Country: United States

Suggested Case Study:

Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Download Presentation PDF

MetLife – Embracing SAFe Enterprise Agility

Gaining C-Suite support for SAFe Enterprise Agility

MetLife is one of 12 Fortune 500 companies to thrive for over 150 years. Met has scale and a proud history … and the many challenges of incumbency including legacy systems and challenges to speed. Agile is quickly being embraced as the way to achieve speed in innovation.

In this 45-minute video, Cheryl Crupi shares the story of how a small team sold MetLife’s new CEO and his new executive group on SAFe Enterprise Agility. This short, immersive session enabled this executive group to experience Agile for themselves and resulted in a third of the group requesting individual follow-up on how they can embrace Enterprise Agility, including HR, Legal, Marketing and regional business presidents.

Presented at 2019 Global SAFe Summit by:
Cheryl Crupi, Assistant Vice President, Global LACE MetLife

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: TravelPort: The Power of PI Planning Customer Story

Lockheed Martin – Adopting SAFe for Agile Transformation in F-16 Product Development

Lockheed Flying the F-16 into the Future with SAFe: Evolving the Falcon Factory

Presented at the 2019 Global SAFe Summit, San Diego Oct. 2, 2019, The F-16 Fighting Falcon is the world’s most successful, combat-proven multirole fighter with approximately 3,000 operational F-16s in service today in 25 countries. In 2014, new production orders were drying out, and the F-16 production line was in danger of shutting down. Our solution to that problem was the adoption of SAFe to streamline the F-16 Product Development and Engineering in 2015. We overcame a lot of challenges along the way, and made rapid progress initially, but have plateaued. That should come as no surprise though. Our limited SAFe implementation showed us limited results. But we are turning this ship around! This year we have really taken stock of our Agile Transformation and implemented several ground-breaking initiatives that are changing our landscape. Lockheed has now started a new F-16 production facility in Greenville, South Carolina that is producing F-16s expected to operate to 2070 and beyond!

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: Bosch/ETAS Customer Story

PepsiCo’s UX-Led Approach – Scaled Agile Transformation

Presented at 2019 Global SAFe Summit, San Diego Oct. 2, 2019

How do the User Design (UX) principles of Simple, Human and Connected guide an ART to interpret and incorporate user-centric design (UCD)? What is the ideal operating model for UX design that includes discovery, design and delivery tracks? This talk will provide an overview of the hypotheses applied to deliver user-centric design within the Scaled Agile Framework® at PepsiCo.

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: Anthem Customer Story

Anthem – Adoption of Agile Mindset for Enterprise Business Agility

Anthem Agile Transformation Journey

Anthem chose to apply the Scaled Agile Framework incrementally, rather than a big bang rollout. Approaching the problem from both top-down and bottom-up, the SAFe transformation for the enterprise concentrated on one vertical slice at a time working with both Business and IT leaders in an area to enable Lean-Agile practices and provide hands-on coaching and education to drive the adoption of the Agile mindset.

They chose to apply the Scaled Agile Framework incrementally, rather than a big bang rollout. Approaching the problem from both top-down and bottoms-up, the transformation for the enterprise concentrated on one vertical slice at a time working with both Business and IT leaders in an area to enable Lean Agile practices and provide hands-on coaching and education to drive the adoption of the Agile mindset.

They worked closely with their partners to go beyond just the mechanics of training and coaching with a focus on sustaining the change and moving towards true enterprise business agility.

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: Easterseals Customer Story

CMS – Approach to Scaling Agile Using SAFe

Nearly 140 million Americans rely on Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the health insurance exchanges—all programs administered by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). The agency pays out approximately $767 billion in benefits annually and employs 4,100 people to administer programs in partnership with state governments.

Challenge:

Isolated Scrum teams didn’t make much progress within a deeply ingrained waterfall culture and against long-range planning and budgeting.

Industry:

Government, Healthcare

Results:

CMS shifted the budget from 100% dedicated to system maintenance to a 40/60 split between maintenance and innovation
Help desk tickets decreased by 55%
Surveys show a 27% increase in employee satisfaction

Best Practices:

Prepare for face-to-face events – CMS found the SAFe Implementation Roadmap and training invaluable to smooth-running PI planning events
Establish transparency – Stress the importance of open, honest discussion and engagement
Communicate the vision – In opening remarks at PI events, CMS reminded team members that their work directly impacts people’s health and lives

Introduction

Amid the pressures of increasing citizen expectations, the CMS environment is complex and ever-changing as budgets and legislation fluctuate—making for a perfect setting to introduce Lean-Agile principles. A few isolated programs had begun using Scrum practices, but given the size and complexity of programs at CMS, Scrum did not lend itself well to longer-range planning and the identification and mitigation of dependencies among the Scrum teams. In addition, the organization still had cultural battles to overcome.

“We were still suffering from a ‘throw-everything-over-the-wall’ mentality,’” explained Brent Weaver, Director of Systems Implementation at CMS. “The few Agile teams were requiring more of programs and that created more frustration on both sides. There was no vision or framework where everyone saw how they fit together. As a result, what they delivered was late, with defects—and not what the market needed.”

SAFe: Systems Thinking for a Complex Organization

In 2017, Weaver arrived with the charge of improving the Agile transformation for the Center of Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ) within CMS. In the search for a new approach, the Scaled Agile Framework^® (SAFe^®) resonated as the right option.

“SAFe brought a much-needed approach to scaling Agile and systems thinking that was critical to an organization of our size and complexity,” Weaver said.

In preparation to obtain buy-in and funding, Weaver built his knowledge of SAFe by taking some initial courses: Leading SAFe®, and later, Implementing SAFe®. Following the Leading SAFe® course, he made the case for the Framework for leadership and earned the full support of Steve Davidson and Mark Plaugher, Directors of the Information Systems Group within CCSQ. Additionally, Debra Santos, Director of Hospitals, ASC, and QIO Systems was also willing to support the SAFe adoption for one of her systems.

Case Study: CMS Approach to Scaling Agile Using SAFe

For help, Weaver tapped Scaled Agile Partner, Agile Six Applications, Inc. With Agile Six, CMS decided to implement SAFe first in a group brand-new to Lean-Agile concepts, rather than with those already using Scrum, for a chance to start from scratch. The first teams on SAFe would be those working on CMS’s Hospital Quality Reporting (HQR) system, which healthcare facilities use to report data to CMS.

With leadership backing, they secured the budget and marked the calendar for the first face-to-face Program Increment (PI) planning event—to take place just six weeks in the future.

PI Planning Day One: Messy and Chaotic

To meet the timeframe, CMS decided to shortcut the recommendations from the SAFe Implementation Roadmap and skip SAFe training—a decision that created significant challenges and that, in hindsight, they wouldn’t recommend to other organizations. The fact that many team members were located outside the area, and many were contractors, played into that decision.

To help prepare for PI planning, HQR conducted a four-hour, half-day mock PI session with about 20 percent of team members to give them an idea of what to expect.

For the actual PI Planning event, CMS brought together more than 120 people, with approximately a quarter of them coming from out of town. The first day, unfortunately, proved to be chaotic and more challenging than expected for several reasons, according to Weaver and Ernie Ramirez, President of Agile Six Applications:

They underestimated the refinement status of the backlog and didn’t follow all relevant parts of the SAFe Implementation Roadmap
They had a single Certified SAFe^® Program Consultant (SPC) in Ramirez (the recommendation is 3 – 5 per 100 development practitioners)
The agency skipped Leading SAFe^®, SAFe^® for Teams, and SAFe^® Product Owner/Product Manager training
They did not identify Value Streams
CMS simultaneously created the implementation plan and prepared for the Agile Release Train (ART) launch

“It cannot be overstated how horrible day one of that PI went,” Ramirez said. “We didn’t lay out an implementation plan as well as we should have, and the development contractor didn’t have the resources or roles we thought they did.”

PI Planning Day Two: ‘Quarter-Million-Dollar Conversations’

Day two, however, could not have played out more differently. “At the end of day one, rather than throw in the towel, we rolled up our sleeves, and resolved to do better in day 2. We came out of day two with a plan that the teams would ultimately deliver on over the next 12 weeks,” Ramirez said.

Ramirez points to a few reasons for the turnaround. After the first day, people returned knowing more of what to expect and came more prepared. Also, the two-day format created a sense of urgency to make progress. Additionally, Ramirez walked around troubleshooting any issues immediately as they arose.

“After the first day, everyone had an opportunity to ‘sleep on it,’” he said. “A lot of the frustration at the end of the first day kind of washed out and everyone came back with a renewed focus and commitment to get the plan done,” Ramirez said.

Team members and program managers alike left the event more hopeful than ever before, believing they could actually hit the plan’s targets. Most promising, Weaver and Ramirez noticed productive discussions happening throughout the room—often between people who had worked together for several years, but had never actually met one another in person.

“We witnessed a lot of team and cross-team bonding that just cannot be replicated over WebEx, Hangouts or Zoom,” Ramirez said. “There is something immeasurably valuable about being in the same room with someone, laughing, joking and yes, respectfully arguing. A lot of trust was earned and built on day two.”

“Quarter-million-dollar conversations were happening all over the place,” Weaver said. “That’s what it would have cost to fix problems down the road if those conversations had not happened.”

Communication, Collaboration across CMS + Contractors

Following that first PI, CMS began adhering to the SAFe Implementation Roadmap. They delivered Leading SAFe^®, SAFe^® for Teams, and SAFe^® Product Owner/Product Manager training. Unlike the first PI, they identified Value Streams.

“For the second PI, we found a lot of value in identifying Value Streams and ARTs, which helped people understand where they fit in and how teams fit together,” Ramirez said.

Agile Six also delivered training to external contractors, including Leading SAFe^®, SAFe^® for Teams, and SAFe^® Product Owner/Product Manager. Several people at contractor organizations earned their SAFe^® Program Consultant (SPC) certification and began training their own people—knowing that it is likely to give them one more strength to promote as they seek to win future contracts with CMS.

During RFPs, contract organizations routinely compete against each other. However, once on contract, they must work with team members from competing firms. As an unexpected benefit, SAFe helped unify CMS team members and contractors, as well as contractors from various companies. Face-to-face, they collaborate more effectively and come to personally know the people behind the roles, developing comfortable working relationships with each other.

“It’s fundamentally better for American taxpayers that teams work together and break those walls down,” Weaver said. “I’m really proud of contractors’ ability to collaborate, share information, and work as a single team. Doing so has helped us reduce trouble tickets, so we know we’re delivering higher-quality solutions.

Because of CMS’s heavy use of contractors, each ART is comprised of people from numerous organizations. That required transformation leaders to be sensitive to job functions and responsibilities across the different companies on a single ART to foster trust and teamwork instead of competition. Having a single backlog for an ART creates further harmony among diverse team members.

27% Boost in Employee Satisfaction

So far, CMS has trained more than 200 people, including 25 – 30 Certified SAFe^® Program Consultants (SPCs). The agency has also since launched four more Agile Release Trains (ARTs).

With training and preparation, participants have been more engaged in PI Planning events after that first learning experience. Communication, says Weaver and Ramirez, has been critical to the acceptance of the new way of working. Especially in the early days, they had to communicate clearly and persistently to convince people to join in the effort and assuage fears about what this meant for their futures.

“We really had to do a lot of selling on SAFe to get people comfortable,” Weaver said. “People were genuinely apprehensive about changing the way they have worked for so long, but as they have seen results, they have embraced it.”

And over time, HQR has implemented other SAFe concepts such as Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF). Well ahead of a PI, the primary stakeholder has time to weigh the value of work and prioritize—which takes some of the emotion out of the decision, Ramirez says.

They are also in the process of adjusting budgets to fit more with shorter-term planning. Instead of years in advance, they began thinking in terms of three-month increments, in which Ramirez called a halfway step between the traditional approach and the ‘wild west’ of Scrum.

Higher Quality, Happier People

After a bumpy beginning, CMS points to measurable progress:

Budget shift to modernization versus maintenance – Instead of 100% of the budget going to maintain the existing HQR system, now only 40% is dedicated to it. A full 60% of the budget goes toward innovation for the system, helping the agency deliver on citizen expectations.
Higher quality – The HQR group reports a 55% decrease in help desk tickets from hospitals—demonstrating a direct impact to customer satisfaction.
Happier people – Surveys conducted before and after SAFe show a 27% increase in employee satisfaction.

While CMS can’t yet measure customer satisfaction gains directly, they know that fewer quality issues and more innovation contribute to that goal.

“SAFe provided a map that enabled us to shift to modernizing versus just maintaining the status quo,” Weaver said. “Beneficiaries will ultimately benefit from more user-friendly, human-centered design systems, which will allow us to reduce the burden on our providers.”

The group’s success has caught the attention of others, with trains now starting in other CMS groups. “Other programs within CMS have approached HQR asking us how to drive the same outcomes,” Santos said. “It’s a testament to how far we’ve come in the past year.”

Transformation starts with leadership – Ideally, you need two to three leaders who are fully committed to the change. If possible, send them through SPC training.
Coaches are a MUST – CMS found substantial value in them
Agile contracting is necessary – Rigid contracts that have highly specific deliverables can be an obstacle to agility and to embracing shifting priorities as new data emerges
Use contractors that understand Lean-Agile principles – Hire teams that truly understand what this means, not just those who can talk the talk
Find collaborative work space – From PI planning events to day-to-day work, collaborative work space enables teams to capture the value of face-to-face interaction
Just do it! – “If we could time-travel and do it again, we would emphasize a sense of urgency to get going,” Weaver said. “Set a near-term date and follow the roadmap.”
Engage employees – Any effort is only as strong as its people. Approach the change with empathy for what your team is undergoing and leverage the support of management and coaches to keep employees engaged and excited.
Start with Essential SAFe^® – CMS found it valuable to simplify as much as possible and started with a program that lent itself to Essential SAFe. The learnings they achieved will influence larger programs, which will require multiple Value Streams.

Back to: All Case Studies

Suggested Case Study:

NHS Blood and Transplant

Easterseals – A Unique SAFe Journey in Healthcare IT

Presented at 2019 Global SAFe Summit, San Diego Oct. 2, 2019

Easterseals Bay Area, as a non-profit provider of behavioral health therapy, provided a unique challenge and environment for adopting SAFe for its IT department. In order to overcome some of the unique challenges of our environment, we embarked on a year-long incremental approach rather than a traditional SAFe implementation, adopting techniques and practices as they supported our growth and learning in scaled agility. Additionally, due to a large number of conflicting and dynamic inputs to the teams, we started our SAFe journey at the Portfolio level to get our flow and capacity under control. At the same time, we developed the knowledge and maturity of our agile teams underneath. At Easterseals we will share with you how we took this innovative trail by focusing on mindset and principles that would enable the business and teams to partner with us without the initial intimidation of a radically new framework and terminology.

Back to: Customer Stories

Next: Standard Bank Customer Story

Cisco IT – Adopting Agile Development – A SAFe Case Study

“Continuous delivery improved quality, increased productivity, and improved the employee experience.”

—Ashish Pandey, Technical Lead, CSIT Team

Challenge:

Cisco wanted to shift away from waterfall, and replace periodic major releases with continuous delivery of new features.

Industry:

Information Technology, Telecommunications

Results:

Cisco achieved significant improvements by using SAFe on two major projects:

16% drop in the defect rejected ratio (DRR)
40% decrease in critical and major defects
14% increase in defect removal efficiency (DRE)
Improved employee satisfaction by eliminating the need for after-hours work and reducing meetings/calls
25 percent fewer quality assurance defects
Sprints that ran more efficiently each subsequent time

Best Practices:

Carefully build teams – Build teams with the best members from any location.
Assemble the right tools – Cisco realized it could not have conducted regression testing every two weeks without test automation tools.
Adjust as needed – For un-integrated or loosely integrated products, features or components, consider eliminating the Program level of SAFe.

Introduction

Cisco IT constantly looks for new ways to go faster and simplify. As part of its digital IT strategy, the Cisco Cloud and Software IT (CSIT) organization wanted to adopt more Agile development as a way to replace periodic major releases with continuous delivery of new features.

“Our goals are to speed up releases, increase productivity, and improve quality,” says Ashish Pandey, technical lead for the CSIT team.

Although a few small teams had adopted Agile techniques, waterfall was still the norm for teams that were large, distributed, or working on complex projects.

To solve these challenges, CSIT moved to the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) and immediately began applying scaled Agile practices on two major initiatives: their Subscription Billing Platform, and the Webex app for Samsung tablets..

Cisco^® Subscription Billing Platform Challenge

For its Subscription Billing Platform (SBP)—which supports various subscription services—the company originally formed different teams for design, build, test and deploy. In waterfall fashion, each team began work once the previous team had completed their part.

The separate tracks bogged down the process

Release cycles exceeded three months

They got late closure on requirements documents

Teams missed delivery dates

There were quality issues due to late integration cycles

Teams worked long hours to make up for schedule slippage

The Solution

On SBP, Cisco launched three Agile Release Trains (ARTs) in 2015: capabilities, defects and fixes, and projects.

All three trains worked together to build and test small features within one SaaS component, while regularly delivering tested features to the system integration and testing team.

Every day, the delivery team met for 15 minutes and determined action items.

Results – 40% Defect Reduction

Cisco delivered the new release of SBP on time and with all planned capabilities. When the company compared this release to those using waterfall, it found a 16 percent drop in the defect rejected ratio (DRR). Plus, critical and major defects decreased by 40 percent.

Continuous delivery also increased defect removal efficiency (DRE) by 14 percent due to greater collaboration among international teams, and by helping members identify opportunities for improvement during daily meetings.

The CSIT team attributes those quality improvements to several factors:

Improving team collaboration and focus

Enabling all team members to see current project status, promoting accountability

Helping the three teams see beyond their own track

Enabling teams to manage themselves

Additionally, the new way of working improved employee satisfaction by eliminating the need for after-hours work and reducing meetings and calls. Employees also saw how they fit into the bigger picture.

WebEx^® App for Samsung

Challenge

In early 2014, the application for WebEx Meetings came pre-installed on Android tablets. Leading up to the release, developers had to work quickly to meet the release date, despite frequently changing requirements.

Solution

The team followed an Agile Scrum framework with three sprints for geographic rollout, the first two consisting of three weeks and the last of five weeks.

During planning, Cisco IT and others gathered requirements, and evaluated the readiness of environments, partners, and engineering and marketing teams.
Developers employed extreme programming, including test-driven development, where they first write an automated test case for a new function. Then they produced the minimal amount of code needed to pass the test and then refined code to make it simpler and easier to maintain.

Results – 25% Reduction in Quality Assurance Defects

On the WebEx app, Cisco reduced quality assurance defects by 25 percent. Plus, with developers checking code in several times a day, the business group reviewed new features sooner in the cycle than before. And each sprint ran more efficiently than the last.

Ultimately, Samsung sold more than 35 million tablets with the new app, creating wide exposure for the brand.

Back to: All Case Studies

Suggested Case Study: Royal Philips

SproutLoud

“SAFe helped us with a magic formula to bring alignment across all teams at an enterprise level, which we struggled to achieve previously. Scalability, visibility, predictability, and most importantly alignment, have improved drastically in the past year. SAFe has become integral to how we develop, deploy, and deliver our technology to customers. In short, SAFe helped us to re-define and invigorate our product development initiatives”

—Ramesh Nori, SPC, Director of Agile PMO and AGILE Coach

Challenge:

For 10 years, SproutLoud experimented with Scrum and Kanban at scale, but it needed a new approach as its product and infrastructure became more complex.

Industry:

Advertising and Marketing

Solution:

SAFe®

Results:

Upgrades on a two-week cycle
Higher code quality through continuous delivery
Improved collaboration between stakeholders, which resulted in better product definition
A focus on value delivery
Enhanced alignment between the business and IT
A higher priority on innovation and education

Best Practices:

Start with training – Train teams and leadership first
Assign SAFe roles – Identify roles such as Product Manager, RTE, System Architect, and DevOps. Also identify the Portfolio team and the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in an ART.
Start with an ART – Then use Inspect and Adapt techniques to improve

Introduction

SproutLoud launched in 2006 with six people and a vision: to change channel marketing. Since then, the company has done just that, and in turn, has grown to nearly 200 employees.

SproutLoud helps major brands be more successful selling their products through local channels with its platform of software, services, and support.

n 2009, as its client base and product offerings expanded, SproutLoud began experimenting with Lean-Agile practices, including Scrum and Kanban at scale. The very speed of its growth made scaling critical.

Over the next few years, IT leaders tried various sprint lengths and increased the sophistication and size of their efforts, adding story-point estimation, cross-functional teams, and value-based management. While teams embraced some aspects—such as empowering teams to be self-organizing—they resisted others, like day-long planning meetings.

In 2014, when the Florida-based company opened an office in South America, IT leadership knew it was time for a new approach.

“The models we had were not on par with our growth,” explains Ramesh Nori, SPC, Director of Agile PMO and Agile Coach. “As our product became more complex, our infrastructure needed to be more robust, and we had to expand beyond IT. It was time to think about a scaling model to increase predictability, alignment, and performance across the enterprise.”

IT and the business finally align

In mid-2015, a search for scaling models led SproutLoud to the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®). “When we found SAFe, we thought, ‘That’s a perfect match!” Nori said. “It resonated very well with our needs and issues at that time.”

“SAFe addressed our pain points, offered suggestions on allocating resources filling in new roles, and introduced a way to approach distributed decision-making, which we really needed at the time,” adds Anjan Upadhya, CTO.

With backing from the executive team, SproutLoud moved forward quickly with deploying the Framework. Admittedly, nine years of work on Lean-Agile practices eased the transition as many were already familiar with the fundamental concepts.

One individual from SproutLoud headed to SAFe® Program Consultant (SPC) training in Washington, D.C. Following that, teams went through SAFe® for Teams while managers took the Leading SAFe® course.

Even though many stakeholders were not yet certified as SPCs, SproutLoud held its first Program Increment (PI) planning meeting and launched its first Agile Release Train (ART) in 2015. “We began using the Framework immediately in our existing development process, which helped us scale from three to seven teams,” Nori said.

They followed with Inspect and Adapt sessions at the end of each PI—as well as at the end of each sprint—to evolve the product development cycle constantly and adhere to the Framework on an iterative basis.

With the introduction of SAFe, SproutLoud brought together teams and business owners for PIs, creating new alignment between the two groups. “Business owners explained the ask, making requests much clearer for IT teams,” Nori said. “That was really fundamental.”

As SproutLoud brought on over 50 new employees from 2015 to 2018, SAFe helped the company absorb them much more smoothly than before. “With clearly defined roles, the team dynamic became very clear and easy to understand,” Nori said. “Even if we had to reconfigure teams, the Framework kept team members on the same page.”

Overcoming resistance, challenges

With the move to SAFe, SproutLoud team members began the process of becoming familiar with the Framework, adjusting to the new way of working, and over time began to embrace it and see the benefits.

The company also contended with having the right people in the right roles for the Framework to succeed—a key step before the transformation begins. Looking at products in terms of strategic themes, Epics, and Features helped teams work through the transformation.

The fundamental change was with introducing two new teams—the Product team and the Engineering team to help with the business and technical sides of the products to be developed.

“Also, we now have a dedicated product team with a product manager and product owners working to help with artifacts such as Epics, Features, and Stories,” Nori said. “This has helped ease the stress on the system due to poorly defined work items. It is a journey and we are making good strides in the right direction.”

Finally, the company also focuses on maintaining excellent code quality through the continuous delivery cycle. SproutLoud addressed these challenges by offering regular training sessions, along with making changes to the development cycle involving enhanced GIT-automated flows.

Deploying regular product upgrades

Currently, SproutLoud runs one ART with 10 teams in the company. After about two years of working within SAFe, Nori and Upadhya credit the Framework with providing excellent insights into challenges related to misalignment, lack of prioritization, and lack of Lean-Agile principles at the Portfolio level—which has a direct impact on delivering value to clients.

SproutLoud now deploys upgrades to its platform on a two-week cycle, and clients gain instant access to those innovations. The ultimate goal is to have on-demand releases in place. The SproutLoud team is working diligently toward that goal while fully embracing the Framework and its recommendations.

“Prior to SAFe, large batch releases stressed the system as a whole, not including the downtime effects,” Nori said. “But post-SAFe implementation, we are doing smaller incremental releases, which has helped reduce the system downtime for launches.”

In addition, the Product team is now offering on-demand training to clients and stakeholders on all the new products that were delivered to production.

After many years of trying Lean-Agile practices without SAFe, leaders were pleased to see improvements quickly:

The development teams are more empowered and engaged than before with product development initiatives, which is directly attributed to having an exclusive Product team and an Engineering team
The emphasis on Agile metrics brought alignment among all tiers of the product development organization as everyone is speaking the same common language
The company’s focus is now set on PI objectives, which are directly attributed to value delivered to the clients
With a Lean-Agile mindset, innovation is continuous and SproutLoud introduced in-house hackathons
SproutLoud formed an exclusive Product Management team with product managers and product owners to help manage the product from concept to final delivery
The company formed an exclusive Systems Engineering team with systems architects and engineers to help manage the technical side (enablers) of the product being planned for delivery

SproutLoud also now extends beta access to clients to collect feedback before products hit the market, which contributes to improved quality.

“As a growing company that never took funding, it’s a challenge to adopt the Framework while balancing costs,” Upadhya said. “We worked on changing our mindset first and then getting people into the right roles. We’re still not 100% there with getting ideal roles filled, but we’ve made significant progress—and we’re seeing the results.”

Most importantly, SAFe helped create essential alignment between the business and IT. “SAFe helped us with a magic formula to bring alignment across all teams at the enterprise level, which we were struggling to achieve previously,” Nori said. “Scalability, visibility, predictability, and most importantly alignment, have improved drastically in the past year. SAFe has become integral to how we develop, deploy, and deliver our technology to customers.”

Back to: All Case Studies

Suggested Case Study:

EdgeVerve Systems

Fannie Mae – Adopting Agility in Business Using SAFe

“SAFe provided the agility, visibility, and transparency needed to ensure we could integrate with numerous other efforts, get predictable in our delivery, and ensure timelines are met.”

–David McMunn, Director of Fannie Mae’s Agile COE

Challenge:

Within three years, the organization would need to stand-up an entirely new business model that would change the way securities are issued to the market—and do so within aggressive timelines.

Industry:

Financial Services, Government

Results:

Releases now happen every month, instead of once or twice a year.
They integrate reliably every two weeks.
Fannie Mae reduced delivery risks.
The organization reduced the defect rate substantially.
Teams now deliver more than 30 attributes per sprint compared to 2-5 before.
Velocity increased from 10 story points to more than 30.

Best Practices:

Sync cadence – Establishing a common cadence was critical to success. Engineering practices must evolve in order to comply with bimodal governance.
Work on database modeling upfront – For any data-heavy effort, perform advance work on database modeling to avoid the impact of changes identified later in the sprint.
Develop a playbook – Such guidance reduces rework for multiple teams working in parallel.

Introduction

Fannie Mae is the leading provider of mortgage financing in the United States. Operating under a congressional charter, Fannie Mae—and its sibling organization Freddie Mac—play an important role in the nation’s housing finance system; they provide liquidity, stability, and affordability to the mortgage market.

Coming out of the housing crisis in 2013, Fannie Mae recognized that the lending environment it was moving into required it to be even more responsive to meet rapidly changing customer needs. Further, Fannie Mae recognized that agility was critical to achieving this objective—not just in technology, but across the organization.

In January 2015, Fannie Mae was preparing to align with guidance provided by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and Congress, under a new joint venture named Common Securitization Solutions (CSS). As part of this effort, Fannie Mae undertook an initiative to transform some of their key internal business processes to align with CSS to build a universal securitization platform for the issuance and management of mortgage-backed securities.

Within three years, Fannie Mae planned to develop an entirely new business model that would change the way securities are issued to the market—and do so within aggressive timelines. More than 20 development teams, encompassing over 300 individuals, were needed to integrate development and testing efforts across 30 assets. As Fannie Mae prepared to implement this change, the organization encountered several challenges as the new model was being defined based on continuously evolving requirements.

“When you’re doing a large-scale integration with a lot of data, the number-one factor for success is early integration and early testing,” says Atif Salam, Director of Enterprise Data at Fannie Mae. “The federal mandate required us to mitigate risk from the get-go, and we realized early on it would not be possible following a waterfall approach. There was no better way for us to mitigate that risk than to adopt Agile.”

Overcoming Initial Roadblocks

Enterprise Data’s efforts to adopt Agile uncovered several challenges, both internal and external:

Challenge #1: No Agile capability evident for the initial two teams at the outset of the Enterprise Data initiative.

The first Enterprise Data teams were brand new to Agile, the Scrum methodology and, having been formed specifically for this initiative, working with each other.

Prior to adopting SAFe, Enterprise Data developed a standard on-boarding approach and entrance criteria for standing up new teams. Additionally, external Agile subject matter expertise was brought in to train and work with the teams, and an Agile Mature Model (AMM) was created to baseline behaviors and practices, as well as identify areas for optimization.

Thereafter, once the decision had been made to adopt SAFe, the program began to work through the SAFe Readiness Checklist. The AMM was used to set target benchmarks that all program teams were required to meet in order to ensure there was sufficient capability in place from which to scale.

Challenge #2: At the outset of the Enterprise Data initiative, a Scrum team could only complete a single user story due to inflexible architecture, end-to-end testing challenges, and numerous build constraints. Further, it was typical for the work to be gated by subject matter expertise between developers who viewed data attributes as a data point, comprised of both sourcing and vending complexities, that could only be implemented sequentially.

In response, technical leads focused on eliminating constraints, reducing complexity, and optimizing workflow. Specifically, Technical Leads worked with the teams to leverage cross-functional team/paired programming constructs to augment technical expertise. As a result, the teams began to view data attributes not as a data point, comprised of both sourcing and vending complexities, but rather as having two distinct pieces of business value, specifically sourcing and vending.

Additionally, they made the effort to move system integration testing (SIT), as well as user acceptance testing (UAT), left into the Scrum team. As a result, and over time, each team began to complete multiple user stories within a given sprint. Additionally, the organization adopted an emergent design mindset, formed cross-functional Agile feature teams, and aligned to a common cadence that synchronized their activities (e.g. sprint planning, Scrum-of-Scrums, sprint reviews).

Challenge #3: At the outset of Enterprise Data’s journey, complexity was further complicated by the fact that teams were required to develop and integrate their code in the same mainline, thereby replacing branching as an accepted technical practice. Additionally, Fannie Mae required new release traceability management that would satisfy corporate and federal governance requirements.

To address these challenges, technical leads and shared services focused on building a continuous integration capability, across all teams, using the same codebase. The organization had always had application lifecycle management (ALM), however, it needed to rethink continuous integration to realize true efficiencies. Over the course of 10 months, the organization focused on leveraging automation to reduce the time to implement builds from once every six months to multiple times a day.

Additionally, Enterprise Data adopted behavior-driven development engineering practices for traceability, automated testing, and prototyping.

Challenge #4: Upstream technical dependencies specific to architecture, database design/modeling, and test data provisioning prevented the teams from completing a single user story within the two-week sprint cadence.

In addition to the technical challenges the teams were facing, there were also multiple upstream dependencies on architecture, data modeling, and test data management that they had to resolve before a User Story could be implemented by a team working in a two-week cadence.

Initially, working ahead of the teams, a group of business analysts were assembled and assigned to groom the program backlog sufficiently so that User Stories met, or exceeded, 80% of the sprint team’s Definition of Ready. Despite this focus, however, there was barely enough ready work in the program backlog for the teams to bring into their respective sprint planning. This was due to the lead times required to resolve upstream dependencies as well as the need to respond to continually changing requirements.

In preparation for scaling, Enterprise Data worked with their business stakeholders to create a roadmap of features spanning one business quarter. Simultaneously, they focused on optimizing backlog health, sufficient in depth to support the Agile teams, for at least two consecutive sprints. Additionally, adopting a system perspective, the entire value stream was analyzed to better anticipate, and mitigate for, internal/external technical dependencies.

Challenge #5: The organization’s culture was accustomed to working within a traditional implementation methodology.

At the outset, Fannie Mae had a traditional command and control culture, supported by a broader ecosystem of corporate functions that had to change to support Agile. Those leading the change made a significant effort to work with leadership and management to pivot from the traditional role of directing delivery to becoming Lean-Agile leaders and critical change agents, both supporting the teams as well as modeling the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto.

As already noted, leadership and management changed their focus to clearing impediments impacting the teams. Additionally, they influenced corporate functions to align in support of Agile, get the business integrated and involved, as well as to put the pieces in place to create an environment focused on continuous learning. “Historically we would have seen challenges as failures in requirements or development rather than opportunities to fail fast and learn, and improve,” Salam explains.

While still new to their roles, the Lean-Agile leaders infused a sense of purpose in the teams and gave them autonomy to implement the work while decentralizing decision-making and minimizing constraints.

SAFe: Agility. Visibility. Transparency.

Although Fannie Mae had pockets of Agile capability up to this point, leadership understood that a scaled Agile methodology was required to achieve their objectives. Fortunately, individuals within the company had prior success with large-scale Agile deployments using the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®).

Fannie Mae teamed up with an external Scaled Agile Gold partner to develop and mature its Scrum capability and then deploy SAFe. As the first to make the SAFe transition, the Enterprise Data division became the torch bearer.

“We had multiple waterfall efforts, third-party integration, and a hard regulatory mandate that made coordination and execution exceptionally difficult,” explains David McMunn, the Director of Fannie Mae’s Agile Center of Excellence (COE). “SAFe provided the agility, visibility, and transparency needed to ensure we could integrate with the numerous other efforts, get predictable in our delivery, and ensure timelines are met.”

Fannie Mae applied a dogmatic approach to ensure the organization was developing a consistent set of practices across multiple teams at the outset. External coaches delivered Agile, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Leading SAFe (SA), and SAFe for Teams (SP) training. The SAFe training was then mandatory for every new team joining the effort.

Fannie Mae launched its first Agile Release Train (ART) encompassing six programs, across 12 teams, with more than 130 people, in June of 2015. Admittedly, that first Program Increment (PI) offered some learning experiences.

“In spite of all the preparation that went into the backlog, setting expectations, confirming attendance from stakeholders, and the training prior to planning, the first PI was somewhat of a chaotic experience,” says Scott Richardson, Chief Data Officer at Fannie Mae.

Context setting provided by the business, product, and architecture leads took time away from team break-out sessions and, as a result, the teams struggled to resolve all of the open requirements and scope questions to complete their plans.

“But by the end of the second day,” Richardson continues, “we started to see progress.” The teams had mapped out their dependencies on the program board, resolved, owned, accepted, or mitigated (ROAM) all of the known risks in the PI and achieved a Fist of Five confidence score of 3.

“The session offered the very first opportunity for all stakeholders to work together on this multi-million dollar program.” Richardson adds. “A new way of managing large-scale integration efforts at Fannie Mae was emerging that would spread across the technology enterprise.”

Over the next few PIs, the organization knew more clearly how to prepare for the PI planning meeting and confidence scores began averaging 4 and higher.

Modeling Confidence in the New Methodology

During cross-team planning in an early PI, it became clear that several teams were not on track to deliver important capabilities within the targeted timeline. “Some of my best new Agile team leaders offered to throw more people at the problem ‘just this once,’ and crash the schedule like they did in the old days,” Richardson says. “It’s in those moments that you need to model confidence in the Agile method, to be the calm in the eye of the storm.”
Instead, the Agile team leaders were encouraged to go back to the Product Owners regarding the change in priorities and empower them to devise a new minimum viable product. “Within a couple of hours, everything was back on track with planning, and ultimately all the teams delivered, and the external customer delivery was on-time,” Richardson says. “Now they carry this story with them, and are empowered to solve problems and make decisions in truly productive ways. It’s part of the culture.”

Gains across the Board

Today, Fannie Mae has come a long way. The Enterprise Data division delivered an integrated solution on time and with much higher quality than was expected for an effort of this size. From a broader perspective, the transformation to SAFe revolutionized how the organization plans for the delivery of large-scale programs.

Fannie Mae has seen improvements on multiple fronts:

Reduced risk – Fannie Mae reduced delivery risks through the relentless focus on innovation and automation to ship “production ready” code with higher and higher frequency. They significantly mitigated the risk inherent in complex integration between legacy and new architectures/applications, as well as between internal and external systems.
Faster feedback cycles – Enterprise Data delivers system demos and integrated code every two weeks. Releases now happen every month, instead of once or twice a year, for the largest application across the enterprise, with millions of lines of code.
Improved predictability – Teams, within the program and across the enterprise, integrate reliably every two weeks.
Boosted quality – The organization reduced the defect rate substantially.
Increased business value – Teams now deliver more than 30 attributes per sprint compared to 2-5 attributes when Agile was first adopted within Enterprise Data.
Better team progress – Teams undergo regular AHR (Agility Health Reviews) cycles and have matured to higher Agile Maturity Model levels.
Greater efficiency – Fannie Mae realizes significant efficiency through a reduction in technical debt.

After the initial deployment, the division rolled out SAFe to the rest of the organization, training up to 600 people on Leading SAFe, SAFe Advanced Scrum Master, SAFe Scrum Master, SAFe Product Manager/Product Owner, and SAFe for Teams, depending on roles. Several employees went on to achieve their SPC certification.

Currently, Fannie Mae runs three ARTs. The Enterprise Data ART recently completed its 13th PI. Additionally, there are more than 200 Lean-Agile teams across Enterprise IT, encompassing over 3,000 people. Functional and business portfolios are adopting lightweight Lean-Agile values and practices as part of their day-to-day activities.

“This way of working has spread across the organization,” Salam says. “It’s changing the way we deliver for the customer, the way we hire and do our budgeting, and is continuously extending further and further into the business.”

Back to: All Case Studies

Suggested Case Study:

Dutch Tax and Customs Administration