Real options promote flexibility in decision-making and enable organizations to pivot, change course, or seize new opportunities as circumstances evolve.
When:
May 9, 2024, 12:00 pm – May 9, 2024, 1:00 pm MST
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Program or Project Manager, SAFe Program Consultant
Improving your health is important so you can live a longer life. The same goes for your Agile transformation.
Certain habits improve your transformation’s health. Like eating healthy and working out do for our bodies.
I’ve seen these habits improve and sustain Agile transformations in many organizations:
Change leaders pave the way
Strategy connects directly to the work
People strategies activate engagement
Each of these habits signals your organization embraces real change. And embracing change is the foundation of a sustainable Agile transformation.
Change Leaders Pave the Way
Leadership is the most important part of a healthy Agile transformation. I’d go as far as saying leaders can make or break transformation efforts.
So leadership teams must lead the change for it to stick. They do this by leading by example at all levels of the organization (from the portfolio to Agile teams).
Leaders should embrace and demonstrate the principles and values in their leadership roles. And consult them when making a change to one of their transformation strategies.
Easterseals demonstrates one way to apply this thinking in this customer story. The company applied SAFe starting with Lean-Agile leadership. They placed change leaders in key roles. And then added the principles and structures to guide their decisions.
Some organizations disregard the principles and values to tailor SAFe. They make this modification to fit SAFe into their culture. But this creates an anti-pattern.
These modifications may include:
Changing the names of the roles identified in the Framework
Picking and choosing which ceremonies to hold
Training leaders on SAFe without proper leadership coaching and guidance
SAFe is not a prescriptive framework. Yet it’s important to maintain its foundational principles and values. This ensures a healthy Agile transformation.
Read more about how to apply the SAFe Core Values in a work setting here.
Change leaders extend their reach through Lean-Agile Communities of Excellence (LACE). LACEs should share transformation learnings across portfolios. This aligns each portfolio to Lean-Agile practices and leadership. It also helps to create a Continuous Learning Culture.
Transformation leaders in the LACE should also spearhead improvement initiatives within the organization. Also, they should focus on cross-training initiatives. This solves bottlenecks and other flow issues.
Leadership sponsorship extends beyond sustaining to accelerating change
In a healthy Agile transformation, leadership doesn’t stop at sponsoring the change. They go as far as participating in and accelerating the change.
When this does not happen, the following pattern can occur.
A Fortune 100 large enterprise pivoted from Waterfall to Agile. (Notice Lean was not even part of the conversation).
Leadership did not choose the method for this transformation. Instead, they pushed this decision to the leaders in each business unit.
You can only imagine what happened. Some business leaders chose SAFe. Others tried a hybrid approach and pulled practices from several Agile frameworks. Others decided to ‘baby step’ it and start with small teams. None of the teams in this ‘small team’ example took into account all the dependencies on the other teams.
Six months in, one leader asked: “Where can I get a holistic view of our product delivery and how we are tracking against all our initiatives?”
With so many frameworks and practices in play, there was no easy way to answer this.
Other impacts?
Business units often worked on initiatives with other business units. But they did not have a common cadence. Or alignment on dependencies or ceremonies. It became chaotic to figure out how to execute together to deliver on business requests.
If leadership selected one framework and language, that would have united the organization. And made the transformation smoother.
This example demonstrates why leadership needs to extend beyond sponsorship to participation. It ensures a transformation’s health and, thus, long-lived success.
Strategy Connects Directly to Daily work
Leadership is in place. Now what? Everyone in a healthy Agile transformation engages in their work. To improve employee engagement, show employees how their work makes a difference.
Make this connection through transparency about your strategies. Show how they align with your enterprise’s Vision and Mission.
How do you make this a healthy habit? By sharing updates during all hands or other standing company-wide meetings.
One way Scaled Agile, Inc. shows its employees how they’re impacting enterprise strategy is through color coding. We assign each strategic theme a specific color (on brand, of course). In System Demo, the agenda is color-coded by the corresponding strategic theme.
Agenda from a recent system demo
This transparency is important, especially when the strategy must pivot. It’s important employees understand the following before any work stops or changes:
Learnings from the pivot
The reason for the pivot
Be thoughtful about how you communicate this information with your organization. This is work that many spend the majority, if not all, of their time on. It’s important to be sensitive to this.
Porsche shared an example of strategy transparency at the 2021 SAFe Summit. Their executive leadership committed to how they wanted to work. And which KPIs they would drive with their products. Leadership did this on stage in front of the entire digital division. This commitment launched the digital sector into its first ARTs and PI Planning.
This shared strategy gave employees a reason to stay engaged with their work. They knew they were working towards a common goal across the digital department.
Once employees understand company strategy, they can connect it to their daily work. This connection is important for improving engagement too. Engagement is the final piece of maintaining a healthy Agile transformation.
People Strategies Activate Engagement
One indicator of a transformation’s health is its most important asset: people. To keep your transformation healthy, you must keep your people happy. One way to do this is through actively engaging them in their roles.
Generate future-focused learning opportunities with paths for Agile roles
If employees see growth opportunities, they will likely remain at their current company.
See these recently updated articles for career development inspiration:
Each article includes role descriptions by category. These descriptions provide opportunities for growth in each of these Agile roles.
Organizations can create paths and learning opportunities based on these role-specific focus areas.
Refresh engagement strategies to align with the current workforce
When employees were asked, “What’s one thing that keeps you from being engaged?” they responded with the following reasons:
No autonomy
Lack of safe space
No clear career direction
Lack of vision and inspiration
Missing feedback
As mentioned in the previous section, engagement creates happier, more motivated employees. Happier and more motivated employees sustain a healthy Agile transformation.
If your engagement strategies need a refresh, try these suggestions:
Overhaul outdated engagement strategies
Align intent with your organization’s social purpose
Facilitate a relational and emotional connection with employees
Generate future-focused learning opportunities
Transform your ceremonies into learning socials
Connect individual contributions to the organizational vision
Connect people to the Vision, Mission, and each other
In a remote/hybrid post-COVID environment, it can feel like you’re working on an island. It’s hard to feel connected to the people you no longer share an office space with.
This connection is important for creating a healthy Agile transformation. Connect people to the following to remind them what they’re working for:
The organization’s Vision
The organization’s Mission
Each other
It gives them the drive to work through the uncomfortable parts of transforming.
Ways you can connect people in your organization:
Schedule volunteer opportunities for teams
Add standing mystery 1:1s to the company calendar
Share rotating appreciations for individual team
Highlight positive customer experiences, interactions, or success milestones
It takes work to maintain your health. Maintaining the health of your transformation is no different. Incorporate these three components into your Agile transformation. It will give you a strong foundation for sustainable change. And prolong your Agile transformation life.
Other resources to incorporate into your transformation routine. You can think of them like supplements if we’re sticking to the health metaphor:
SAFe Enterprise: This enterprise-level subscription provides SAFe training and resources.
Transformation in Practice Panel: This webinar zeroes in on change leadership approaches. Available to SAFe Community members only.
Measure and Grow Assessments: Check your organization’s health with Measure and Grow Assessments. Available to SAFe Community members only.
About Audrey Boydston
Audrey Boydston is a senior consultant at Scaled Agile and an experienced SPCT, Lean-Agile coach, trainer, and facilitator. Her work focuses on continuous learning, building fundamentals, re-orienting around principles, and helping clients—from senior executives to developers—build networks and communities that support their transformations.
Events > Webinars > Business Agility in Banking: How Easy Can It Be?
Business Agility in Banking: How Easy Can It Be?
Banking is a highly regulated business, and most of the large banks have traditions that can easily become a major impediment to new ways of working and thinking.
When:
December 7, 2022, 1:00 pm – December 7, 2022, 2:00 pm ECT
Companies in the financial sector are also extremely aware of risk and financial risk management is one of the very regulated areas one has to take into account when changing the way of working.
In this webinar, Audrey Boydston and Mats will share some experiences in a dialog and discussion, as well as answer your questions.
Speakers
Audrey Boydston
SAFe® Fellow and SPCT (Scaled Agile Inc.)
As an executive management professional, I spent almost 20 years leading and managing projects and process improvement initiatives. After experiencing an agile transformation, I have discovered that it is more than just a methodology for managing product development, and am passionate about helping organizations on their Agile journeys. As an Agile trainer and coach, I have gained a unique perspective that allows me to take my hands on experiences and learnings and weave them into each training session I facilitate. I consider myself a visionary with the ability to establish rapport and facilitate highly collaborative sessions with diverse groups ranging from developers to senior leadership. I hold an array of certifications: SAFe Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT), Training from the BACK of the Room! (TBR-Certified Trainer), Project Management Professional (PMP), Org Mindset Enterprise Coach (OMEC), Certified Scrum Professional (CSP-SM and CSP-PO), SAFe RTE (RTE), ICAgile Certified
Mats Jegebo
Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor (WoW! Agile)
Currently Head Coach and co-founder of WoW! Agile, with 29 years of experience from being a consultant. Real life experience from large projects and organizations is what has given Mats his knowledge and understanding of how you create real business value and benefit. Since 2004 Mats has worked solely with large agile implementations, in leading roles as Project manager, Change control manager, Head coach, strategic advisor, etc. Mats has spent a great deal of his career in regulated businesses and the last 6 in banking.
Though transformations are widespread, not all feel successful.
I am blessed to have been able to take part in many transformations.
And in the transformations I’ve been a part of, I’ve found similarities. This goes for Agile transformations, digital transformations, business transformations, and my own more personal transformations.
In this blog post, I’ll share executive behaviors that I’ve seen produce unhappy employees and decreased outcomes:
Lack of clarity and communication
No connection to middle management
Passivity
I will also share patterns that created positive outcomes for the employees and the end users:
Leading with heart
Leading with honesty
Leading with accountability
Leading by example
Executive leadership is not the only impact on success or failure. But I’ve seen and felt that strong agile executives enable transformations to be motivational and positive.
Three Ways Executives Break Transformations
Beginning a transformation and not following through can have immense ripple effects throughout an organization.
To begin a transformation, we must ask people to change. Change is something humans have a natural negative reaction to unless they feel safe.
Transformation failures start with this basic premise: we must feel safe to change. Executives who don’t enable safety at scale are not enabling a transformation.
Lack of clarity and communication
Executives are decision-makers.
Leaders must remember that those under their supervision must live with their decisions. Thus, the leader needs to listen to the ideas and concerns of everyone involved before making and imposing a decision.
This does not mean leaders must follow the suggestions or ideas of everyone. But they must hear and consider what those under their supervision believe before making a decision.
A leader needs to make decisions in a way that those affected by the decision can believe they were heard. Those affected should also know there were reasons why their ideas were not incorporated into the final decision.
Leaders are not “commanders” but must make decisions and be clear about them. Transformations with executives who attempt to please everyone in the moment only ensure that nothing is clear. In this situation, happiness is, at best, temporary.
No connection to middle management
Middle managers have complicated jobs with conflicting priorities. They must focus on in-the-moment concerns as well as long-term strategies. Also, they must find ways to care about the humans that work for them while completing the larger mission of the company. And in most cases, they are not incentivized for these behaviors.
Rewarding these middle management behaviors and outcomes builds a system unable to transform:
Siloed improvements
Heroics by individuals over systemic improvements that eliminate the need for heroics
Meeting dates at the sacrifice of employee and end-user well-being
Passivity
Passivity is the biggest failure of executive leadership in times that need change and transformation.
Passive leadership, in my experience, is executives who say they want a transformation and even hire a team to do so and then stop getting involved.
To create a generative culture of engaged workers, a leader must engage. Executive leaders who step back from the decisions and motivations of their workforce may have happy accidents. But they won’t have the intentional system that builds the culture required to keep their enterprise focused on the appropriate risks and learnings to speed up outcomes.
Four Ways Executives Make Transformations
I’ve managed to interact with many executives throughout my career. Because of this, I’ve internalized my belief on what makes an “agile executive.”
Agile executives hold these transformation leaders accountable for outcomes and results while taking accountability for removing blockers and giving the group the time needed to change. They vocalize and act upon SAFe transformation as a journey that should have measurable and time-bound moments but is never complete.
Agile executives understand their most important asset is the people who work within the company.
Leading with heart
The desire to inspire others comes to mind first. Agile executives are purposeful about inspiring individuals they come across day to day as well as large groups. They do this through clarity of vision but also by taking the time to do so. They find pride in making others feel better, even momentarily, for having spoken with them.
The agile executive doesn’t talk at people; they talk with them and encourage others to talk with each other along the way. Agile executives understand their most important asset is the people who work within the company. They understand this in economic and human terms: employees who are happy, enabled, and mission-driven produce better economic outcomes than those who are not.
A motivating example of leading with heart is in the customer story from Porsche’s leadership. I felt inspired by these agile executives’ connection to the heart of their workforce and how they brought that heart to life together across organizational boundaries.
Leading with honesty
Agile executives know that if those they lead doubt for one second that they are being honest with them or that they don’t have the best interest of their people at the forefront, harm will occur.
Depending on the products the enterprise creates, this harm could result in not only decreased customer outcomes but actual physical or mental harm to employees and end users.
Agile executives know that trust doesn’t occur in meetings; it happens in moments between them. And they encourage leaders throughout the company to know the same. They own up to mistakes immediately and celebrate those who act upon errors as learning moments.
Leading with accountability
Agile executives hold themselves and others accountable for the transformation at hand. They provide clarity of strategy, prioritization reasoning, and clear intent, creating a fertile ground to hold people accountable.
They also select and empower a group of trusted individuals who have shown desire and competency to move the full business along. To do this, they look for those who believe the company mission and customer outcomes could improve through change and have the relentless positive energy to make it happen.
Agile executives hold these transformation leaders accountable for outcomes and results while taking accountability for removing blockers and giving the group the time needed to change. They vocalize and act upon transformation as a journey that should have measurable and time-bound moments but is never complete.
A personal vignette
This moment continues to stick with me as a clear example of leading with honesty and accountability.
When I was a senior director a few years into leading a SAFe® transformation inside an organization, a new C-suite leader asked to meet with me in her first couple of weeks on the job.
During this meeting, we discussed where I saw opportunities and what I was hoping to achieve over the next year. She ended the call with a few statements that renewed my energy and began an amazing working relationship.
She said:
I appreciate your candor and ability to see the full system. I know this is a journey, not a destination. My ask is to continue to be bold, open, gritty, and kind. My other ask is a challenge to you. If you can help the teams and trains gain 5 percent efficiency in how they produce their work, we will have $$ (number left out on purpose, but it was A LOT) to fund additional efficiencies and improvements. Be the person who tells me how to do this, what you need from me, my peers, and the organization to succeed. I will be there with you, and I ask you to be accountable to that initial result, with more challenges from me after we succeed.
Agile executives are action-based. The transforming organization mimics their actions, not their words.
First, they ask for and receive coaching and education, knowing that lifelong learning is how they got to their position. And no title they have eliminates the need to continue learning, especially in today’s changing age.
Then Agile executives work hard to form teams amongst their peers, exemplifying team behaviors and living the same practices they ask their employees to have. They share their improvement backlogs and communicate their wins, failures, and hopes authentically.
Finally, agile executives show up, physically and mentally, to events made up of cross-functional roles spanning hierarchies held within the organization, encouraging behaviors that create alignment and discouraging siloes. They learn the words of the transformation and frequently meet with those they hold accountable for the transformational steps. This ensures space to raise and resolve risks, blockers, and detractors to progress.
Aspire to Your Own Transformation
Transformational agile executives have a good sense of themselves and their role in the overall scheme of the endeavor in which they’re engaged. Leaders cannot take themselves too seriously but need also to recognize that their conduct establishes a pattern for those under their leadership to follow. Agile executives teach by example as much as by any other means available to them.
Leadership requires that a leader respect those under their supervision and treat them as equals. Regardless of the type of transformation which you are deciding to lead, I hope this blog inspires you to inspire others and to continue aspiring to your own transformation.
Be the change.
About Rebecca Davis
Rebecca Davis is a Scaled Agile Framework team member within Scaled Agile, Inc., a SAFe Fellow, SPCT, and a Principal Consultant. She has led multiple transformations as a LACE Director, RTE, Portfolio Manager, and Coach. Rebecca has experience helping organizations create joy in the workplace by connecting employees to each other and user outcomes.
Connect with SAFe coaches, industry experts, and change agents
Get advice from subject matter experts on setting up a SAFe transformation
Network, ask questions, and share best practices with your peers
Discover firsthand how British and European organizations use SAFe and Atlassian Solutions to deliver value to customers
Speakers
Tina Behers
VP Enterprise Agility (Adaptavist)
Tina is a Lean-Agile Transformation Professional, and an accomplished Business Leader with a proven ability to successfully create and execute value. Over 20 years of experience in leading organizational improvement initiatives with a strong focus on delivery and business alignment. Her expertise in delivering exceptional value, leading complex high-value technology, and business process improvement initiatives as a trusted advisor is proven in how she provides the right balance of consulting and the hands-on practical expertise.
Aslam Cader
Principal Atlassian Consultant (Valiantys)
Aslam Cader is based in London, and he leads the Agile at Scale practice for the Valiantys North EMEA region. He is an Atlassian Certified Expert and a Scaled Agile specialist with over 10 years of experience working with teams at all levels of scale. He has a Masters’ degree in Information Systems and Technology from City, University of London. He co-authored the book, Scaling Agile with Jira Align: A practical guide to strategically scaling agile across teams, programs, and portfolios in enterprises.
Fiona Chalk
Head of Portfolio Strategy and Funding (Vodafone)
Fiona Chalk is Head of Portfolio Strategy & Funding for the Lean Portfolio Management & Transformation team in Vodafone’s global Digital IT organization. Driven to support the implementation of SAFe for Vodafone by establishing how Digital & can organize to match strategic business priorities with the demand from multiple functions, in line with Lean Portfolio Management. Fiona has over 20 years of experience across Vodafone UK and Group in roles spanning Strategy, Sales, Marketing, Procurement, and Business Management. The last 15 years she managed large global Programmes launching major business products and solutions across multiple markets. Fiona enjoys fostering a culture of collaboration in large virtual teams in order to achieve transformational results. She adopted SAFe in 2017, implementing Lean Portfolio Management in 2019 for her programme. Fiona lives in Newbury, UK, with her husband, son and daughter. Outside work she enjoys time with her family cycling, sailing, skiing and walking the dog, and also supporting the local Scout Group. She can be contacted at Fiona.Chalk@vodafone.com or on LinkedIn.
Rick Cobb
Head of Global Solutions Sales (Atlassian)
Rick Cobb is the Head of Global Solutions Sales for Atlassian, a collaboration software company with a mission to unleash the potential of every team. Rick is a strategic, high-integrity technology executive and passionate leader with 25 years of experience building innovative, high-growth software companies known for the quality of their employees and commitment to customer success. His background includes deep international expertise in commercial and government sales, customer support, professional services, business development, and marketing, as well as overall technology company operations.
Mary Gagne
Director, Product Owner of SaaS Business Applications (Boston Consulting)
Mary is a sought-after leader and technology expert at Boston Consulting Group. She spearheaded the Atlassian tool implementation as part of the scaled agile transformation. The success of the Atlassian implementations and adoption has positioned Mary as an internal asset for BCG consultants. She advises colleagues on implementation approaches, governance models, technical challenges and best practices for client cases. In her current role, as a Product Owner, she oversees BCG’s Enterprise Business Applications, spanning Adobe suite, WalkMe, Atlassian & others. Prior to BCG, she had over 15 years of Product/Program Management experience within large to medium sized software development firms. Mary’s ability to deeply understand the organization she works for, while having a pulse on the needs of the people, accelerates the success of any transformation that she is part of. She lives in Boston, MA with her boyfriend and their three dogs. Outside of work she coaches individuals to awaken their heart and find their life purpose. She can be contacted at gagne.mary@bcg.com or through LinkedIn at Mary C Gagne.
Raj Heda
Expert Associate Partner (Bain)
Raj leads Bain’s Global Agile and Product coaching practice. Raj has 25+ years of experience in Healthcare, Banking & Finance, Media, Retail, and Education. He has helped dozens of firms across industries and around the world improve the agility and effectiveness of their technology-based innovation.
Raj has co-authored Agile Project Management (2009) and Risk Management (2013). He has published 13 patents. He is an adjunct professor at Boston University. Previously, he was head of Business Agility at BCG. He is also an SPCT (C).
Aaron Monroe
Global Head of Enterprise Agility (Visa)
Aaron is the Global Head of Enterprise Business Agility at Visa. He is a dynamic transformation leader with over 20 years of experience helping Fortune 500 companies build high performing teams, accelerate speed to market, and increase the business value delivered. He has a proven track record of leading successful enterprise transformations, and is capable of defining and implementing high-agility behaviors and practices at scale. He is a senior-level Agilist proficient at leading analytical problem-solving efforts to improve the effectiveness of product development, engineering practices, and business operations. Aaron is a compelling communicator able to motivate leaders at all organizational levels to embrace an Agile mindset, adopt Agile practices, and embrace change.
Odile Moreau
Strategic Advisor and SPCT (Scaled Agile Inc.)
Odile has over 20 years of experience helping profit and non-profit organizations in the fields of IT Service Management, Business Information Management, and Software Engineering across Europe. Over the last 10 years, Odilehas been helping leaders and teams adopt Lean and Agile values, mindset, principles, and practices at scale. Working as a Strategic advisor, Scaled Agile instructor, and consultant, Odile loves inspiring people and helping them develop the necessary skills, competencies, and behaviors in order to take the first step in improving and changing the way they work. By combining deep matter expertise with the ability to coach on behavior and leadership, she has proven to be a highly effective transformation coach for large organizations. Born and raised in France, after spending 27 years abroad (mainly in the UK and The Netherlands), she now works in Paris. When Odile is not working, you will probably find her exploring the world, immersing herself in local history, culture, cuisine, and arts.
MichelleNeilson
People and Practice Executive (The Adaptavist Group (Gravity Works))
As an entrepreneur, IT Professional and Enterprise Agile Coach in Financial Services and Telecommunications, Michelle has more than 16 years experience in developing and implementing progressive technology solutions for leading corporations. Coupled with her outstanding interpersonal and relationship management skills and talent for successfully leading large projects, Michelle thrives on coaching, mentoring, leading teams (across global locations) to deliver beyond expectations. Michelle is a critical thinker, passionate about high-quality, sustainable delivery across all facets of business and technology. Michelle is currently a Founding Member and Director of Gravity Works Business Consultants (part of The Adaptavist Group), a boutique consultancy focused on all facets of organisational and digital transformation in the financial services and telecommunications industry.Previously, Michelle was a Founding Member and Director of Freethinking Business Consultants, a financial services consultancy. Michelle has also held several senior managerial positions within large financial corporations.Her skills and expertise include Agile Methodologies, Six Sigma, Prince 2, ITIL, Release Management, Risk and Compliance Monitoring Solutions, TOGAF.
Andrew Sales
Principal Consultant, SAFe Fellow & Framework PM (Scaled Agile Inc.)
Andrew is a SAFe Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT) and has many years of experience in delivering SAFe implementations across a wide range of different industries. He is an accomplished trainer, regularly delivering Scrum, Kanban, and Certified SAFe courses in both private and public settings.
Andrew possesses an excellent balance of technical and business acumen and has Masters’ degrees in both Philosophy and Software Development, and is part of the MBA program at Warwick Business School.
Sarah Sego
Agile Transformation Consultant (Cprime)
Sarah Sego is an Agile Transformation Consultant with over 10 years’ IT experience. Her career has focused on guiding Agile and Lean practices within large enterprises, both for process (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, etc.) and tooling (Jira, etc.). Sarah helps enterprises achieve scaling, productivity, speed to market, and customer satisfaction. She champions a hands-on leadership approach, emphasizing transparency, learning, innovation, quality, and continuous improvement within all levels of an organization.
Derek Vaughan
Head of Presales Consulting Northern Europe (Valiantys)
As a member of the Northern Europe Leadership team Derek works closely on Agile at Scale deployment with strategic customers. Derek has a passion for helping customers to achieving their value creation objectives with a combination of digital and organisation transformation. As a SAFe(TM) Agilist Derek takes a hands-on role as Project Director, assisting executive teams steer the enterprise in scaling agile and the deployment of Atlassian tools. He has worked on strategic transformation projects with Booking, Boston Consulting Group, amongst others.
Stephen de Villiers Graaf
Managing Director (The Adaptavist Group (Gravity Works))
Stephen is an inspirational coach, trainer and entrepreneur. He has gained over 20 years of experience in creating environments where people can excel, having held senior leadership roles such as Head of Application Development, Development Manager and Support Manager. Stephen has worked in many different industries from the collar and tie of large corporates, to the hard-hats and steel-caps of manufacturing.As a keen methodologist, Stephen is all about helping people discover new ways of thinking, learning and relearning with a strong emphasis on focus, simplicity and continuous improvement practices. As a talented public speaker and thought leader, Stephen inspires people and organisations to become passionately curious, creative, expressive and collectively responsible.Stephen is currently a Founding Member and Director of Gravity Works Business Consultants (part of The Adaptavist Group), a boutique consultancy focused on all facets of organisational and digital transformation in financial services and telecommunications.
How Enterprise Agility Is Transforming the Largest Media Company in Latin America
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TV Globo is Brazil’s largest TV network serving 100 million viewers in 130 countries.
Like many other media companies, Globo needed to accelerate its digital transformation journey. Their waterfall project approach did not support the speed that was needed to meet this challenge. They needed an Agile approach! But how do you implement Agile in a highly complex environment with hundreds of legacy solutions and a silo-based culture?
Both culture and technology had to be transformed. After some small Agile initiatives, TV Globo decided to adopt SAFe. They started bottom-up. The IT Director sponsored their first implementation of SAFe in two main business areas: Commercial and Content Production. The results after the first year of SAFe implementation were impressive. Leaving behind their “who is right” or “who is guilty” approach, business and technology areas were able to work more closely with a value-driven approach. The empowerment and engagement that resulted from aligning business and tech around the same purpose and company priorities resulted in significant improvements:
20% cost reduction
24% improvement in employee engagement
86% improvement in customer satisfaction
Inspired by these early results, Globo expanded its practice of SAFe. New Value Streams were implemented in other areas, this time sponsored by the C-level, and Globo is designing its roadmap to expand the implementation throughout the company. It has been an exciting, challenging, and rewarding journey so far!
Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:
Luciana Povoa, Head of Content Production Solutions /Globo
To accelerate their digital transformation and remain competitive in a fast-changing market, Brazil’s largest TV network turned to SAFe. With 12,000 employees serving 100 million viewers in 130 countries, the media giant offers a full lineup of content: news, sports, entertainment, soap operas, reality shows, and more.
As they worked to overcome a complex software legacy, speed up innovation, and create new ways of working, the challenge has been enormous, but the effort has paid off. Today, TV Globo has established a common way of working for the business and technology areas that embraces a value-driven approach and empowers and engages teams around a common purpose. This has enabled the organization to integrate a portfolio view into decisions for evaluating competing initiatives and aligning them with enterprise priorities.
The results have been dramatic:
20% cost reduction
24% improvement in employee engagement
86% improvement in customer satisfaction
View the video for the full story and see how deeply engaged TV Globo’s employees are in this company-wide transformation using SAFe. It is narrated in Portuguese with English translations.
“SAFe was the right fit because of the dynamics and goals at EdgeVerve. It helps bring the alignment and cultural change needed to deliver faster results in an organization with many dependencies across products.”
—Dr. Ronen Barnahor, Head of Agile Business Transformation, EdgeVerve Systems
Challenge:
With releases every 6-18 months, the company set a goal of further improving time-to-market, quality, flexibility, and predictability.
Industry:
Information Technology
Results:
Release time improved by 50 – 66%
Planning every 10 weeks sharpens predictability
Feature cycle time went down by 50 percent
The cost per feature point dropped by eight percent from one PI to the next
Reduction in escaped defects and increased customer satisfaction
Best Practices:
Managers first – By beginning training with managers, EdgeVerve gained essential buy-in that helped influence the C-level and team level
Merging Testing and Engineering – Bringing these groups together reduced what were distinct silos
Common cadence – EdgeVerve kept everyone on a common cadence, even before bringing all teams into the Framework
Hybrid model of implementation – ARTs and managers of non-ARTs aligned on the same cadence and planning activities
Introduction
Banks across 94 countries, serving 848 million consumers, rely on Finacle, an industry-leading universal banking suite from EdgeVerve Systems Ltd. A wholly-owned subsidiary of the global IT company, Infosys, EdgeVerve develops software products that enable businesses across multiple industries to innovate, accelerate growth, and have deeper connections with stakeholders. Gartner and Forrester consistently name EdgeVerve at the top of their rankings for banking platforms.
In 2015, the company set an aggressive goal of improving time-to-market, quality, flexibility, and predictability.
SAFe: a framework for faster results
For guidance, the management brought on Dr. Ronen Barnahor, now Head of Agile Business Transformation. Barnahor recommended the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) to help instigate real change, quickly.
“Our mission is to adopt a Lean and Agile mindset and practices, and become a learning organization focused on continuous improvement to provide better value to our customers,” Barnahor says. “SAFe was the right fit because of the dynamics and goals at EdgeVerve. It helps bring the alignment and cultural change needed to deliver faster results in an organization with many dependencies across products.”
Prior to adopting SAFe, the teams at EdgeVerve were working in cadence, however, their approach wasn’t effective in meeting new organizational goals.
Building a coalition from the ground up
To bolster internal buy-in, EdgeVerve appointed Jasdeep Singh Kaler, an AVP and 20-year veteran of the company, to help Barnahor lead the effort. Through a contest, the transformation earned the name “Mach 1”—a nod to the importance of speed.
In alignment with SAFe, EdgeVerve began with training, choosing first to focus specifically on managers. VPs and directors, and about 30 leads across all functional areas attended two days of Leading SAFe®. The SAFe training created a buzz about the agile transformation and gave the C-level confidence that moving to SAFe was accepted by internal leaders. By the end of the class, participants signaled they were ready to move forward with SAFe, with confidence scores of 4 and 5.
With positive feedback from leaders, C-level executives attended a one-day management workshop that included principles from Leading SAFe. There, they set implementation goals and approved the new direction. Knowing they would begin with the Finacle banking solution, they identified dependencies, defined all Value Streams and established who would join in the first two Agile Release Trains (ARTs).
“This was a crucial meeting with leads from product strategy, delivery, architecture, and testing, to help them embrace the concepts of the Value Stream and the ART, optimize the whole process, gain a systems view, decentralize decisions, and more,” Barnahor says.
Quick Wins
In April 2016, EdgeVerve kicked off the first Program Increment (PI) using SAFe with a 2-day planning meeting in Bangalore, India. The event brought together 60 individuals from multiple locations across India. The CTO attended, sending a message about the importance of the change for EdgeVerve.
In subsequent ART launches and PI planning events, the heads of engineering, product strategy, product management and other senior leaders participated with great commitment—bolstering the adoption at a grassroots level.
The event itself excited and motivated team members: “We had fun as a team in PI planning and that enabled us to do better work,” says one team member.
Hybrid implementation model—ARTs + Non-ARTs
As the company launched two ARTs, it did so with just two coaches. For that reason, EdgeVerve continued running non-SAFe teams on the same cadence—in what it calls a “hybrid model.”
“We didn’t have the coaching capacity to structure everyone into SAFe, but they all aligned on the same cadence with a centralized backlog,” Barnahor explains.
While EdgeVerve began implementing SAFe, managers of other products outside of ARTs were trained concurrently in Program-level activities. Under the hybrid approach, all product teams (ARTs and non-ARTs) aligned in several ways:
The same cadence (sprints and PI)
Working in IBM Rational Team Concert
Pre-planning + PI Planning (For non-ARTs, only managers joined in PI planning)
Execution (For non-ARTs, there was no coaching. Leads managed the work as previously but with a focus on demos in cadence with ARTs.)
Product and solution-level demos
Retrospectives (In non-ARTs, only managers joined.)
“The hybrid model of implementation of a full ART plus managers first in non-ART teams contributed to faster alignment and predictability across products within the integrated banking solution,” Barnahor says.
Very quickly, teams began delivering on cadence, demonstrating early value to management. SAFe also sharpened visibility, enabling them to predict more accurately. As a result, the Product Management Organization began to understand the power of “velocity” as a prediction metric and began using the Agile dashboard that EdgeVerve developed.
Changing the Culture
As EdgeVerve launched trains, the company concurrently focused heavily on changing the culture, with the belief that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” According to Kaler, since EdgeVerve focused on ‘managers first,’ these individuals became key influencers in the cultural change. The main focus was around breaking the silos, establishing common ownership on quality, managing and improving through data, and an emphasis on outcome and business value instead of on utilization.
The new, common terminology of SAFe (ARTs, ceremonies, and cadence) ensured everyone spoke the same language. With a common language, they could more easily understand expectations and minimize misunderstandings.
“From a change management perspective, everyone understood that EdgeVerve had embarked on something important at the organizational level that is based on a proven industry framework,” Barnahor says. “We had fewer arguments on definitions. I told them, ‘Let’s adapt SAFe definitions and practices, observe the impact on the ground during execution, and then change. Why reinvent the wheel?’”
The company also altered its success measures to help influence behavior, asking questions such as…
Are we delivering desired value to customers?
Are we on time? If not, when can we deliver the committed scope?
Are we on scope? If not, what we will not deliver on due date?
Are we on top of quality?
Are we on flow? Any bottlenecks? Starvation? Backlog readiness for the next PI? What is the average cycle time?
Can we predict well?
How do employees feel about the change?
As attitudes changed, EdgeVerve collected feedback from the field and shared positive comments from team members and managers widely on posters and in videos—with the goal of spreading enthusiasm.
Additionally, the company adjusted the organizational structure to support the change. From developer to head of engineering, EdgeVerve reduced the number of organizational layers from seven layers to just four layers.
Perhaps the biggest difference came in moving the distinct testing organization, which was under delivery, into engineering—a decision that quickly improved relations between developers and testers. In line with SAFe, testing also now happens concurrently with development with greater focus on acceptance automation.
Reducing cycle time, increasing quality
Today, the company runs eight ARTs with approximately 800 people across three value streams and one portfolio. They launch a new ART every six weeks. At the same time, they run five teams of teams that are not part of the SAFe transformation.
Less than a year after deploying SAFe, EdgeVerve reported significant gains:
Reduced time-to-market – For large enterprise products, release time dropped from 12 – 18 months to six months, and for small products, from six months to three months
Improved predictability – The company plans consistently every 10 weeks, which increases flexibility for changing scope with minimal cost
Expedited feature speed – Feature cycle time went down by 50 percent
Elevated efficiency – The cost per feature point dropped by eight percent from one PI to the next
Fewer defects – The company significantly improved early detection of defects, leading to fewer escaped defects and increased customer satisfaction
Dissolving silos
As the PIs progressed, team members could clearly see the advantages of the new approach. Most notably, communication and collaboration improved, with evidence that silos were dissolving.
“The way teams were working, even a minor downtime was clearly a cascading effect in the team’s progress,” says one team member. “Teams identified it, they came up with solutions, and they worked together.
“If code was not working, we got the right contacts, spoke to the code team and got the issue resolved,” says another team member. “This is a big change from the software developer’s perspective on how they approach their work.”
“The developer-tester relationship was better,” says another. “You can directly check with them for the issues you’re facing.” Additionally, anonymous participant surveys reflected progress. The company asked approximately 300 people about the impact of SAFe. Most notably, there was an 89% improvement in trust and communication across different functions while 73% believe that SAFe helped increase productivity/throughput.
Even as EdgeVerve sees positive results and culture shifts, transformation leaders find it is an ongoing process. With demonstrated results, they gained backing to hire more coaches. Looking ahead, the main challenge, Barnahor says, is middle management’s mind-set—transforming managers to act as Agile leaders and mentors to the teams by focusing on an Agile leadership program.
“It’s a transformation of hearts and minds,” Kaler says. “We made sure that managers believed in what we’re doing and slowly the culture is changing.”
“The products we’re developing are bigger than one Agile team. For the teams to interact and plan together, we really needed SAFe as the foundation. It brings the practices and methodologies to coordinate multiple teams working on the same product at the same time.”
—Mike Eason, CIO, Commercial Banking
Challenge:
Capital One sought to be more responsive to the market, to transform software delivery to an agile framework, and to do it at scale.
Industry:
Financial Services
Results:
Raised employee engagement by 15-20%
Employed Agile and scaled agile across the enterprise; business and tech.
Re-thinking the strategy on outsourced applications led to a drastic shift towards building internally
Best Practices:
Establish communities of practice—Peer groups for Scrum Masters, RTEs, and System Teams enable these individuals to learn from each other.
Support innovation—Commercial Banking leads Innovation Renovations similar to the Shark Tank TV show, where individuals present ideas for improvement.
Recognize accomplishments—Commercial Banking calls out specific individuals for their efforts at PI events, and enhances morale and a sense of fun by requesting that people write what they appreciate about others on “walking billboards” on each other’s’ backs.
Introduction
One of the most widely recognized brands in America, Capital One is a diversified bank that offers a broad array of financial products and services to consumers, small businesses, and commercial clients. The company employs more than 47,000 people, and in 2016, reported revenue of $25 billion.
Since launching in the mid ‘90s, Capital One has been a disrupter. Smaller and nimbler than its competitors, it could react to market demands quickly. But as it grew, it lost some of that agility.
2010 began a transformation starting with the renaming of the Capital One’s IT groups to Capital One Technology. “This was more than a name change,” Capital One CIO Rob Alexander said. “It was a declaration that we would no longer be a traditional bank IT shop. From now that day on, we would be an organization working to transform Capital One into a technology company.”
In 2012, Capital One’s Commercial Banking group set out to be more responsive to customer and market needs. Knowing the organization relied on a lot of outsourced functions, the team set out on a transformational journey to bring IT development back in-house.
As the transformation picked up steam; it was clear, talent would be the lynchpin to execute against their development goals. To maximize the transformation, the following was always the question:
“How do we work in a way that allows great talent to do great work?” (Rob Alexander, CIO, Capital One)
The CIO of the company’s Commercial Banking Technology team, Mike Eason, explains the motivation for change. “Like many companies with outsourced technology, we knew we needed to gain control over our customer experience and become more nimble,” Eason says. “We took a step back and said, ‘we need to build our own technology to respond more rapidly to the market.’”
In 2013, the group began taking steps toward building an Agile workforce, however, Eason describes it as going through the motions. Development was largely still a waterfall approach. And while technology leaders were fully on board, opportunities remained to gain the full support of upper management.
SAFe: ‘A Well-Supported Framework with Clear Guidelines’
For the guidance it needed, Commercial Banking turned to the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®).
“We looked at other frameworks for Agile, but SAFe offered a well-supported framework with clear guidelines, training, and experts to support us throughout the journey,” says Anand Francis, Director of Agile Coaching Services, Capital One Commercial Banking.
“The products we’re developing are bigger than one Agile team,” Eason adds. “For the teams to interact and plan together, we really needed SAFe as the foundation. It brings the practices and methodologies to coordinate multiple teams working on the same product at the same time.”
With the decision to go SAFe, support from the Capital One Commercial Operations Leader was a key factor, helping to influence large scale buy-in from other executives. Moving beyond rhetoric of “business and IT” alignment, Capital One business executives have agile teams dedicated to their products, services, and broader business strategies.
Goal: 100% Training
Prior to the first Program Increment (PI), all team members went through Agile 101 training. Today, half of the Release Train Engineers (RTEs) are SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs). Out of 50 Scrum Master roles, one quarter have achieved SAFe® Scrum Master (SSM) Certification while 10 percent are SPCs.
“Our goal is to have 50 percent of our Scrum Master population SAFe Scrum Master certified and 100% of our RTE population SAFe RTE certified by the end of the year,” Francis says.
Capital One now includes Agile, Design Thinking, and SAFe training courses in its Capital One University. Employees can choose from a number of SAFe courses, including Leading SAFe, SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager, and SAFe Release Train Engineer.
Empowering Teams
Capital One held its first Program Increment (PI) Planning meeting in 2013. In-house Agile coaches provided continuous guidance to Scrum Masters, RTEs, and Product Owners.
As Commercial Banking kicked off its first PI, a mindset shift was necessary for associates and to continue to move forward on two big themes: one, we as an organization needed to be great at delivering software; and two, we needed to be great at delivering data solutions that support how we make decisions for customers, how we interact with them, and how we make decisions internally. Christy Gurkin, the RTE on the first Agile Release Train (ART), found that while teams were initially resistant to the change, they soon began embracing the new approach.
“I noticed that people who normally would not have talked together were initiating conversations on their own, without me having to push it,” she says.
Eason also notes that, early on, teams lacked the autonomy to deliver independently because too many outside dependencies slowed down the process. Capital One addressed this by changing team structure. Instead of teams that focused on a single aspect, such as building an API, they transitioned to full-feature teams—equipping an entire team to deliver working software independently in a two-week sprint.
With this shift in team composition, and a greater focus on DevOps and continuous integration/continuous development, the company gained momentum.
Capital One additionally reduced team sizes down to seven or eight people. “By reducing team sizes, we improved team chemistry, which left them feeling like they had the autonomy to solve issues themselves,” Eason says.
Commercial Banking also took a major step in moving from project-centric budgeting to team-centric budgeting. “Before, no one wanted the project to end because then the resources would be distributed somewhere else,” Eason says. “Leadership and teams are now aligned to products, and make decisions on how much to invest in the products themselves instead of justifying every single project.”
As a result, teams are more nimble to ‘turn on a dime’ as needed, without the pressure of having to see a specific project to the end.
“Teams feel more beholden to the product they’re working on versus moving from project to project,” Francis adds.
A Transformation Guided by Teams
In addition to performing Inspect and Adapt after every PI, Commercial Banking designed and developed an Agile maturity assessment to help trains and teams understand where they are on their transformation journey. Once a quarter, they ask individuals to react anonymously to neutral statements across five areas: sustainability, value delivery, scaled agile, culture, and technical health.
“A lot of companies think they’re in one place, but they’re really in another,” says Greg Jaeger, Agile Coach. “Our goal was honest opinions and honest assessment because that’s the only way to help each member of the team, each team, each train, and each program get better—not only in being Agile or SAFe but in actual product delivery.”
Areas with low scores indicate the need for a discussion. In response, individuals at the Team and Program levels identify areas to improve for the next six sprints. Based on items chosen at those levels, Agile coaches formulate an Agile transformation path for every value stream.
Faster Delivery, Happier People
Today, Commercial Banking has 13 ARTs and seven Value Streams. Since deploying SAFe, the group has seen gains that benefit employees, partners, customers, and the organization as a whole:
Time-to-market— As we build out our physical campus, we have tried to create work spaces that enable that collaboration at the agile scrum team level, but also, we operate what is called the scaled agile framework. That implies that we need to be able to be effective in collaborating at both the individual team level, but also across multiple teams.
Taking an iterative approach to frequently deliver to production brought about efficiency and speed not previously seen. “We’re truly able to deliver working software into production at the end of every sprint,” Eason says. “What took us six months to complete before, now we might complete in a couple of months. And by bringing development in-house, we have working solutions much faster than any vendor partnership could deliver.”
Commercial Banking turned the ratio of vendor-created applications to those built in-house upside down.
Engagement—With employee engagement up 15-20 percent overall, morale and retention have improved.
Predictability—With each PI, Commercial Banking sees greater predictability in what it can deliver. PI planning plays a major role in setting expectations and encouraging follow-through.
Customer satisfaction—Eason says business partners prefer the new approach and would not want to go back to the old way of working. Likewise, the businesses that Commercial Banking serve have responded positively to the opportunity to see demos and progress along the way, rather than only having insight into fully completed projects.
“It’s been great to have clients with us on the design and test aspects of development,” Eason says.
The journey continues at Capital One, with Commercial Banking continuously refining after every PI. Success so far, aided by SAFe, greatly fuels that momentum.
“SAFe has enabled us to go to production in a safer and more scalable way more often than we would have normally,” Anand says.
“We are in that journey, and it is important that as the leadership team in technology,” says Capital One CIO Rob Alexander, “we are communicating to our whole organization that this is what excellence in software delivery looks like.”
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