“You don’t have to be a large organization to take on SAFe®. You can apply enough of the Framework in a sensible enough way to have real benefits, real positive benefits. We are proof of that.”
—Chris Ware, Senior VP of Product Development at Audinate
Industry:
IT, Audio-video Networking
Quick Facts:
Audinate started the SAFe® journey with product management and engineering, training 40 people in an offsite location. Soon they grew to more than 100 people practicing SAFe successfully over 14 PIs.
They brought in a SAFe Fellow/SPCT to support the transformation.
They kicked off quickly with training first half of the week, and their first PI Planning the second half of the week
Adopted SAFe in a flexible, non-prescriptive matter to meet their specific needs
Audinate’s advice to those considering SAFe:
Share PIP backlog preparation to increase transparency and buy-in
Allow teams and ARTs to self-manage
Always look for innovation opportunities to increase iteration effectiveness
Focus on the development of Agile culture in the ARTs
Outcomes
“After implementing SAFe, we scaled the size of our product development team by a factor of 3 over a period of 2 years. During that time, we added two international development locations, and have just added a third development location in addition to our Sydney head office. Today we have over 100 employees trained in and using SAFe.”
—Chris Ware, Senior VP of Product Development at Audinate
“As you grow, you get to a point where you can’t really just rely on a small number of talented people to hold everything together… We had plans to grow. We’ve been growing very strongly, 30 percent every year for the past five or six years, and we had a particular moment where we decided we were going to double the size of our engineering and product making function. And we just knew at that time that there was no way we could continue to do it in an organic fashion.
The other thing that was really important was to not waste people’s time and money in business. Wasting money is a very ‘management’ thing to worry about. But also I think there is a people element. Most people don’t want to build things that are then thrown away. The only thing you can’t get back in life is time. And so, it was important to be able to make sure that our people were spending time developing things that are really of use and are going to be used and meet the customer’s needs”
“e-Prescribing is probably the biggest example of a SAFe outcome for Fred IT. It was a real shake-up, quite transformative for our whole industry. And we were the leaders and able to pull it off!”
—Zoe Walters, Product Manager
Challenge:
Siloed development and a need to meet rapidly changing demands proved challenging for a business whose product suite is an end-to-end solution.
Industry:
Pharmaceutical, IT
Results:
Faster time-to-market
Predictability improved to 82%
Bugs decreased by 50%
Backlog reduced from 160 support items to under 20
Improved top-down engagement with the stakeholders
Best Practices:
Train leadership – Fred IT trained the executive leadership team first, which helped drive complete business transformation
Train extensively – most people within the company have completed an average of two courses, including everyone in the leadership team, all the way to the CEO
Get expert help – Pretty Agile had an engagement with Fred that went beyond initial training. Their consultants were embedded to support continuous improvement and provide team guidance through more advanced practices up to PI6 results
Fred IT Group is Australia’s largest provider of pharmacy IT solutions servicing more than 3000 pharmacies. The company was launched out of a deep commitment to the role of technological leadership in improving patient outcomes whilst making it easier and more efficient for health professionals to run their businesses.
Building an end-to-end solution in a siloed work culture
Over the years, Fred IT used a mix of Agile and Waterfall methodologies. However, neither approach addressed the need to respond quickly to continually changing demands or the siloed development approach across their teams.
“If you were in a team for a specific product, there was limited cross-over and discussion with other teams. Sharing of knowledge across products was ad-hoc and team members were often only expected to be skilled on one product,” says Fred IT product manager, Zoe Walters.
This was a problem for a business whose product suite is an end-to-end solution. “All of the products in our suite are fully integrated,” says Walters. “But our approach made it difficult to do this well. For example, a dispensary and back-office product might have the same reports. But, because they were developed in isolation, they were inconsistent in looks and the data captured and reported on. It was the same company, solution and report—but two different outputs.”
To transform their way of working and harmonize the development of their product suite, Fred decided to adopt SAFe®.
Training leaders first leads to early wins
With the help of Scaled Agile Transformation Partner, Pretty Agile, Fred started training people in 2018 with a goal of launching SAFe in 2019. The new initiative primarily included people from Product and Engineering, with HR, Finance, Security, and Infrastructure teams supporting the operational and strategic work. They decided to train leadership first, and then move to development teams. This approach quickly paid off. “Getting the executive leadership team in a Leading SAFe® class was regarded as a key success factor for Fred and is one of those things that made a difference to them,” says Pretty Agile founder, Em Campbell-Pretty.
“Getting the executive leadership team in a Leading SAFe® class was regarded as a key success factor for Fred and is one of those things that made a difference to them.”
Em Campbell-Pretty, Founder, pretty agile
As soon as the teams began planning and collaborating through SAFe practices, the organization experienced a noticeable difference. “The impact on prioritization was a massive eye-opener,” observed Walters. “It no longer became a matter of who screamed loudest determining what got done first, but making better decisions based on business value and impact based on the effort required. We knew in theory that it would happen, but to see it happen in reality was interesting. It became clear what needed to happen first, and made us examine the business reasoning behind it, and document and capture features and expected outcomes so we had a yardstick to measure what we’d achieved.”
One method that Fred IT uses in this decision-making process is to assess each feature/epic against the strategic investment, tech debt, maintenance, and other costs to the business. They then decide how they want to distribute that work across each PI. These guardrails allow the Lean Portfolio Manager (LPM) to manage the train capacity dedicated to each area.
Taking the market lead in times of COVID
Adopting SAFe made a business-critical difference for Fred when COVID-19 hit Australia. Due to government mandates, citizens could not visit their doctors, so the pressure was on Fred to quickly deliver an e-Prescription solution
“COVID fast-tracked the forward momentum of the Australian e-Health industry,” says Walters. “Critically, conversations we’d been having about moving from paper prescriptions to electronic scripts for several years became concrete projects that needed to be delivered urgently.”
Already mid-way through launching a new dispense product, Fred needed to pivot its attention to successfully delivering a second product which would result in significant changes in deadlines.
“We had plans and extensive roadmaps for the dispense product in place, and the teams were already locked in,” says Walters. “But with SAFe, we could quickly and effectively change tack to deliver the e-Prescription product, despite the huge list of requirements.”
“SAFe enabled us to estimate the effort and time required, form teams, align them to the work, show the business how we’d achieve delivery, and then go ahead,” added Walters. “Using our previous approach, we’d have had no capability or ability to manage that. Instead, we would have just had a pile of work to chip away at—and hope for the best.”
“SAFe enabled us to estimate the effort and time required, form teams, align them to the work, show the business how we’d achieve delivery, and then go ahead.”
Zoe Walters, Product Manager
Practicing SAFe, the organization became more efficient and effective. They improved planning and road mapping with the Program Increment (PI) cycles and had transparency across the teams. Walters added, “As a result, they were able to plan and deliver last-minute changes to requirements and meet those fast-tracked milestones. So, it enabled us to get two different sustainable products up and running fast!”
Significant business outcomes
Fred has realized myriad benefits from adopting the SAFe way of working, from product development and delivery to cultural shifts:
Faster time-to-market: “e-Prescribing is probably the biggest example of a SAFe outcome for Fred IT,” says Walters. “It was a real shake-up, quite transformative for our whole industry. And we were the leaders and able to pull it off! Perhaps we could have done it without SAFe, but it would have been high risk, and supporting and maintaining the system would have been difficult. But with SAFe, we succeeded.”
Predictability: After several PIs, Fred achieved an average of 82% predictability on features and enablers.
Improvements in quality: SAFe introduced a big shift in the ownership of quality. Prior to SAFe, one person with a quality assurance title would attempt to address quality issues at the end of the development cycle. With SAFe, the entire team took ownership, and quality became embedded in the process. That approach paid off. Based on customer feedback, the quality of Fred’s products has dramatically improved and introduced bugs have dropped more than 50%.
Backlog reduction: Fred’s support backlog has also been significantly impacted. “We had an overall backlog of around 160 support items that needed to be reduced, and that number just never seemed to go down,” says Walters. “After a few PIs, the backlog dropped to under 20. It was a massive reduction.”
Cultural Shifts: “Since adopting SAFe, I feel like Fred’s a more collaborative place than before,” says Walters. “Our teams are more integrated, and there are stronger relationships between them because they’re part of every activity and process. We are sharing more, so we all know more about what’s happening across the business – and with more transparency. People are putting up their hands to help get projects across the line. We’ve become more understanding and supportive. That has been a big step forward for us as a company.”
“We’ve become more understanding and supportive. That has been a big step forward for us as a company.”
Zoe Walters, Product Manager
A transformative way of working
The SAFe way of working has significantly impacted the way Fred’s teams communicate, and it has improved their ability to adapt and pivot, manage quality standards, and coordinate the flow of work.
“Every single person at Fred IT who is using the SAFe way of working agrees that the transparency of the work and the ability to adapt quickly to changes in the market and be more agile is certainly tenfold,” says Walters.
“The difference now is that we have regular stand-ups together and can coordinate work across the board. So, for example, if we need a field change on Fred Dispense and the back-office report, the conversation is out in the open and can be planned and coordinated. It’s a massive improvement on past processes.”
The new visibility and transparency are also having an effect on future development work. Many of Fred’s government initiatives involve two different products, and one team might start before the other. With SAFe, the first team now shares all their learnings with the next team before they start. It allows for a much smoother approach and typically helps the teams avoid any potential issues.
“We now have predictability of our estimates,” says Walters. “We know how fast work can be achieved, which we didn’t know before. Previously we could only estimate delivery/release dates and resource requirements.
“SAFe was also a big shift in the team ownership of quality. Rather it being the responsibility of one person who landed the quality assurance title, it became embedded in the process – and has become a focus.
“Having SAFe processes in place means that everyone now knows what will happen each week, each month, and in each cycle.”
Summary
With the help of SAFe, Fred IT successfully overcame the challenges associated with developing a critical, time-sensitive end-to-end ePrescription solution, despite existing commitments. Previously siloed teams worked together with transparency and collaboration, and the product was successfully delivered despite significantly abbreviated timelines and a plethora of on-the-go changes to requirements.
Says Walters, “The enthusiasm for SAFe training is such that most people average a minimum of two courses. Tom Boswell, Enterprise Agile Coach and Release Train Engineer, added, “We’re very proud of where we got to with SAFe training. All of our leadership team—right up to the CEO—trained, which is unusual in my experience. It shows that they understood the value of investing in SAFe. We now have the capabilities to provide SAFe training and certification internally but continue to be supported by Pretty Agile for advanced courses.”
PI Planning at Fred ITKaizen dragon at Fred IT PI Planning
“The fact that we delivered for the biggest industry event of the year was hugely motivating and moved us from a negative to a positive spiral. The business was a bit surprised and shocked that we did what we said we would do on something that was quite big and complicated. There’s no way we could have done it without SAFe.”
Six months before the biggest annual industry event, IT leadership recognized that it would likely not deliver a new release as planned.
Industry:
Agriculture
Solution:
SAFe® 4.0
Results:
Time to market – A 75% reduction in the time to get features to market
Customer value – With more frequent releases, customers see value much faster
Quality – A 25% reduction in defects in production
Predictability – 98% accuracy on the delivery predictability
Morale – A 60% jump in employee engagement survey results
Best Practices:
Deploy SAFe by the book – “Adopting an industry best-practices system like SAFe off the shelf has forced us to transition and change in the way we needed to,” Littlefair says.
Be lean with SAFe – To implement quickly ahead of an industry event, LIC used only what was essential.
Focus on the business outcome – Look beyond the implementation at the objectives for implementing SAFe/Agile. “This will then allow the business to be ruthless in getting early wins, and shift from a cost-driven culture to one of value,” Clark says.
Introduction
In New Zealand, Fieldays is billed as “the biggest agricultural trade show in the Southern Hemisphere.” Every June, more than 115,000 farming industry visitors come to purchase equipment and learn about the latest in farming advances.
For Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC), it’s a can’t-miss opportunity to connect with current and prospective customers—farmers. One of the oldest farming co-operatives in the country, LIC provides a range of services and solutions to help farmers be more prosperous and productive: genetics and information to create superior livestock; information to improve farmer decision-making; and hardware and systems to improve productivity. To achieve those goals, more than 700 employees are based in offices around New Zealand, increasing to around 2,000 for the peak dairy mating season
As Big Data and other technologies begin to heavily influence farming practices, LIC is riding a wave of growth. As LIC prepared for Fieldays 2016, the co-op planned a new release of MINDA Live, the company’s proprietary herd management system. Yet the organization’s IT leadership lacked confidence about delivering as planned—and with good reason. Historically, IT had rarely delivered on time or budget.
“Every time we failed to deliver we did a post-mortem, but didn’t learn from our mistakes, and it would happen again a few months later,” says Paul Littlefair, CIO.
Deploying Essential SAFe®
LIC was an early adopter of Lean-Agile team practices. However, they still performed most IT work with a waterfall governance process.
“We still had incredibly large, multi-year projects, and detailed analysis to write business cases,” Littlefair says. “In typical waterfall fashion, we didn’t test until the end or consider quality from the beginning. It took a lot of rework to get it right, leading to overruns.”
With the Fieldays deadline looming, Littlefair decided to call in Gillian Clark for an assessment of their readiness. To Clark, it was unclear whether teams would deliver as needed for the big event.
To expedite progress, Clark recommended that LIC implement the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®). Given the short timeframe and the team’s unfamiliarity with the Framework, they chose to deploy Essential SAFe, a subset of SAFe that includes 10 major elements necessary for a successful SAFe implementation.
“The approach was, get everyone into a room, align teams into a single Agile Release Train (ART) with a focus on integration, and focus on delivery of the program with a single program backlog, with one person coordinating the project managers and pooled budgets. Up to that point they had three project managers fighting for budget and resources, so we merged them,” Clark says.
Given the approaching deadline—just six months out—Littlefair and Clark encountered some resistance to trying something new. They asked everyone to participate in the PI planning, including Operations, which had not participated in planning previously. The CEO likewise attended, which set the tone for the importance of the launch.
“Putting everyone in a room together to talk about stuff—instead of building it—was seen as something we should not do,” Littlefair says. “But we made it mandatory for everyone to attend.”
In spite of initial misgivings, some of those who had been unsure began to recognize the value of face-to-face collaboration during the first day of Program Increment (PI) planning. Specifically, they saw how their roles and their work tied to others.
“It slowly dawned on them that they were on the same critical path as everyone else in the room,” Clark says. “They also began to realize the project outcomes were at risk and that SAFe practices were providing more understanding of what needed to happen to be successful.”
For the first time, teams were working on the same cadence, an essential step in synchronizing everyone across the organization. Soon, they fell into a flow and started to self manage. Communication and transparency improved; instead of making assumptions, individuals started identifying dependencies with others, and making sure those dependencies were discussed and accepted.
Delivering for Fieldays and Beyond
When Cerno first introduced DevOps practices, the company lacked a SAFe DevOps Practitioner. Still, they made progress on a delivery pipeline and staging environment, supported a grayscale release of a product, and shortened the time to release future versions.
Beyond that release, LIC notes improvements across multiple areas:
Time-to-market – A 75% reduction in the time to get features to market (from 12 to 24 months down to three to six months). Features are now released twice a week for COBOL and legacy solutions.
Customer value – With more frequent releases, customers now see value much faster. “Customers have absolutely noticed,” Littlefair says. “Whenever something goes out, we post it on social media and we’re seeing a lot more engagement and real-time feedback there.”
Quality – A 25% reduction in defects in production
Predictability – 98% accuracy on delivery predictability
Morale – A 60% improvement in employee engagement survey results
Culture Shift
LIC’s SAFe journey has led to numerous changes across the organization. For one, meetings look quite different than they did before SAFe was adopted. Initially, some leaders preferred not to include all teams in planning meetings. Now, everyone joins, and Littlefair notes, teams hold each other more accountable and ask more insightful questions.
Before, analysts would write involved business cases and ‘push’ them on teams. These days, product owners make sure work is properly sized and teams ‘pull’ the work.
On the Path of Value-Stream Funding
Currently, LIC runs three ARTs and has extended SAFe across the entire technical landscape. Having moved beyond Essential SAFe, the co-op is now on a course to fund projects at the value stream level. Business leaders now clearly see the value of their investments, and discussions center on priorities in terms of features and benefits.
“SAFe has succeeded in a culture and mindset change,” Littlefair says. “We have a set of processes, rules, and practices that work extremely well, and that have led a cultural shift.”
“SAFe has really helped bring the organization along its transformation journey. Its real value has been in the way it links strategy with decentralized execution, using metrics to enable a high level of transparency and fact-based decision making to focus on achieving business outcomes.”
–Natalie Field, Head of MyPost Consumer
Challenge:
Effectively deliver solutions that sustain and further enable Australia Post as a trusted services provider, and delight customers with personalized digital products and services.
Industry:
Delivery Services
Results:
100-fold increase in yearly production deployments with 98% cost reduction, enabling iterative product development
400% Agile Release Train productivity increase over 18 months
Strong overall delivery predictability of 80%+
First-Time Delivery rate improved by 7 percentage points
Net Promoter Score rose by 8 points
Increased employee satisfaction and engagement
Best Practices:
Establish a learning and improvement mindset – Place a primary focus on learning and continuous improvement across all facets of delivery to achieve consistent growth in maturity and effectiveness.
Measure outcomes – Enabling a metrics and measurement capability links teams to business strategy and is key to ensuring business outcomes are effectively achieved.
Align to DevOps principles – Building a strong technology delivery platform aligned to DevOps principles enables iterative and innovative product
Focus on the entire system of work – Build organizational advocacy and sustainability by facilitating change and enablement for shared teams that support and govern Agile Release Trains.
Introduction
Australia Post is Australia’s iconic postal services provider. For 208 years, the organization has been integral to how people and communities connect across Australia. Through a collective workforce of over 50,000 people, Australia Post serves communities, citizens, and businesses, from large corporations to government departments.
Like many organizations, Australia Post’s business has been disrupted and must transform to adapt to the digital era. Traditional business pillars such as letters are in persistent decline, while the company faces fierce competition, but also immense opportunity with the growth of ecommerce. For Australia Post, that opportunity lies in creating sustainable competitive advantage through trusted relationships between consumers, businesses, and government.
Given these forces, Australia Post needed a new way of working to both sustain and further enable the organization as a trusted services provider, and to delight its customers with personalized digital products and services.
SAFe: Driving Change with Lean Structure and Common Language
Over the past four years, Australia Post has invested in its technology, people, and culture to change the way it works to focus on customer experiences and continuous innovation. To help achieve this agility in business, Australia Post selected and adopted the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) not only as an operating model but as a tool for change. With SAFe, the organization aims to describe, communicate, and build an understanding of how to leverage Lean and Agile principles across the organization.
“The structure and discipline outlined in SAFe have been a powerful way to communicate a different way of working,” says Daniel Fajerman, Head of Digital Engineering. “Using an industry-proven framework offered a strong basis to start the conversation about working differently, providing a common language and consistent base to work off.”
Achieving Sustainable Change
The goal at Australia Post is sustainable, lasting change that fundamentally shifts how the organization approaches and delivers against its strategies. To do so, Australia Post must equip its people with knowledge and the ability to advocate for and be a part of this new way of working.
A broad and comprehensive training and enablement strategy was rolled out across the organization to build experience and maturity. With help from Mark Richards of CoActivation, a Scaled Agile partner, Australia Post trained more than 900 people in Leading SAFe® and SAFe for Teams® courses. This included key roles across executive leadership, within business functions such as finance, risk, architecture, security, marketing and sales, and of course technology leadership and teams.
From the beginning, Australia Post applied a persistent focus on cadence and synchronization – keys to building alignment and embedding disciplined delivery practices across diverse teams. With all of Australia Post on the same sprint (and then Program Increment) cadence, scaling teams and ultimately forming these into Agile Release Trains (ARTs) became a natural evolution.
Achieving sustainable change focused on four key interrelated areas of emphasis across the organization:
Cross-functional, long-running teams – Moving from transient project teams to cross-functional, long-running teams aligned to customer experiences was a foundational, critical change to the way people work.
Culture – Australia Post invested significantly in evolving the culture of the organization to one where curiosity, innovation, and a learning mindset predominate.
Technology enablement – Beyond cultural and process changes, improving delivery flow and time-to-value requires an effective build pipeline and deployment infrastructure aligned to DevOps principles.
System of work – Implementing a new way of working spans well beyond delivery teams to every part of the organization that supports the delivery of business initiatives. The change team worked closely with shared services groups to tailor approaches to enable and meet their needs under the Framework, including new innovative funding and governance models.
This multi-pronged approach formed sustainable building blocks for change and enablement. With the goal of implementing Agile Release Trains (ARTs), the early focus was on long-running teams and culture to allow maturity to build and grow. The greatest traction came with the advocacy and leadership of business sponsors and leads, who understood the increased business opportunity and had confidence in the delivery model.
MyPost Consumer – Creating a Platform for Personalized Services
Today, five ARTs now support Australia Post’s value streams and associated enterprise strategies. One of those trains, the MyPost Consumer ART, sits within Australia Post’s Consumer market segment value stream. Established in 2015 to play a significant role in the shift toward customer centricity, MyPost Consumer is creating an omni-channel platform to offer personalized services to customers. The train’s primary focus: the parcel delivery experience, which sits at the heart of Australia Post’s business.
The train is made up of 110 cross-functional roles, with each team responsible for specific components of the parcel delivery experience. As a multi-channel, multi-technology program, only 30% of features are purely digital. The most impactful features require changes to multiple channels and enterprise technology systems.
“Getting the job done right is about focusing as much on how we work together, as what we are working on,” says Natalie Field, Head of MyPost Consumer. “We know there are many unknowns in achieving our program strategy and we don’t, and won’t, always get it right. However we also know that by respecting each other, and staying committed to rapid learning cycles, we will always come up with great solutions. “
The train has achieved strong outcomes over the past couple of years. Australia Post attributes the success of the train to several pillars:
Create a customer-centric culture Building a customer-centric culture meant creating an environment that empowers the entire team to make fact-based, data-driven decisions and equipping everyone to be advocates for the customer experience.
Focus on metrics to drive business outcomes A strong focus on measurement has resulted in significant positive impact across the organization’s primary success measures. To help achieve this outcome, teams are equipped with technology tools and the ability to collect and report on data. This empowers teams to learn fast about in-market feature performance and make changes when necessary. The result is a data-driven approach to how the train identifies, prioritises, implements, and learns from each Program Increment.
Improve continuously for greater predictability and performance Success of the train hinges on an ability to improve continuously and focus relentlessly on evolving the experience to meet customer needs. The train adapts and responds to market demands, continually improving technology capabilities to advance the business across its digital channel, retail stores, delivery network, and call centre.
Raising Satisfaction and Throughput, with Lower Cost
A strong focus on measurement and learning to maximize business outcomes resulted in significant positive impact:
Improved first-time delivery – The First-Time Delivery rate jumped by 7 percentage points over 12 months.
Reduced cost – Australia Post reduced its infrastructure costs by 98%.
Predictability – The train consistently delivered on 80% or more of its objectives.
Customer satisfaction – The Net Promoter Score rose by 8 points over the course of one year.
Employee engagement – Employee satisfaction and engagement increased.
Industry accolades – The train was voted the Best Customer Centric Project in Australia / New Zealand by the CX Management Conference.
Australia Post continues to evolve and grow to meet the needs of its business. Its focus on continuous improvement means the organization ever challenges itself to create the next wave of trusted services for its customers.
“SAFe has really helped bring the organization along its transformation journey,” Field says. “Its real value has been in the way it links strategy with decentralized execution, using metrics to enable a high level of transparency and fact-based decision making to focus on achieving business outcomes.”
“Everyone hearing the same message from the same trainers at the same time was a huge enabler for alignment and a ‘one-team’ culture.”
—Em Campbell-Pretty, Context Matters
Challenge:
After the successful rollout of a new online banking platform, Westpac received numerous requests for additional features and needed to deliver quickly.
Industry:
Banking
Solution:
SAFe®
Results:
Westpac successfully took 150 people from waterfall to Agile in one week, and garnered positive feedback from teams
Team and business engagement went up
Cycle time and defects went down
Best Practices:
Get executive buy-in—Getting leadership on board—and participating—is essential to achieving team buy-in
Include all roles in training—Triple check that everyone is scheduled to get the training they need
One of Australia’s “big four” banks, Westpac serves approximately 10 million consumer and business customers across Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Challenge
In 2015, Westpac launched a new online banking platform. Though very successful—and award-winning—the launch resulted in a huge demand to deliver additional features quickly. The company wanted to take a scaled Agile approach to roll out new capabilities but lacked the quality training and know-how to apply it to this initiative.
Solution
Westpac reached out to Scaled Agile Partner, Context Matters, for guidance, leading to the decision to adopt SAFe, and form an Agile Release Train (ART) for the new features.
Before launch planning began, the company settled on a vision, a prioritized feature backlog, an approach to product ownership and a decision on capacity allocation.
At the time, teams were focused on delivering the final release of the in-flight program. If they were going to change the delivery approach for the next release, they would need to move fast. With a small window of opportunity, a SAFe QuickStart seemed the only answer.
To achieve launch in one week, Westpac began by training everyone at the same time. Midweek, they aligned all teams to common objectives, secured commitment and continued training during planning. By week’s end, they provided orientation for specialty roles, open spaces and tool training for teams.
Development teams would be available in six weeks, so Westpac grabbed that time slot—knowing the window would be tight. After buy-in from executives on the business and IT sides, they were ready for next steps.
To support their efforts, they also established Communities of Practice and hold monthly technical workshops for developers.
2 Days of Leading SAFe® Training
Next, 32 leaders across business and IT came together for two days of Leading SAFe training to discuss SAFe in the Westpac context, generating team excitement. Together, leaders came up with a theme for the train—Galaxy—with all teams receiving related names.
“Giving the train a shared identity helps create a bond across the team of teams that is the Agile Release Train, seeding the “one-team” culture that helps trains excel,” says Em Campbell-Pretty of Context Matters.
SAFe Scrum XP training brought together 60 people in one release train of eight teams over two days with two trainers in one room. The RTE additionally joined team-level training for both days, leading team members to note his commitment to SAFe.
“Everyone hearing the same message from the same trainers at the same time was a huge enabler for alignment and a ‘one-team’ culture,” says Campbell-Pretty.
The following Monday, Westpac launched the train. Some last-minute feature requests presented a hiccup, but the teams and leadership committed to a plan.
Results: Cycle Time, Defects Down
Westpac successfully took 100 people from waterfall to Agile in one week, and garnered positive feedback from teams. Team and business engagement went up while cycle time and defects went down.
Agile at Westpac continues to grow, with the company holding its third PI Planning session recently.
Additional Reading
For a deeper dive into this SAFe experience, download Em-Campbell Pretty’s presentation to AgileAustralia16.
RMIT University – SAFe Implementation for Business Agility Transformation
“The first Program Increment showed both the potential of the train to deliver value more quickly, and also the challenges facing its success. It also successfully delivered a number of features for release.”
—Em Campbell-Pretty, CEO, Pretty Agile
Industry:
Education
Solution:
SAFe®
Results:
Positive shift in employee NPS
Improvement in business engagement
Reduction in cycle time
Increase in release frequency
Overview
Since April 2014, Scaled Agile Partner, Context Matters (now Pretty Agile), under the lead of Em Campbell-Pretty, has been supporting the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (aka RMIT University) with implementing SAFe for effective business agility transformation. RMIT is Australia’s largest university and, as the name suggests, is known for its technology focus. On November 6, 2014, Catherine Haugh (the SAFe Release Train Engineer-RTE) and some of her team presented their success story at the ANZ Oracle Higher Education User Group conference.
At the time, the presentation at HEUG outlined the journey of a new Agile Release Train, describing the practices and approach of the train as well as the challenges met implementing this new way of working while introducing it to the wider organisation. A sister-presentation was delivered by the Academic Registrar, Maddy McMaster, outlining the experience of going Agile from the business point of view. Maddy is the business owner of RMIT’s Student Administration Management System (SAMS) and the business sponsor of the Student Administration Agile Release Train (StAART).
StAART came into being following a shift within Information Technology Services (ITS) at RMIT towards Lean and Agile practices and a recognition that the ability to scale capability would be critical to ongoing success. SAFe was chosen to address that need and the train stood up in June 2014.
StAART is the delivery mechanism for three major projects in the Student Administration Portfolio as well as day-to-day operational work requests made to enhance and support Student Administration systems. It is made up of seven feature teams which they call squads, supported by a delivery services team – about 60 people in all.
StAART works predominantly with Oracle’s PeopleSoft-Campus Solutions application environment, tailoring the software to suit the organisation’s student administrative requirements through configuration and development. RMIT’s customised Campus Solutions system is known as SAMS. PeopleSoft is a commercial off the shelf (COTS) application.
Early Results
The first Program Increment showed both the potential of the train to deliver value more quickly and also the challenges facing its success. It also successfully delivered a number of features for release. Even though it is early days RMIT has already seen a positive shift in employee NPS, an improvement in business engagement, a reduction in cycle time and an increase in release frequency. The overarching challenge has been one of cultural change – StAART commenced life in a distinct waterfall environment.
Thank you to Catherine Haugh (RMIT), Maddy McMaster (RMIT) and Em Campbell-Pretty for sharing their story with the SAFe community.
Update – October, 2015:
At the 2015 Agile Australia conference, Catherine presented an update on the StAART and its successes, including a dramatic improvement in NPS ratings from stakeholders. Her presentation includes video testimonials from the teams and ART stakeholders, as well as the data detailing the Net Promoter Scores before the ART launch and after.
Additional Reading
For a deeper dive into this SAFe experience, download the two presentations below.
Telstra is Australia’s leading provider of mobile phones, mobile devices, home phones and broadband internet. When Telstra’s Enterprise Data Warehouse delivery team began their SAFe Agile journey, they scaled from 1 to 5 teams in a matter of months and found themselves struggling to make the leap from agile projects to an Agile program. “After reading Dean Leffingwell’s Scaling Software Agility and Agile Software Requirements,” notes Mark Richards (Agile Coach) and Em Campbell-Pretty (General Manager, EDW Delivery), “we were inspired to establish Telstra’s first Agile Release Train.” Later, they both followed up with SPC certification to further enhance their knowledge and skills.
This presentation, from Agile Australia 2013 in June, covers how SAFe provided a recipe for success, reflecting on how Telstra translated Program-level SAFe theory into practice, transforming not only the delivery capability of the EDW team, but also the culture. Adopting Leffingwell’s Scaled Agile Framework, the Theory and the Practice.
Most importantly, they are getting great business results, including:
Average delivery cycle time down from 12 month to 3 months
6X increased in delivery frequency
50% cost to deliver reduction
95% decrease in product defects
100% projects delivered on time and on budget
Happy project sponsors
Happy teams
As we noted, Em and Mark placed an early emphasis on rapidly evolving the culture that supports Lean-Agile development, and they had some fun with it too, as you can see if you check out the The Power of Haka! on Em’s PrettyAgile blog.
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