Unlock Unprecedented Productivity: The Flow Metrics Path to Agile Success
Whether you are new to the concept of flow metrics or looking to deepen your understanding and application, this session will equip you with the knowledge and tools to start leveraging flow metrics for remarkable improvements in your organizational performance.
When:
April 24, 2024, 10:00 am – April 24, 2024, 11:00 am MST
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Agile Leaders, LACE Leader, Product Manager, SAFe Practice Consultant, SAFe Program Consultant, Transformation Leader
In today’s competitive business landscape, attaining enterprise agility is more crucial than ever. Many are intrigued by the potential of Value Stream Management (VSM), yet find it intimidating and overly complex, even a colossal challenge. What if the journey to enterprise agility could be significantly simplified?
This session focuses on demystifying “flow metrics” – it’s the fastest and most effective path to extract immediate value for any organization. Flow metrics offer a lens through which organizations can view the efficiency, speed, and quality of work moving through their processes.
By attending this webinar, you will learn:
– What Flow Metrics Are: An introduction to flow metrics and their role in tracking the movement and delivery of value in the enterprise.
– Why They Matter: Explore the critical importance of flow metrics in identifying bottlenecks, reducing waste, and improving overall system performance, leading to enhanced enterprise agility.
– How to Get Started: Practical steps to begin collecting and analyzing flow metrics, even without fully implementing Value Stream Management (VSM). We’ll break down the seeming complexity of VSM, showing how any organization can derive significant value from flow metrics.
–Transformative Insights: Discover the kinds of insights flow metrics can provide and how these insights can be used to make informed decisions, prioritize work, and drive continuous improvement.
How do you adapt your organization’s culture so it’s more responsive to customer needs and can compete with emerging alternatives without disrupting what’s working or adding unnecessary layers of complexity—all while undergoing a major paradigm-shifting merger? This was the challenge facing Latin America’s largest stock exchange, B3 S/A Brasil Bolsa Balcao (B3), back in 2019.
Recently, Marcio Tambelini, SPC and Lean Agile Transformation Coordinator at B3, sat down with us at the 2023 SAFe® Summit Nashville to discuss his organization’s journey with SAFe over the past few years. He talked candidly about the challenges that led to B3 considering Agile methodologies, what motivated them to adopt the Scaled Agile Framework®, and their results.
Challenges
Process
Results
Leaders at B3 gather in person to prioritize and align work for the PI as part of the Brazilian company’s multi-year SAFe initiative.
B3 Challenges
Every organization has its own operating culture and norms. In the case of a merger, the challenge becomes combining those norms and establishing a new, unified way of working.
This was the situation facing B3 in 2019. At that point, B3 was two years into a merger that had ushered in a new era of its history. BM&FBOVESPA, a leading regional exchange, had joined forces with CETIP, a merger securities clearinghouse, creating B3. The combination positioned B3 as a key player in Latin America’s financial landscape. But it also created a need for shared values and common goals.
“We had a distance between these areas, and every area had different problems,” said Tambelini.
A growing number of competitors were also emerging in the Brazilian market, putting additional pressure on B3 to deliver new features, capture new markets, and respond to challenges faster and more predictably.
When leaders started exploring options for improving their culture, they were drawn to Agile for its focus on speed and collaboration. They were also interested in SAFe to provide the necessary training for scaling Agile practices.
“We decided that Agile would bring us common objectives and common challenges,” said Tambelini. “This was very important for us because each area had personal problems and personal challenges. So we decided to work together, and Agile methodology was the best way to resolve this problem for us.”
Leaders at B3 gather in person to prioritize and align work for the PI as part of the Brazilian company’s multi-year SAFe initiative.
B3 Process
B3 started small with one Portfolio, using SAFe to guide the adoption of Agile principles at scale. In 2021, after proving the value of the Agile approach, they decided to upgrade to a SAFe Enterprise subscription. This would allow them to make training and resources available to the entire organization and better align the Agile adoption of separate teams.
By 2023, Agile practices had spread throughout B3. They had formed 32 value streams, with 121 Agile teams and more than 1,400 people working in those value streams. They had also begun expanding Agile values beyond development teams and into the operations side of the business.
“At B3, we’re working toward business agility, not just Agile … there are many initiatives in other areas like Human Resources, infrastructure, finance, and others,” said Tambelini.
He said the creation of value streams was particularly important to leaders because before, the various parts of B3 had functioned with different challenges and objectives, making it hard to track progress and align efforts. Value streams enabled them to see how each part of the organization played a critical role in delivering a product or service to the market.
Another way B3 brought teams together was by adopting shared metrics like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs). They also shifted their mindset from “projects” to “products” to help teams better visualize the customer and focus on the end value delivered.
“This has given us the opportunity to enhance our customer-centric approach, delivering products and services that align more closely with their needs,” said Tambelini.
Leaders at B3 gather in person to prioritize and align work for the PI as part of the Brazilian company’s multi-year SAFe initiative.
B3 Results
Tambelini said the results have been overwhelmingly positive, helping to secure B3’s position as the leading stock exchange in Latin America.
“All the portfolios that we started in the last two or three years had many kinds of good results, especially when we’re talking about the clients,” he said.
One of the biggest benefits has been the ability to deliver value to clients in a much shorter time cycle. Before, delivering a new product or feature could take up to a year. Now, B3 developers can roll out new features for clients throughout the year, much faster than was previously possible.
Within B3’s largest portfolio, which represented 70 percent of their revenue, the challenge had become managing layers of complexity among clients, markets, and regulators. So before proposing any drastic changes, leaders started by mapping out the interdependencies among platforms and teams.
Their initial priority with this portfolio was to bring alignment and transparency to the work. They chose to adopt Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) because they believed that starting at the top and focusing on the financial aspect among leaders and stakeholders would bring much-needed clarity and direction to the rest of the process.
“Our understanding grew, and we identified points of contact and bottlenecks,” said Tambelini. “We proposed value streams that could bring productivity gains and increase deliveries to the clients.”
Instead of budgeting for projects, they began budgeting for products, enabling B3 to increase speed and become more responsive as an organization.
“This action has been instrumental in our evolution, leading to significant gains with both customers and regulators,” he said. “We’re able to respond to new challenges, become more efficient, increase customer experience, and capture new markets.”
“On the development side, they’ve seen shorter cycles, and, in one product release that I know of, they were able to get ten times the expected number of customers,” said Saldivar. “I think they realized the power of SAFe when building new solutions and new products and getting an attractive solution to market.”
B3 Conclusion
B3’s adoption of SAFe has proven highly successful, enabling leaders to overcome merger challenges and dynamic market pressures and begin to operate as one organization. Starting with one portfolio in 2019 and then expanding in the following years, they’ve been able to reduce delivery times and increase the value created. Their story proves the importance of approaching change intentionally, holistically, and with the customer at the center.
The LPM in Practice series returns with an exciting view of Portfolio prioritization and Participatory Budgeting in SAFe organizations. In today’s business climate, organizations are continuously seeking innovative approaches to improve their responsiveness, and overall business outcomes. Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) has emerged as SAFe’s key strategy for achieving these goals. However, traditional funding models pose a challenge to realizing the promise of LPM and SAFe. Participatory budgeting is a collaborative portfolio event for allocating the portfolio budget to its value streams, and it’s adoption is increasing SAFe portfolios.
This panel discussion explores the integration of Participatory Budgeting and SAFe’s new application, SAFe CoFund, to advance LPM and enable focus on the right portfolio investments to achieve the strategy. The panelists feature industry experts from Cprime who have successfully implemented the shift and were the early adopters of CoFund.
Speakers
Neru Obhrai
Principal Consultant at Radtac, SAFe SPCT at Cprime, Inc.
Neru is a certified SPCT and experienced Transformation Coach, who has lead and delivered a range of large scale, complex business transformation programmes. After 3 decades of delivery of business solutions in the airline sector, Neru has also led multiple transformation initiatives within the finance and telco sectors. As a principal consultant with Cprime, Neru takes pride in establishing high performance diverse departments to deliver quality solutions and services and championing the drive for excellence
Ken France
VP, Enterprise Agility Practice and SAFe Fellow at Cprime, Inc.
Ken France is an executive enterprise coach cultivating transformational organizations, a recognized and highly-rated trainer, and one of the first US minted SPCT and a SAFe Fellow. Ken France has worked with SAFe since its inception, contributing actively to the framework, including SAFe LSE/4.0. With 25+ years’ experience in Information Technology, Ken has successfully supported multiple Fortune 100 enterprises tackling large and complex scaled agile transformations across numerous verticals.
Isaac Montgomery
SAFe Fellow and SPCT at Cprime, Inc.
I’ve spent the past 25 years working with organizations across the spectrum of sizes and industries seeking to realize the promises of business agility – responsiveness, productivity, quality, predictability, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. By helping leaders understand how their operating model and leadership practices drive the culture and performance of the organization, we’ve been able to realize lasting change and measurable improvements. Through these experiences I’ve become recognized as a thought leader in the areas of lean portfolio management (LPM), agile product management (APM), and organizational change management (OCM). While I regularly speak and teach at conferences around the world, and am a contributor to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), my passion remains working in the field, helping organizations achieve sustainable competitive advantage and business agility.
Deema Dajani
SAFe Fellow and Product Manager at Scaled Agile, Inc.
A SAFe Fellow, Deema helps large institutions create the environment to shape disruption like a startup with business agility and Lean Portfolio Management (LPM). Deema currently serves as a Scaled Agile Product Management Director focused on enabling sustainable SAFe transformations at scale. Co-founder of Women in Agile, a non-profit organization focused on breaking barriers and inclusivity in the agile community.
To survive in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organisations must respond to market changes and expedite delivery cycles without compromising quality. However, implementing an Agile approach across all levels of the organisation to accelerate flow can be challenging within a complex enterprise. How can you achieve visibility? And how do you measure success?
The latest iteration of SAFe, version 6.0, highlights SAFe principle #6 – Make Value Flow Without Interruptions and the eight “flow accelerators” as the means to accelerate value flow across all enterprise levels. At this upcoming fireside chat, Mik Kersten, CTO of Planview, will discuss this principle’s practical applications to accelerate flow at all levels.
The event will consist of 45 minutes of panelist content, followed by 30 minutes discussion and Q&A.
Business agility requires close synchronization across the organization. In this webinar, learn how value stream management (VSM) aligns people and teams across functions to shared principles, practices, and tools that enable their businesses to sense and respond quickly to changing market conditions.
When:
July 18, 2023, 9:00 am – July 18, 2023, 10:00 am MST
Derek leads the Enterprise Agility Solutions Engineering Guild at Atlassian, where they help the largest and most complex organizations reach better outcomes. Prior to Atlassian, Derek helped transform how people work at companies such as Walmart, GEICO, and Capital One and federal agencies like National Archives and National Institutes of Health. He has authored 2 books and over 600 articles.
Marc Rix
SAFe® Fellow (Scaled Agile, Inc.)
Marc helps large enterprises leverage the game-changing power of Lean, Agile, and DevOps at scale. He has been practicing Agile for over 20 years and is an internationally recognized thought leader, consultant, trainer, adviser, and speaker. Marc is a SAFe Fellow and member of the Framework team at Scaled Agile.
Discover SAFe® 6.0 – The Next Evolution with Dean Leffingwell
Here at Scaled Agile, we were thrilled to announce the launch of SAFe® 6.0 and SAFe Studio this month. These new updates will deepen SAFe’s impact, help you build resiliency and reshape the way you approach transformation. On 30 March, Dean Leffingwell is joining us for a deep dive into what these changes mean for you in the APAC region.
When:
March 30, 2023, 11:12 am – March 30, 2023, 11:25 am
The Scaled Agile APAC team is thrilled to host our Co-founder and Cheif Methodologist, Dean Leffingwell, to share his insights about SAFe 6.0. Learn directly from Dean about how these updates enable you to work differently and build the future.
11:30 am AEDT 6:00am IST 8:30am SGT 8:30am CST 9:30am JST
Recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on Lean-Agile best practices, Dean Leffingwell is an entrepreneur and software development methodologist best known for creating SAFe®, the world’s most widely used framework for business agility.
His best-selling books, Agile Software Requirements, Scaling Software Agility, and SAFe® Distilled, form much of the basis of modern thinking on Lean-Agile practices and principles. Founder of several successful startups, including Requisite, Inc. (acquired by Rational), Mr. Leffingwell also served as Chief Methodologist to Rally Software, and prior to that, as Sr. Vice President at Rational Software (now part of IBM). He currently serves as Chief Methodologist to Scaled Agile, Inc., which he co-founded in 2011.
Learn how to apply Flow Accelerators to your context in this workshop to deliver value to your customers faster. After instruction and work time, you’ll see how your area of flow affects the larger system.
When:
June 28, 2023, 1:00 pm – June 29, 2023, 5:00 pm ECT
Where:
Remote
Who:
Agile Coach, Program or Project Manager, Release Train Engineer, SAFe Practice Consultant
This workshop takes place over two days (June 28 and 29) in four-hour sessions from 1-5 pm (CEST).
We designed this eight-hour workshop over two days to support the range of participants needed to optimize one or many value streams.
Who will benefit: The workshop supports everyone involved with building solutions with SAFe®. This may include, but is not limited to, the following: • Cross-functional members of Agile Teams, Agile Release Trains, or Solution Trains running for one PI or longer • A SAFe Portfolio that has already identified its value streams and begun implementing LPM • Full Agile Teams across multiple value streams within a single Portfolio
What attendees will learn: • The flow tools and coaching available to them • Current usage of SAFe Flow Metrics within their organization • How each of the SAFe Flow Accelerators applies within their organization • How to align on actions and create a flow-based improvement backlog • How improvement items affect the larger flow of the value stream or Portfolio
Prerequisites: This workshop is designed to support a set of cross-functional attendees from value stream(s) applying SAFe for at least one PI.
What’s included: • Workshop materials • Eight hours of facilitation from a SAFe Strategic Advisor or SAFe Fellow • Three hours of prep time with internal SPCs or leaders
Speakers
Rune Christensen
SPCT, Strategic Advisor (Scaled Agile, Inc.)
Rune has more than 20 years of experience working with software and cyber physical solutions within enterprise and public safety communication, insurance, logistics, and energy. He has supported several Enterprises in transforming their ways of working using lean-agile practices and helped them achieve greater business outcomes.
Harry Koehnemann
SAFe Fellow, Methodologist (Scaled Agile, Inc.)
Harry Koehnemann is a Methodologist and SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile Inc., where he helps organizations deliver solutions faster, more predictably, and with high quality. He has spent the past two decades working with large system builders in aerospace, defense, automotive, and other industries, helping them apply Lean, Agile, and MBSE to their engineering practices.
Why SAFe ® and SAP®? Getting better results with experience from the field
In this panel dialogue, we will share our experience at SBB (Swiss Federal Railways) and other SAP S/4 business transformations leveraging SAFe principles and practices to deliver better results.
When:
March 8, 2023, 4:00 pm – March 8, 2023, 5:00 pm ECT
Where:
Zoom
Who:
Agile Coach, Consultant, Director, SAFe Program Consultant
Event Overview: In this panel dialogue, we will share our experience at Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) and other SAP S/4 business transformations leveraging SAFe principles and practices to deliver better results. Showcase: SBB is harmonizing business processes across seven Portfolios with multiple value streams impacting 20.000 employees, building an Enterprise-wide state-of-the-art SAP S/4HANA. You will discover how to combine the SAFe Framework with an SAP delivery model to realize cross-portfolio initiatives.
We discuss the following topics:
• How do you manage SAP Cross-Portfolio Initiatives with SAFe – Organize around value and optimize for Flow for better results • How SAFe helps in achieving harmonization and standardization program objectives? • What is a State-of-the-Art SAP Delivery Model that accelerates Value Delivery and Organizational Agility? • What role do SAP Activate and Focused Build play in the State-of-the-Art SAP Delivery Model to realize program ambitions? • How do you ensure the integration of business concepts, processes, data, and systems, and how does SAFe help to achieve this? • How do you ensure simplicity, efficiency, and steering ability from a business/expert leadership/governance/program perspective – knowing that trade-offs will be necessary? • What patterns are helpful in the transition to a portfolio of portfolio SAFe Lean (Enterprise) Portfolio Management (tactical planning events and organizing around value with Value Nodes or Solution Areas)
In our interactive session, we highly welcome your participation in our discussion!
Speakers
Malte Kumlehn
Director and SAFe® Fellow – SAP Delivery Excellence (Project and Team Inc.)
Malte guides complex Ecosystems, People, Cloud, AI and Data powered digital transformations toward Business Agility. He pioneers Intelligent Operating Models for accelerated strategy execution with large solutions as globally the first of 30+ SAFe® Fellows, Executive Advisor & Advisory Board Members in this field. The SAFe® Fellow Program represents an elite class of experts who can help the world’s largest organizations accelerate digital transformation & achieve business agility. The SAFe® Fellow achievement is Scaled Agile’s most prestigious distinction, recognizing individuals who have exhibited the highest level of mastery and thought leadership in the practice and principles of SAFe. His track record includes founding, leading and growing Accenture’s first SAP Agile Delivery Excellence business. In his Business Owner role, he cared for people, revenue, cost, business development & delivery excellence while living Business Agility, applying Lean-Agile at Scale & SAFe daily.
Oliver Lauffer
Project and Program Manager (SAP)
Oliver Lauffer has been working for more than 20 Years at SAP. He has a long history of leading extensive international Programs and Projects with international Teams. Next to the standard project topics, his focus is on combining agile Methods and Frameworks like SAFe with implementing Standard Software like SAP and connected methodologies like SAP Activate. In addition to his project and program manager role, he has been a highly appreciated, trusted advisor and coach for large, global customer programs. In this role, his extensive experience in Organizational Change Management has been crucial for the success of these programs. Due to his result-oriented, structured working style, good communication skills and high capacity for teamwork, he managed various complex programs and rollouts on time, on budget and with high quality. In Parallel, he is responsible for the Swiss Project Manager Community from an SAP perspective.
Kaya Yumusaklar
Program Manager S/4 and Managing Director (Swiss Federal Railways)
Kaya Yumusaklar (47) has been leading SBB’s SAP S/4 Program since the beginning of 2022 and the overall SBB IT “Asset & Enterprise” practice since the beginning of 2023. In this role, he is the responsible IT Executive for delivering the ongoing SAP transition to S/4 and for developing and operating the overall application portfolio for rail infrastructure and rolling stock maintenance, real estate facility management, logistics, procurement and finance. Before that, he worked as a Finance Director at SBB and was responsible for strategic, companywide programs for cost management, transformation and carve-out initiatives. Kaya grew up in Konstanz in south of Germany. He later moved to Berlin and graduated from the TU Berlin in engineering and management. Later, before he joined SBB in 2015, he gained a broad experience in various industries as a Management Consultant based in Zürich and Berlin in strategy and organizational development projects and large transformations.
Join our virtual event on Wednesday, March 15, at 12:00 PM MDT/6:00 PM GMT to see the full launch and learn what it means for your organization. Sign up to receive a reminder one hour before the event to ensure you don’t miss it.
Development Value Stream Patterns – Observations from Value Stream Mapping and ART Identification Workshops
Development Value Stream Patterns – Observations from Value Stream Mapping and ART Identification Workshops
The speakers will share real-world examples, and you will have the opportunity to bring all your questions in order to get valuable insight and context for your transformation.
When:
February 14, 2023, 4:00 pm – February 14, 2023, 5:00 pm ECT
One of the key principles within the Scaled Agile Framework is Organise Around Value. In this webinar series, you will hear from the field on how to apply this principle and involve your organisation.
The speakers will share real-world examples, and you will have the opportunity to bring all your questions in order to get valuable insight and context for your transformation.
Over three sessions, the speakers will take you through: Session 01: Aligning Around Value – Practical Advice From The Field (January 31, 2023) Register
Session 02: Development Value Stream Patterns – Observations from Value Stream Mapping and ART Identification Workshops (February 14, 2023) Register
Session 03: Funding and Reporting Value – How to Enable Empowerment and Hold It Accountable (February 28, 2023) Register
Speakers
Odile Moreau
SAFe® Strategic Advisor and SPCT (Scaled Agile Inc.)
Odile is a SAFe® strategic advisor and SPCT for Scaled Agile Inc. She guides international organisations through adoption of business agility. By combining deep matter expertise with the ability to coach on behaviour and leadership, she has been a highly effective team coach for large organisations. Odile is passionate about Lean Kanban, Scrum, Lean and SAFe, never losing sight of the human factor. With 20+ years of professional experience helping profit and non-profit organisations in the fields of IT Service Management, Business Information Management and Software Engineering across the world, Odile worked for many profit and non-profits making organisations in Europe. The last 10 years her focus has been helping teams adopt the agile mindset, principles and practices at scale and continuous improvement methods.
Brian Tucker
Principal Consultant, SAFe® Fellow, and SPCT (Ivar Jacobson International)
Brian was one of the first trainers outside of the Scaled Agile Academy to qualify as a SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT) having worked with the framework since its initial inception ten years ago. Brian regularly delivers the SAFe Program Consultant training and has delivered it over a hundred times in the last 8 years; more than anyone else in the world. Brian has been involved in SAFe implementations at numerous companies across Europe including hybris, PZU, Ford, Nordea, NHS Blood + Transplants, Etihad Airlines, Sony Playstation and LV Insurance. Brian is a highly proficient Agile and Scrum coach and trainer with extensive management experience in both corporate and small company situations, backed up with 11 years of software development experience.
