Topic: Executive Engagement

Royal Philips – Adopting SAFe for Agile Transition

“Philips is continuously driving to develop high-quality software in a predictable, fast and Agile way. SAFe addresses this primary goal, as well as offering these further benefits: reduced time to market and improved quality, stronger alignment across geographically distributed multi-disciplinary teams, and collaboration across teams to deliver meaningful value to customers with reduced cycle time.”

—Sundaresan Jagadeesan, Program Manager – I2M Excellence SW Development Program

Challenge:

Philips sought to transition from traditional development to Agile, as well as bring an Agile mindset to business units beyond software to address the needs of a dynamic customer environment.

Industry:

Information Technology, Healthcare

Solution:

SAFe®

Results:

  • Average release cycle time down from 18 months to 6 months
  • Feature cycle time reduced from >240 to <100 days
  • Sprint and PI deliveries on time, leading to “release on demand”
  • Quality improvements—zero regressions in some business units
  • 5 major releases per train per year on demand

Best Practices:

Philips recommends a straightforward, 4-step approach for any organization aiming to transition to Agile

  • Develop products in the Agile way with focus on basic Agile practices (Scrum)
  • Establish product ownership with a focus on enabling scaling aspects (SAFe practices)
  • Establish a release pipeline with continuous integration (supported by automation)
  • Adopt a DevOps culture with focus on continuous delivery (to production environment)

Introduction

Netherlands-based Royal Philips is a $26 billion medical technology company committed to making the world healthier and more sustainable through innovation. Their goal is to improve the lives of 3 billion people a year by 2025, so being able to achieve faster time to market has a direct impact not just on bottom line, but on millions of lives as well.

Agile Transformation Journey

In 2014, the company began exploring the use of Agile methods to improve processes and increase efficiency across the organization. With a traditional, project-based approach to software development, release cycle time averaged 18 months. Philips had to accelerate delivery to meet market demands.

“Changing customer expectations and the tremendous pace of market disruptions require a framework and processes that are quick, scalable and responsive,” says Sundaresan Jagadeesan, Program Manager at Philips Electronic India Limited. “The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) with its non-linear approach and adaptability, is the way of the future.”

Vigorously Deploying SAFe

At Philips, the SAFe initiative fell within a program called I2M Excellence Idea to Market. The program is part of Accelerate!, a multi-year, worldwide business-transformation program designed to change the way the company does business and unlock its full potential. To that end, the company formed a foundational core of Scrum, upon which it could build SAFe practices.

“We chose SAFe to meet our goals of reducing time to market, improving quality, strengthening alignment across geographically distributed multi-disciplinary teams, and collaborating across teams to deliver meaningful value to customers with reduced cycle time,” says Jagadeesan.

Philips is now vigorously deploying SAFe in its software businesses and is piloting its use in complex systems environments (hardware, software, mechanical engineering, customer support and electrical teams). What’s more, the company has brought SAFe beyond software development to the R&D activities of a number of businesses, particularly in the Business Group, Healthcare Informatics, Solutions & Services (BG HISS).

Agile Transformation Journey

Driving Feature Cycle Time Down 58%

To date, Philips has 42 ARTs running across various business units, making this one of the larger-scale SAFe implementations. With a focus on the systems business, the company has launched multiple ARTs there as well, including the first ART in Philips China.

Agile Transformation Journey

The results:

  • Average release cycle time down from 18 months to 6 months
  • A greater focus on the customer mindset
  • Feature cycle time reduced from >240 to <100 days
  • Sprint and PI deliveries on time, leading to “release on demand”
  • Quality improvements—zero regressions in some business units
  • 5 major releases per train per year on demand, each catering to multiple products
  • 3700+ people engaged in a SAFe way of working
  • Around 1300+ trained and formally certified in Agile and SAFe
  • Process and tooling alignment

The results from the original pilots caught the attention of and acted as catalyst for many other business units in Philips.

Offering Key Learnings

Through this process, transition leaders at Royal Philips learned what worked most effectively. They found it important to embed the Agile mindset and approach in other crucial areas of work—not just R&D, but in areas such as HR, Finance and Q&R—to ensure streamlined, efficient processes and quicker turnaround times.

Philips also found it critical to involve the senior management and leadership team of the organization in this SAFe transitional journey.

“Finally, to ensure an effective move to Agile, it is critical to change mindsets within the organization,” Jagadeesan says. “Agile implies continuous learning as enterprise behavior, decentralized decision-making, quick adaptiveness and more.”

“Any transformation program will be successful if you actively seek and solve business problems,” he adds.

Philips Royal recommends a number of organizational and cultural changes for any company making this transformation:

  • Create an environment that encourages proactive, feedback-seeking behavior
  • Motivate teams and give them the autonomy they need to function well
  • Engage in courageous conversations
  • Enable cultural change in the organization
  • Focus on building teams for the long run with emphasis on stability
  • Trust the team to solve problems by “teaching them to fish” instead of fishing for them
  • Enable teams and support them by removing impediments
  • Differentiate between outcome (value generated) and output (velocity-productivity improvements)
  • Identify value streams and optimize around value to help the alignment and effective collaboration across the team
  • Gain stakeholder alignment, and leadership commitment and support
  • Train and coach based on roles
  • Have a deployment strategy and change leaders’ coalition to help accelerate scaled Agile transformation

“Our Agile transformation journey is successfully underway,” says Jagadeesan. “It has been a tremendous learning experience, and we continue to deliver value to all our stakeholders and customers. Agile learning is an enriching and fun-filled journey!”

Agile Transformation Journey

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Censhare – Adopting SAFe for Business Agility Transformation

censhare - Adopting SAFe for Agility

“Having a clear methodology and training in place has been very helpful when hiring people: Good developers expect a modern methodology. Being able to tell candidates that we take Agile principles seriously, by mentioning that we have trained and certified product owners and Scrum masters, and that we follow a clear Agile path-definitely makes a difference.”

—Walter Bauer, CTO, censhare

Challenge:

As the company reached 150 people, locally developed variations of Scrum were no longer effective.

Industry:

Software

Results:

  • Faster time to market of the company’s latest product version
  • Greater alignment between product management and development
  • More team spirit
  • Enhanced employee satisfaction and an edge when hiring

Best Practices:

  • Prepare thoroughly for PI events – Before the first real PI planning meeting, Improuv organized a training session that simulated the event-leading to very successful early PIs.
  • Train product managers – Product owners and the Chief Product Owner attended the SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager (PMPO) two-day workshop, to help prepare the overall backlog.
  • Show the Program Board – The program board hangs in an area of the office seen by all, and provides a focal point for Scrum of Scrum meetings and PO/PM meetings.

Introduction

Munich-based censhare is an international software firm deploying innovative technologies that enable companies to master the next generation of digital communication. For more than 20 years, the company has offered comprehensive digital platforms geared to creating, shaping, and designing engaging customer experiences.

While censhare was not new to Agile principles, their experience was limited to locally developed interpretations of Scrum. That Agile approach worked to an extent when the company was small, but not as well when it reached 150 people.

“I used to have regular personal contact with all people in the company, but now it’s even hard to keep this up within my own department,” explains Walter Bauer, censhare CTO.

Adopting SAFe for Agility

Train, then Launch the Train

Bauer and a product manager attended Leading SAFe® training, where they discovered the thinking and practices behind scaling Agile via the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®). Bauer saw how censhare could adapt the SAFe “Big Picture” to provide a flexible and scalable Agile way of working that would help not just development, but the organization as a whole.

Following training, the CTO decided to bring SAFe to censhare. The goal: solidify Agile across the organization and prepare it for future expansion.

With the support of Scaled Agile partner, Improuv, censhare followed the concept of “train everyone, then launch an Agile Release Train:”

  • Management
    Executive leadership attended a one-day workshop to discuss agility, scaling Agile, and to set and manage expectations. The leadership team bought into the approach and gave the green light to introduce scaled Lean-Agile practices.
  • Scrum teams
    Before focusing on scaling, censhare decided to further develop the core Agile strengths of their development teams. Scrum teams received training and coaching on Scrum and SAFe to help develop team potential and prepare them for working together at scale. All Scrum Masters received Certified Scrum Master training (CSM).
  • Product management
    Product owners and the Chief Product Owner attended the SAFe Product Manager Product Owner (PMPO) two-day workshop, becoming certified as SAFe PMPOs. This, along with coaching, helped product management prepare the overall backlog.

Kicking Off

In SAFe, the Program Increment (PI) planning meeting sets the objectives for the coming 10-week increment. To bring the organization up-to-speed before the first real PI planning meeting, Improuv organized a training session that simulated the event. This turned out to be key to the eventual success of the first planning sessions.

censhare then formed an Agile Release Train (ART) and launched it on a 10-week planning and alignment cadence. Within the 10 weeks, Scrum teams work in synchronized two-week sprints. The kickoff PI planning event followed the SAFe model.

The company introduced Scaled Agile portfolio management, aided by Portfolio-level Kanban, to add transparency to the Portfolio backlog and match demand with capacity. However, censhare is still implementing this level since there is currently a clear demand process—which is now matched to the capacity of the ART.

Improving Time to Market, Morale

The CTO points to a number of positive outcomes resulting from SAFe:

  • Faster time to market-censhare released a new version of its product to the market (something that would have been challenging had the company not adopted SAFe). The development and release of the product was significantly faster than previous releases.
  • Greater alignment—SAFe succeeded in improving alignment between product management and development teams. Cross-team dependencies are better managed and made transparent.
  • Common vision—The Agile Release Train and 10-week cadence helped the teams develop a product globally, rather than local team deliverables.
  • More team spirit—The “we are a censhare team” spirit improved through the development team-of-teams thinking. Teams feel more empowered and involved.
  • Enhanced employee satisfaction—An employee survey revealed that employees appreciate that censhare now has a more professional way of developing products.
Adopting SAFe for Agility

“Having a clear methodology and training in place has been very helpful when hiring people: Good developers expect a modern methodology. Being able to tell candidates that we take Agile principles seriously—by mentioning that we have trained and certified Product Owners and Scrum Masters, and that we follow a clear Agile path—definitely makes a difference,” Bauer says

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Westpac – Implementing SAFe in Banking Services

Westpac - Implementing SAFe in Banking Services

“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
  • Prepare, prepare, prepare—A one-week launch takes significant pre-work

Overview

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.

Implementing SAFe in Banking Services

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.

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Valpak – Achieving Business Agility Using SAFe for Digital Savings Marketplace

Valpak - Using SAFe for Digital Savings Marketplace

Industry:

Advertising & Marketing

Overview

Valpak’s IT group builds and supports technology for a wide variety of stakeholders and audiences including Consumers that are focused on saving money with coupons, Valpak Franchises that need systems to run their business and sales operations, Merchants interested in tracking and maximizing their
returns on investment, and traditional internal corporate stakeholders that need to run the core business operations.

Read the full Valpak case study to learn how they leveraged SAFe to compete in the quickly changing Digital savings marketplace.

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SK Hynix Memory Solutions – Adopting SAFe to Improve Enterprise-grade SSDs Production

SK Hynix Memory Solutions - SAFe to Improve Enterprise-grade SSDs Production

Industry:

Technology, Semiconductors

Overview

SK hynix memory solutions (SKHMS) is a subsidiary of  the SK Hynix, Inc, which ranks #82 in the Fortune Global 500, and is the 5th largest semiconductor company in the world. Hynix memory is used by Apple, Asus, Google, IBM, Dell, and Hewlett Packard, as well as in products such as DVD players, cellular phones, set-top boxes, personal digital assistants, networking equipment, and hard disk drives.

Being a leading provider of custom system-on-chip (SOC) solutions for the solid state disk (SSD) storage market, SKHMS wanted to maintain their competitive edge via relentless improvement for producing enterprise grade SSDs. They teamed up with Scaled Agile Gold Partner, CPrime, to assess areas of improvement, and to understand the major impediments in their product delivery life-cycle. They gave careful attention to:

SAFe to Improve Enterprise-grade SSDs Production
  • How hardware was coordinated with firmware development.
  • How testing was conducted throughout the current PDLC process.
  • Departments involved in building and delivering the product.
  • How often these products were released to the customer and/or to the market.
  • Source code management and build deployment.
  • Tooling in place to support the Agile pilot.
  • The U-Curve optimization (analysis of transaction costs) for delivering work.

They ultimately chose SAFe as the Framework best equipped for agility transformation and to address the complex issues often associated with the firmware development. Kicking off a 1-year pilot program, they started with 5 Scrum teams with 50 people to support their first Agile Release Train (ART), and set their Program Increments (PIs) at 3 months, with a two-week iteration cycle.

Software and Hardware Align Through Program Level, Value Stream

They decoupled the Hardware group from the Firmware ART because their work was not conducive to two week iterations with the Scrum Teams. Instead, the Hardware group worked in a Kanban like fashion with SLAs on their work based on the Backlog prioritization. For example, knowing what features were coming down the pipe, they were able to prioritize their own work and in some cases, put out proto-hardware for testing purposes during the Program Increment. This coordination was possible because representatives from the Hardware group attended critical Program level meetings as stakeholders and because they were part of the Value stream for delivering the product.

Early Results Reveal Tangible Value

The Pilot was off to a solid start and teams were embracing the change, and seeing the tangible value of using SAFe. The overall metrics and feedback indicated:

  • 60% improved transparency
  • 55% defect reduction rate
  • 50% improved service delivery predictability

The 8-page study, provided below, is well worth the read, as it includes helpful detail and insights that include:

  • Their Preparation Checklist
  • Program Backlog Prioritization
  • Business Value
  • Timing Criticality
  • Opportunity Enablement/Risk Reduction
  • Feature Analysis & Architurecture Design
  • PI Planning
  • Continuous Integration

A big Thank you! to Johnny Lam, Director at SKHMS, and Dr. Sanjeev Raman Enterprise Agile-Lean Coach from cPrime, for sharing your SAFe experience.

Download the Full Case Study

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Elekta – Adopting SAFe for a Successful Lean-Agile Transformation

Elekta is a human care company pioneering clinical solutions for treating cancer and brain disorders. They develop sophisticated, state-of-the-art tools and treatment planning systems for radiation therapy, radiosurgery and brachytherapy, as well as workflow enhancing software systems across the spectrum of cancer care. Headquartered in Stockholm, Elekta employs around 3,800 employees globally in 30 countries.

Industry:

Software

Overview

Every day 100,000 patients receive diagnosis, treatment or follow-up by an Elekta solution

Elekta’s development goal is to enhance patient and customer value by providing solutions that improve, prolong and save lives better and faster. With teams working in several time zones, and individual members having different backgrounds and history working on separate products, their challenge was to create an environment where teams could better align with global priorities and with each other.

Implementing SAFe for Lean-Agile Practices

In 2007, Elekta adopted Scrum, but in their attempt to scale up, they saw that the Scrum teams were operating in silos which created issues with dependency, integration, and visibility of the big picture, all causing lack of clarity on overall objectives and plan. Wanting to address all areas of the enterprise, Elekta took a holistic view and introduced SAFe to their Scrum teams, launching their first Agile Release Train (ART) in 2013. Soon thereafter, they expanded to the Program level and trained all of their teams.

Today, Elekta is running 4 ARTs with 20 teams across three continents. Their SAFe journey has delivered significant gains and improvements in several areas, provided valuable lessons learned, as well as a roadmap to refine their value streams, and tackle ongoing challenges, including a deeper integration of Lean-Agile practices at the Portfolio level. Here are the highlights:

Introduction of SAFe Led to Key Changes in the Organization

  • Introduced Rally for Agile project management
  • Adopted organization and roles for SAFe (RTE, PM/PO, UX, EA, Agile coaches)
  • Streamlined development tooling and processes
  • Updated the Quality System for Agile development
  • Simplified project time reporting

Gains Made Through Introduction of SAFe

  • Improved quality
  • Cross site and cross functional collaboration
  • PI Planning provides both vertical and horizontal alignment
  • Transparency through Rally, reports, and  SAFe ceremonies
  • Agile Portfolio estimation & planning drives realistic Portfolio plan

Elekta’s Top 3 Tips for Starting up SAFe

  • Get buy-in from management—this is not isolated to development
  • Plan for a lot of training and exchange of practices to ensure an understanding of the principles behind (the mechanics are easy to learn). Bring in consultants/experts!
  • Use Agile to introduce it (don’t wait until everything is planned and in control, just start!)
Download Elekta Case Study supplement

Take a moment to read the Speaker notes in the PowerPoint; you’ll see that Elekta has been generous with sharing some of the context and nuance that can be especially helpful for anyone going through a SAFe transformation.

Many thanks to Elekta’s Director of Engineering, Petrine Herbai, Manager of Engineering, Lars Gusch, and our Gold Partner, Rally Software; we appreciate all the great information you have shared, and look forward to hearing more about your continuing journey of SAFe transformation.

Many thanks to Elekta’s Director of Engineering, Petrine Herbai, Manager of Engineering, Lars Gusch, and our Gold Partner, Rally Software; we appreciate all the great information you have shared, and look forward to hearing more about your continuing journey of transformation.

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