative AI and its positive impact on SAFe roles, offering a competitive edge in the tech development landscape.
• Practical Application Examples: Witness real-world examples of how top-tier generative AI tools replace mundane tasks, ensuring optimal utilization of human effort for pivotal roles.
• Transition to Higher-Order Tasks: Learn strategies to redirect workforce focus from repetitive tasks to critical thinking assignments, catalyzing innovation and strategic growth.
Speakers
Cheryl Crupi
Methodologist and SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Rebecca Davis
Methodologist and SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Building, Operating, and Scaling AI-Enabled Solutions with SAFe
SAFe Enterprises often encounter challenges integrating AI technology into their production solutions. Early adopters of AI have found ways to address the common barriers to building, operating, and scaling AI-enabled products.
When:
November 15, 2023, 10:00 am – November 15, 2023, 11:00 am MST
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Agile Coach, Product Manager, Product Owner, Program or Project Manager, Release Train Engineer, Scrum Master
This webinar will examine the impacts of AI solution development on people, processes, and technology, as well as the commitments SAFe organizations should be prepared to make for creating desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable AI solutions.
• Identify the new roles needed in Agile teams and ARTs, and the upskilling needed across all SAFe roles.
• Understand the new processes that must be added to the product development lifecyle to support AI solutions.
• Explore the new classes of tools that form the architectural runway needed to support AI development.
Speakers
Marc Rix
Methodologist & SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Harry Koehnemann
Methodologist & SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
Dr. Wiselin Mathuram
SPCT, Chief Transformation Officer at International Business Consultants, LLC
Jeff Shupack
SAFe Fellow, President of Advisory Practice at Project & Team, Inc.
SAFe 6.0 featured new guidance providing a basic introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how enterprises can improve their AI adoption using patterns in the Framework.
When:
November 8, 2023, 10:00 am – November 8, 2023, 11:00 am MST
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Agile Coach, Product Owner, Program or Project Manager, Release Train Engineer, Scrum Master
SAFe 6.0 featured new guidance providing a basic introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how enterprises can improve their AI adoption using patterns in the Framework. With the recent explosion of Chat GPT and Generative AI, new opportunities and challenges have emerged for organizations wanting to embrace this rapidly evolving technology. This webinar will examine the current state of AI and how SAFe is also evolving to provide new guidance for adopting AI safely and effectively.
• Understand how Chat GPT and the explosion of Generative AI has launched a new technological revolution.
• Explore the three new dimensions of AI guidance that will be added to the Framework in the weeks ahead.
• Learn about the insights gained from recent research on AI adoption by SAFe enterprises.
Speakers
Dr. Steven Mayner
VP Framework, Methodologist & SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.
“Working for an organization that practices SAFe means employees can be confident that their code will get to production and that their SAFe training will secure them transportable skills that add value to their career paths.”
—Paul Gampe, CTO, PCCW Global
Challenge:
Console Connect needed to deliver positive and on-time outcomes for its customers and partners and amplify its ability to attract talented technologists to the business.
Industry:
Telecommunications
Results:
Improved business goal setting and ability to measure business value
Achieved 98%+ of the committed PI objectives
Reduced the number of lower business value objectives to allow time for innovation
Established positive and transparent relationships with partners
Attracted and trained new staff in a competitive market
Console Connect by PCCW Global: Improving Business Relationships and Attracting Top Talent with SAFe®
Introduction
PCCW Global is a leading telecommunications provider, offering flexible and scalable next-generation network solutions on a global scale combined with local, on-the-ground knowledge.
A product of PCCW, Console Connect is a platform that allows businesses to easily connect to public and private clouds, applications, and enterprise sites. It makes connecting clouds, networks, and business-critical partners and applications easy and secure. A leader in the Asia-Pacific Region, Console Connect by PCCW Global is globally accessible, offering best-in-class connections in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Africa.
Breaking out of silos and finding common ground
When CTO Paul Gampe joined PCCW Global overseeing Console Connect in 2017, they had recently acquired several start-ups and development organizations. But they were struggling with a backlog of 50 unfinished projects, some of which had been running for five years and had no expected delivery date. The business was frustrated by the slow progress, and the IT team was overwhelmed.
In December 2017, Gampe toured the Console Connect facilities worldwide to meet the Corporate Services, IT and IP Engineering teams that he would lead. He spotted a trend in the challenges they faced.
“I began to sense the traditional silos and a disconnect between the business and the technical community in the company—issues that the Scaled Agile Framework is often used to identify and dissolve,” Gampe says.
Business agility with SAFe
Having seen the success of an Agile approach in his previous role, Gampe knew the benefits an Agile way of working would bring to the organization. After analyzing various frameworks and with the full support of the executive leadership of Console Connect, Gampe recommended the organization adopt SAFe® in early 2018 and engaged Pretty Agile to assist.
The technical leadership team flew from Greece, the US, Hong Kong and all around the world to Brisbane, Australia for training.
Pretty Agile CEO and Managing Director, Em Campbell-Pretty, has been impressed by the executive buy-in at PCCW. “When I look back over the organizations we work with, the organizations where I get the CEO and their leadership team in the room for two days for a Leading SAFe® class are the organizations that really get some momentum,” she explains. About six months later, the Console Connect Senior Management Team, including the CEO, gathered in Singapore for a two-day Leading SAFe® class followed by a Value Stream Identification Workshop.
Global communications start with human connection
One of Gampe’s favorite SAFe training memories was when he and Console Connect Head of Product and Innovation, Jordick Wong, hugged each other after a breakthrough moment during PI Plan acceptance. But it wasn’t always like that.
Console Connect made an early decision during a workshop to identify value streams for product offerings that they would focus on transforming while simultaneously switching to an Agile way of working. This choice presented a lot of challenges. “The biggest challenge that we faced wasn’t just trying to connect an engineering mindset with a network engineering mindset. It was coming up with a common language to help everybody in the organization begin to understand what we’re going to do when we’re going to do it,” says Gampe.
Bringing together the business and technology leadership teams to commit to a plan at each PI Planning session has been a crucial factor in driving this internal alignment and has led to a radical shift in the way the team builds applications.
“The first change we noticed was moving from component teams to feature teams. This shift allowed us to speak more clearly about the resource requirements to deliver a feature,” Gampe says. While it was challenging for the software community to make that transition, it has been very valuable for the business. “The business didn’t need to understand the complexity of our application architecture; they just articulated what they needed to get done. And we couldn’t have done that without a SAFe approach.”
Training partners in SAFe practices
In the past, PCCW would end up in heated debates with partners around the agreed scope of work and delivery times. But that’s no longer a problem. In addition to leveraging SAFe for internal software development, Console Connect now asks all its technology partners to train in SAFe, participate in the PI Planning, and get involved in the Agile Release Trains (ARTs). This approach addresses the challenges around timing and scope for fixed-contract projects. The overall response has been overwhelmingly positive, with increased clarity driven by:
Organization-wide discussions—PCCW and their technology partners meet to discuss programming and planning and to map clear objectives, roles, and responsibilities.
Ownership and accountability of tasks—Dependencies between PCCW and the partner are mapped out on a Program Board. Where an initiative is dependent on a task outside of the ART, a Release Train Engineer (RTE) owns this risk.
Education—In the early stages of the engagement, there is a lot of restructuring of contractual relationships and discussion of the guidelines for engagement as Console Connect educates their technology partners around SAFe.
Together, these changes have led to increased confidence in the shared ability to deliver the outcomes required.
Accelerating updates to new technology
Today, SAFe helps Console Connect not only work more efficiently with partner companies, but they use the Framework to speed the adoption of new technologies. A recent example is their partnership with BMC Software. Console Connect wanted to work with BMC to update their IT Service Management Suite to the next generation, cloud-based BMC Helix ITSM. Console Connect utilized SAFe to work with BMC more effectively and deliver an outcome which delighted both Console Connect and BMC.
Gampe explains: “Because many of these on-premises systems have deep integrations and lots of customizations, we asked BMC to become a member of our Agile Release Train and plan and act with us as if they were a feature team.” He says the benefit was that as BMC attended the planning sessions, they saw the resolution of dependencies and the detailed planning activity and could participate in the draft planning. “They saw management accept the plans and prioritize the Program Increment (PI) objectives,” Gampe explains.
“By joining us in our SAFe approach, BMC understood the cadence they’d need to demonstrate at the end of each iteration. As a result, our confidence that the budget would align with the allocation and the delivery would be achieved within the set time frame was completely justified.”
Attracting and retaining top talent with SAFe
Like most organizations that rely heavily on technical expertise, Console Connect is constantly looking for more software development resources. They use SAFe as a means to attract the best talent, with their Agile training and environment ensuring that they have a steady flow of quality job applicants.
“The Agile way of working contributes to how efficient an employee can be,” says Gampe. “Working for an organization that practices SAFe means employees can be confident that their code will get to production and that their SAFe training will secure them transportable skills that add value to their career paths.”
Gampe calls out several standout SAFe attributes that help Console Connect attract and engage talented resources, specifically the publicly available content and global availability of training and support. “With SAFe,” he says, “I can provide a publicly available link for a product manager’s job description and know that a product manager in Greece or the US can read that content without any paywall or barrier. And the breadth of SAFe’s coverage means I can get people trained irrespective of their geography. These are significant advantages over the other Agile frameworks I considered.”
SAFe has also positively impacted employee retention, with staff able to demonstrate their work and interact with all levels of the organization. “The CRO, the CFO, and other senior executives now participate with our junior developers or senior architects every 90 days. The closed feedback loop has enriched the relationship for the development community and their understanding of the business, and vice versa,” says Gampe.
Console Connect and SAFe at a glance
Six ARTs designed to support the systems associated with the ways that they deliver value
An Agile Program Management Office, which is home to their Lean-Agile Centre of Excellence (LACE)
An inter-ART dependency process, with a solution manager who coordinates activities across ARTs if required
piplanning.io leveraged to plan and execute their PI
SAFe has helped Console Connect evolve from its traditional ways of working with employees, partners, and customers. Now, staff attraction and training levels are at an all-time high, relationships with partners and project outcomes are transparent, positive and less stressful, and SAFe is a key selling point for Console Connect initiatives.
Southwest Airlines is famous for its employee-first culture, dedication to customer service, and sense of warmth, friendliness, and fun. And when it comes to meeting the urgent demands of technology development in a highly complex logistical environment, a thriving culture is just the start to meeting the challenge.
To live up to Southwest’s purpose of connecting people to what’s important in their lives through reliable, low-cost air travel, Southwest began its Agile transformation in 2018 in operations. The fantastic results led to SAFe® adoption throughout Southwest.
Now four-plus years into their Agile transformation, more than 2,000 Southwest employees collaborate cross-functionally across the organization.
Quick Facts:
Operates at more than 120 airports across 11 countries worldwide
Carried 126 million customers in 2022
Operates more than 4,000 flights per day during peak season
Started SAFe transformation in 2018
More than 2,000 employees involved in SAFe across reservations, customer experience, crews, scheduling, training, aircrafts, ground operations, maintenance, and more
Key Outcomes:
Streamlined the number of steps and handoffs between business and technology and made them more predictable, saving time and money.
By adopting SAFe at the portfolio level, Southwest went from 7–9 months of planning in 2017, plus variable building, testing, and deploying timeframes (see timeline below) to releasing every iteration in 2020
From 2018–2020, they saw increased deployment success and 5x faster time to market (28 releases with 45% deployment success in 2018, to 349 releases and 93% deployment success in 2020)
Experienced better alignment around business value while measuring greater than 80% of business value delivered
The LPM in Practice series returns with an exciting view of Portfolio prioritization and Participatory Budgeting in SAFe organizations. In today’s business climate, organizations are continuously seeking innovative approaches to improve their responsiveness, and overall business outcomes. Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) has emerged as SAFe’s key strategy for achieving these goals. However, traditional funding models pose a challenge to realizing the promise of LPM and SAFe. Participatory budgeting is a collaborative portfolio event for allocating the portfolio budget to its value streams, and it’s adoption is increasing SAFe portfolios.
This panel discussion explores the integration of Participatory Budgeting and SAFe’s new application, SAFe CoFund, to advance LPM and enable focus on the right portfolio investments to achieve the strategy. The panelists feature industry experts from Cprime who have successfully implemented the shift and were the early adopters of CoFund.
Speakers
Neru Obhrai
Principal Consultant at Radtac, SAFe SPCT at Cprime, Inc.
Neru is a certified SPCT and experienced Transformation Coach, who has lead and delivered a range of large scale, complex business transformation programmes. After 3 decades of delivery of business solutions in the airline sector, Neru has also led multiple transformation initiatives within the finance and telco sectors. As a principal consultant with Cprime, Neru takes pride in establishing high performance diverse departments to deliver quality solutions and services and championing the drive for excellence
Ken France
VP, Enterprise Agility Practice and SAFe Fellow at Cprime, Inc.
Ken France is an executive enterprise coach cultivating transformational organizations, a recognized and highly-rated trainer, and one of the first US minted SPCT and a SAFe Fellow. Ken France has worked with SAFe since its inception, contributing actively to the framework, including SAFe LSE/4.0. With 25+ years’ experience in Information Technology, Ken has successfully supported multiple Fortune 100 enterprises tackling large and complex scaled agile transformations across numerous verticals.
Isaac Montgomery
SAFe Fellow and SPCT at Cprime, Inc.
I’ve spent the past 25 years working with organizations across the spectrum of sizes and industries seeking to realize the promises of business agility – responsiveness, productivity, quality, predictability, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. By helping leaders understand how their operating model and leadership practices drive the culture and performance of the organization, we’ve been able to realize lasting change and measurable improvements. Through these experiences I’ve become recognized as a thought leader in the areas of lean portfolio management (LPM), agile product management (APM), and organizational change management (OCM). While I regularly speak and teach at conferences around the world, and am a contributor to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), my passion remains working in the field, helping organizations achieve sustainable competitive advantage and business agility.
Deema Dajani
SAFe Fellow and Product Manager at Scaled Agile, Inc.
A SAFe Fellow, Deema helps large institutions create the environment to shape disruption like a startup with business agility and Lean Portfolio Management (LPM). Deema currently serves as a Scaled Agile Product Management Director focused on enabling sustainable SAFe transformations at scale. Co-founder of Women in Agile, a non-profit organization focused on breaking barriers and inclusivity in the agile community.
Join SAFe Chief Methodologist, Andrew Sales, as he walks through the Applying SAFe 6.0 for Business Agility workshop and provides helpful tips for facilitating this workshop in your organization.
When:
September 28, 2023, 8:00 am – September 28, 2023, 9:00 am
Where:
Zoom
Who:
LACE Members, Release Train Engineer, SAFe Program Consultant
This one-day workshop will facilitate the development of a backlog of items to implement SAFe 6.0 guidance. Using the modules most relevant to their organization, attendees will have the opportunity to consider their own context and design a backlog of items to implement SAFe 6.0 guidance across the enterprise.
