Melissa Reeve, the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile describes how Airbus used SAFe to improve its operations, how value streams behave in a large solution environment how to conduct I & A for large solution trains and more.
Click the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to the SAFe Business Agility podcast on Apple Podcasts
Our SAFe in the News articles is titled, “Airbus CIO Luc Hennekens’ plan to disrupt aviation with data” and is written by Thomas Macaulay for November issue CIO Magazine in the UK.
Hear Harry Koehnemann describe how to conduct value stream identification in large solutions environments and some common anti-patterns. To learn more about the large solutions, visit scaledagileframework.com.
Audio CoP
The Audio Community of Practice section of the show is where we answer YOUR most frequently asked and submitted questions. If you have a question for us to answer on air, please send it to podcast@scaledagile.com
The two questions we answer in this episode are:
What are some recommendations and lessons learned, for preparing and facilitating a Large Solution Level Inspect and Adapt session?
When do I need solution intent? What is the difference between NFRs in the backlog and in solution intent, why?
Hosted by: Melissa Reeve
Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile, Inc. In this role, Melissa guides the marketing team, helping people better understand Scaled Agile, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and its mission.
In this SAFe Business Agility podcast episode learn how SAFe embraces architectural roles, the struggles around identifying value streams and the meaning behind WSJF. You will also learn the minimum an organization can implement and still call it SAFe.
Click the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to the SAFe Business Agility podcast on Apple Podcasts
Architects and agile teams often work in silos to the detriment of organizations
Architects can prioritize strategic initiatives from other initiatives by identifying key but problematic business capabilities using value streams and several measurement techniques. Architects can also decompose value stages defining a value stream into sub value-stages and breakdown business capabilities into sub-capabilities several levels deep for further exploration, refinement and precision
Finally, architects can detect, signal and eliminate duplicated sub-projects or sprints that can appear in different Agile Release Trains (‘ART’).
Business and enterprise architects can be instrumental in the delivery of sophisticated projects with their ability to accomplish these following four tasks:
Prioritize strategic initiatives,
Decompose high level value stream/value stages and business capabilities,
Assist in defining epics and user stories using architecture model elements, and finally
Eliminate sub-projects or sprints duplicates.
Want to learn how System, Solution, and Enterprise Architects can engage SAFe across the organization to collaboratively deliver architectural solutions? Check out the new SAFe for Architects course at scaledagile.com/architects
SAFe in the Trenches
We discuss Value Stream identification, the issues with it and how to overcome common struggles. Current SPCs – don’t forget the Value Stream and DevOps Workshop Toolkits are available for you to download at community.scaledagile.com
Audio CoP
The Audio Community of Practice section of the show is where we answer YOUR most frequently asked and submitted questions. If you have a question for us to answer on air, please send it to podcast@scaledagile.com The two questions we answer in this episode are:
What is WSJF and why is it a critical part of SAFe?
Can SAFe be customized and if so, how?
Hosted by: Melissa Reeve
Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile, Inc. In this role, Melissa guides the marketing team, helping people better understand Scaled Agile, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and its mission.
Joe Vallone is an experienced Agile Coach and Trainer and has been involved in the Lean and Agile communities since 2002. Mr. Vallone has helped coach several large-scale Agile transitions at Zynga, Apple, Microsoft, VCE, Nokia, AT&T, and American Airlines. Prior to founding Agile Business Connect, Joe Vallone served as an Agile Coach at Ciber, CTO/CIO of We The People, and the VP of Engineering for Telogical Systems.
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.
Lockheed Flying the F-16 into the Future with SAFe: Evolving the Falcon Factory
Share:
Presented at the 2019 Global SAFe Summit, San Diego Oct. 2, 2019, The F-16 Fighting Falcon is the world’s most successful, combat-proven multirole fighter with approximately 3,000 operational F-16s in service today in 25 countries. In 2014, new production orders were drying out, and the F-16 production line was in danger of shutting down. Our solution to that problem was the adoption of SAFe to streamline the F-16 Product Development and Engineering in 2015. We overcame a lot of challenges along the way, and made rapid progress initially, but have plateaued. That should come as no surprise though. Our limited SAFe implementation showed us limited results. But we are turning this ship around! This year we have really taken stock of our Agile Transformation and implemented several ground-breaking initiatives that are changing our landscape. Lockheed has now started a new F-16 production facility in Greenville, South Carolina that is producing F-16s expected to operate to 2070 and beyond!
“Using SAFe to deploy agility at scale across our product factory has been fundamental to putting in place the mindset necessary for our transition to DevOps across our value chain. We still have further to go on this journey, but the benefits we see have proven that the SAFe framework was the right choice to accelerate our transformation.”
—Jonathan Coyle, Head of Agile Factory Operations
Challenge:
With its MX.3 platform in use across the globe, Murex sought to maintain and build upon its market-leading position while continuing to respond rapidly to support the changing needs of clients and global regulatory demands.
Industry:
Information Technology, Financial Services
Solution:
SAFe®
Results:
10X faster production-like testing
A full functional testing cycle in just one hour
85% reduction in user story cycle time
Time to release for internal test management system dropped from 37 man-days to two
95 percent of those asked would not want to return to the old way of working
Best Practices:
Communicate continuously – You cannot over-communicate on your vision or the ‘why.’ Constantly reinforce the mission context.
Prepare for challenges – Be ready to tackle the problems that emerge quickly as teams and trains accelerate.
Anticipate changes in culture and people – Don’t underestimate the cultural impacts that agility at scale brings and be ready to invest in people.
Invest in collaboration infrastructure – Murex invested heavily in digital solutions to help foster collaboration between distributed teams.
Provide coaching and SAFe training – Coaching and training guides teams and individuals through the huge changes that they go through during the transformation and sets the stage for success.
Introduction
Every day, over 50,000 people in 60 countries rely on financial software from Murex. For more than 30 years, Murex has provided financial technology solutions for capital markets, from banking and asset management to energy and commodities. The independent, Paris-based company employs more than 2,200 people across 17 countries.
Murex’s flagship, award-winning platform, MX.3, supports trading, treasury, risk, and post-trade operations, enabling clients to better meet regulatory requirements, manage risk, and control IT costs. To maintain its industry-leading position, Murex continues focusing on building transformative technology, but faces numerous challenges in those efforts:
Changing regulations across regions
Complex and growing customer demands
Legacy IT and processes
As well, Murex wanted to improve its quality and time-to-market in getting new capabilities to customers.
“The impact of technology and regulation on financial institutions means they need to find new ways to adapt faster,” explained Joe Iafigliola, Head of Americas for Murex. “To answer this challenge, Murex realized that we needed to provide a more flexible and Agile approach to project delivery. While this brings more predictability and convergence, it also allows greater flexibility to make changes that are required during a project.”
Pursuing Continuous Delivery the SAFe® Way
Murex chose to apply SAFe to both its product development and the infrastructure supporting product development for proper business agility, and thus created a Value Stream for each:
Value Stream #1 – Development of MX.3, its flagship product
Murex’s first Value Stream onboarded 700 engineers in eight ARTs for the development of its MX.3 trading, risk, and post-trade platform. This ART targets consistent Agile development practices, continuous integration, improved cycle time, and a faster feedback loop.
Value Stream #2 – Infrastructure evolution for MX.3 development and delivery
Murex created a second Value Stream to evolve the underlying development infrastructure, which includes development environments, versioning, build pipeline, and test management systems. Before SAFe, this portfolio released about every 10 weeks. Following the SAFe implementation, this timeframe has been reduced to two weeks.
Both Value Streams run with a DevOps flow. They follow sprint-based development on a two-week cadence with a continuous delivery pipeline. And batch sizes, iterations, and feedback cycles—all hallmarks of DevOps best practices—are all reduced.
Murex has also started piloting a DevOps approach for client rollouts and upgrades. They created a full development environment for customization of the MX.3 platform for clients. They now handle configuration, tests, test data, and infrastructure as code, and every piece is importable and exportable, and version-able in source control. Smaller changes flow to production more easily, reducing the challenges associated with large releases.
In pilot tests, the SAFe DevOps approach has shown promising results and is fostering more collaborative relations with clients.
“We found that, with a DevOps approach, validation timescales can be cut in half when compared to traditional methods,” added Hassan Kamal, Head of Software Engineering. “This unlocks huge potential in terms of delivering incremental value because we can react faster to changing market and regulatory requirements.”
Impressive Productivity Gains
As of today, Murex has trained more than 1,000 people in SAFe, or half the company, with teams distributed across its three development centers in Paris, Dublin, and Beirut. Its efforts have driven measurable progress across numerous benchmarks:
10X faster production-like testing – Client Delivery teams can now simulate 10 weeks of real production activity in a single weekend
Complete testing in just one hour, instead of days – The full client delivery testing cycle, including environment provisioning, functional tests, and upstream/downstream interface validation dropped from five days to just one hour, making it possible to run this full suite to customize each new customer configuration
85% reduction in user story cycle time – Internal user story cycle for MX.3 platform development time dropped from 90 days to 15 days
Lower release cost for internal IS – The time to release for the internal test management system dropped from 37 man-days to two
Positive feedback from employees – 95 percent of those asked would not want to return to the old way of working (pre-SAFe)
Just as critical as the numbers, Murex’s people have embraced the mindset required to make the transformation.
“The most notable difference at Murex is a change in the way we plan and execute solution development. We do not commit to tasks—we commit to outcomes—and we let the teams decide how best to get there,” said Wissam Ghamroun, Head of EMEA Customer Delivery Services.
The company credits SAFe with helping it adopt best-practice engineering standards around test-driven development and CICD.
“Using SAFe to deploy agility at scale across our product factory has been fundamental to putting in place the mindset necessary for the transition to DevOps across our value chain,” Coyle said. “We still have further to go on this SAFe journey, but the benefits we see have proven that the SAFe framework was the right choice to accelerate our agility transformation.”
“The fact that we delivered for the biggest industry event of the year was hugely motivating and moved us from a negative to a positive spiral. The business was a bit surprised and shocked that we did what we said we would do on something that was quite big and complicated. There’s no way we could have done it without SAFe.”
Six months before the biggest annual industry event, IT leadership recognized that it would likely not deliver a new release as planned.
Industry:
Agriculture
Solution:
SAFe® 4.0
Results:
Time to market – A 75% reduction in the time to get features to market
Customer value – With more frequent releases, customers see value much faster
Quality – A 25% reduction in defects in production
Predictability – 98% accuracy on the delivery predictability
Morale – A 60% jump in employee engagement survey results
Best Practices:
Deploy SAFe by the book – “Adopting an industry best-practices system like SAFe off the shelf has forced us to transition and change in the way we needed to,” Littlefair says.
Be lean with SAFe – To implement quickly ahead of an industry event, LIC used only what was essential.
Focus on the business outcome – Look beyond the implementation at the objectives for implementing SAFe/Agile. “This will then allow the business to be ruthless in getting early wins, and shift from a cost-driven culture to one of value,” Clark says.
Introduction
In New Zealand, Fieldays is billed as “the biggest agricultural trade show in the Southern Hemisphere.” Every June, more than 115,000 farming industry visitors come to purchase equipment and learn about the latest in farming advances.
For Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC), it’s a can’t-miss opportunity to connect with current and prospective customers—farmers. One of the oldest farming co-operatives in the country, LIC provides a range of services and solutions to help farmers be more prosperous and productive: genetics and information to create superior livestock; information to improve farmer decision-making; and hardware and systems to improve productivity. To achieve those goals, more than 700 employees are based in offices around New Zealand, increasing to around 2,000 for the peak dairy mating season
As Big Data and other technologies begin to heavily influence farming practices, LIC is riding a wave of growth. As LIC prepared for Fieldays 2016, the co-op planned a new release of MINDA Live, the company’s proprietary herd management system. Yet the organization’s IT leadership lacked confidence about delivering as planned—and with good reason. Historically, IT had rarely delivered on time or budget.
“Every time we failed to deliver we did a post-mortem, but didn’t learn from our mistakes, and it would happen again a few months later,” says Paul Littlefair, CIO.
Deploying Essential SAFe®
LIC was an early adopter of Lean-Agile team practices. However, they still performed most IT work with a waterfall governance process.
“We still had incredibly large, multi-year projects, and detailed analysis to write business cases,” Littlefair says. “In typical waterfall fashion, we didn’t test until the end or consider quality from the beginning. It took a lot of rework to get it right, leading to overruns.”
With the Fieldays deadline looming, Littlefair decided to call in Gillian Clark for an assessment of their readiness. To Clark, it was unclear whether teams would deliver as needed for the big event.
To expedite progress, Clark recommended that LIC implement the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®). Given the short timeframe and the team’s unfamiliarity with the Framework, they chose to deploy Essential SAFe, a subset of SAFe that includes 10 major elements necessary for a successful SAFe implementation.
“The approach was, get everyone into a room, align teams into a single Agile Release Train (ART) with a focus on integration, and focus on delivery of the program with a single program backlog, with one person coordinating the project managers and pooled budgets. Up to that point they had three project managers fighting for budget and resources, so we merged them,” Clark says.
Given the approaching deadline—just six months out—Littlefair and Clark encountered some resistance to trying something new. They asked everyone to participate in the PI planning, including Operations, which had not participated in planning previously. The CEO likewise attended, which set the tone for the importance of the launch.
“Putting everyone in a room together to talk about stuff—instead of building it—was seen as something we should not do,” Littlefair says. “But we made it mandatory for everyone to attend.”
In spite of initial misgivings, some of those who had been unsure began to recognize the value of face-to-face collaboration during the first day of Program Increment (PI) planning. Specifically, they saw how their roles and their work tied to others.
“It slowly dawned on them that they were on the same critical path as everyone else in the room,” Clark says. “They also began to realize the project outcomes were at risk and that SAFe practices were providing more understanding of what needed to happen to be successful.”
For the first time, teams were working on the same cadence, an essential step in synchronizing everyone across the organization. Soon, they fell into a flow and started to self manage. Communication and transparency improved; instead of making assumptions, individuals started identifying dependencies with others, and making sure those dependencies were discussed and accepted.
Delivering for Fieldays and Beyond
When Cerno first introduced DevOps practices, the company lacked a SAFe DevOps Practitioner. Still, they made progress on a delivery pipeline and staging environment, supported a grayscale release of a product, and shortened the time to release future versions.
Beyond that release, LIC notes improvements across multiple areas:
Time-to-market – A 75% reduction in the time to get features to market (from 12 to 24 months down to three to six months). Features are now released twice a week for COBOL and legacy solutions.
Customer value – With more frequent releases, customers now see value much faster. “Customers have absolutely noticed,” Littlefair says. “Whenever something goes out, we post it on social media and we’re seeing a lot more engagement and real-time feedback there.”
Quality – A 25% reduction in defects in production
Predictability – 98% accuracy on delivery predictability
Morale – A 60% improvement in employee engagement survey results
Culture Shift
LIC’s SAFe journey has led to numerous changes across the organization. For one, meetings look quite different than they did before SAFe was adopted. Initially, some leaders preferred not to include all teams in planning meetings. Now, everyone joins, and Littlefair notes, teams hold each other more accountable and ask more insightful questions.
Before, analysts would write involved business cases and ‘push’ them on teams. These days, product owners make sure work is properly sized and teams ‘pull’ the work.
On the Path of Value-Stream Funding
Currently, LIC runs three ARTs and has extended SAFe across the entire technical landscape. Having moved beyond Essential SAFe, the co-op is now on a course to fund projects at the value stream level. Business leaders now clearly see the value of their investments, and discussions center on priorities in terms of features and benefits.
“SAFe has succeeded in a culture and mindset change,” Littlefair says. “We have a set of processes, rules, and practices that work extremely well, and that have led a cultural shift.”
“We had been challenged a number of times in changing our underlying CRM platform. After implementing SAFe, our overall effort actually came in $12M less than originally estimated and 18 months sooner than predicted.”
—Bryan Kadlec, Director, Client Digital Experience
Challenge:
Market leader Northwestern Mutual sought to apply Lean-Agile practices to remain competitive, though previous efforts had been stymied by a longtime Waterfall culture.
Industry:
Financial Services, Insurance
Solution:
SAFe®
Results:
Collection Feature Cycle Time improved 30-50%
IT delivers requested capabilities 80-90 % of the time
The overall effort on a project came in $12 million less than originally estimated and 18 months sooner than predicted
Best Practices:
Support experimentation—Leadership at NWM fostered an environment, and provided resources, to enable this transformation. “Our forward-thinking leadership knew we needed to bring in some changes so they invested in continuous learning and improvement,” Schindler says.
Use proxies for offshore teams—NWM pre-plans with offshore teams and then brings proxy representatives to PI planning events.
Customize SAFe—NWM increased engagement with its own spin on the program board, with the Transformation Railway Station.
Introduction
In business, staying ahead of the competition inevitably requires taking some risks. But how do you do this, when a key part of your success depends on keeping risk at bay? That’s the question Milwaukee-based Northwestern Mutual (NWM) had to answer while seeking new ways to maintain and build on their 160-year history of helping families and businesses achieve financial security.
To maintain the leadership position NWM has built over nearly 160 years, the organization has taken an innovative, entrepreneurial approach to business. It’s paid off: The past year (2016) was one of the company’s strongest. The company reported record-level revenue ($27.9 billion), was named by FORTUNE® magazine as one of the “World’s Most Admired” life insurance companies, and has maintained the highest financial strength ratings awarded to any U.S. life insurer.*
300-Day Cycles
In 2012, the company reached a turning point. In addition to a company-wide push for continuous learning and improvement, IT needed to move faster.
“It took over 300 days and many instances to deliver value to our customers,” says Jill Schindler, Manager, Client Digital Experience. “We were getting a lot of questions around, ‘Why does it take so long and cost so much?’ We knew we needed to be more flexible, adaptable and responsive, and it didn’t take us long to realize that Agile was a big part of that.”
NWM had tried to adopt Lean-Agile practices before, experimenting with a few Scrum teams in the mid-2000s. However, those efforts ran headfirst into a deeply ingrained Waterfall culture.
“We didn’t start with much training or coaching, and teams worked on the aspects they wanted instead of the aspects that we needed,” says Bryan Kadlec, Director, Client Digital Experience. “We fell woefully behind and then were slammed by a waterfall world to put out the fire.”
A Second Attempt at Agile
Northwestern Mutual shelved its Scrum efforts until 2012, when the company embarked on a more methodical approach to Agile. This time, they set out to train as many people as possible. “We wanted to do this and senior leadership believed in it, so we pushed forward,” Schindler says.
At the time, three or four teams experimented with Agile but the organization simply was not set up to accommodate it.
For next steps, they held their first rapid improvement event (Value Stream mapping). The weeklong event brought together Scrum teams and specialized teams with the goal of addressing the challenges of these distinct groups working together. The end result: a better understanding of the problems and a systematic way of approaching them. Key to that was engaging the IT strategy team to help remove barriers.
The Missing Piece
About that time, NWM found the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) and quickly saw it as the missing piece. “SAFe totally lines up with what we were already trying to do but we just didn’t have a platform for it,” Schindler says. “This was the framework we needed for delivering Agile at scale.”
“In SAFe, we could see Agile and Lean together and had this sense that it was a very powerful thing,” Kadlec adds.
Schindler and Kadlec went back to the leaders of their respective organizations and secured resources to try SAFe—becoming pioneers not just for their own company, but also establishing NWM as the first large company in Wisconsin to take this course. They believed firmly in their chosen path, but it still felt risky to apply new Lean-Agile practices to a large chunk of the company’s portfolio.
“It shaved a few years off our lives!” Kadlec quips. “We believed that the path we were taking would deliver high value, but it still felt high risk. But if we’re going to compete, we had to have a quicker response time.”
The First Program Increment (PI)
Schindler and Kadlec trained as SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs) and additionally tapped Al Shalloway, CEO, Net Objectives, along with SAFe Fellow Jennifer Fawcett to facilitate the company’s first PI planning event. NWM asked 270 people to come together for the first two-day event—in January in Wisconsin—where they launched their first four Agile Release Trains (ARTs).
The response was heartening. People were engaged and ultimately on board. “At the end of the day, we felt a huge sense of accomplishment,” Schindler says. “Everyone understood what was expected of them.” Northwestern went on to train as many people as possible. In fact, for some team members, training was the first sprint.
Making the shift in the company’s longtime waterfall culture wasn’t easy. Coaching was key, especially at the beginning. As teams went through cycles of Plan, Do, Check and Adjust, old behaviors would emerge—and need to be addressed. In truth, some individuals chose to leave—but most chose to dedicate themselves to the new way of working. The “new era” behaviors the Agile mindset fosters have taken such a firm hold companywide that they are now a factor in performance reviews.
By the second PI event, again with Fawcett facilitating, Release Train Engineers had a sense of ownership.
Transformation Railway Station
Northwestern Mutual took a clever twist on the ART program board, dubbing it Transformation Railway Station. On its board, a tunnel image represents the funnel of new work/ideas and cows represent impediments. The former is particularly apt given that, in 1859, two policy owners were killed when a train hit a cow and derailed. When the new company lacked the full funds to pay out those first life insurance claims (for $3500), NWM’s president at the time personally borrowed the funds.
On the board, laminated trains make their way along the track (the Portfolio level) from the departure station through various stages:
Identify—Communicate change vision, and determine Value Stream, ARTs, scope, PI planning date and training
Prep—Perform SAFe training
Launch—Conduct final prep and first PI planning event
Mature—Coach and develop the ART
Inspect and Adapt—Hold Inspect and Adapt workshop, plus second PI planning event
Through the PI, all parties keep a close watch on progress and metrics. “Leadership can walk up and know where we are at any time,” says Sarah Scott, Agile Lean Organization Coach at Northwestern Mutual.
Transformation Railway Station
Cycle Time Improvement
Since deploying SAFe, and beginning its first earnest Agile efforts, Northwestern Mutual reduced Collection Feature Cycle Time by 30-50%. And surveys of business representatives indicate that IT delivers what they requested 80-90 percent of the time.
Ultimately, the changes affected the bottom-line—for the better. “After implementing SAFe, our overall effort actually came in $12 million less than originally estimated and 18 months sooner than predicted,” Kadlec says.
Now in year three, with 12 PIs behind them, the company has five SAFe instances and 14 ARTs in progress across a wide range of product areas. Northwestern Mutual provides leadership for SAFe in Wisconsin, even hosting a Scaling Agile Meetup Group that draws as many as 300 attendees to its monthly gatherings.
“We’re at a tipping point now, continuing to break down barriers,” Schindler says. “The whole organization is in the heart of a major transformation and we’re leveraging SAFe to accelerate our Lean-Agile IT transformation. We’re at a whole other level that I don’t think would have happened as quickly or with as much impact if we’d just had a handful of Scrum teams.”
* Ratings are for The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company and Northwestern Long Term Care Insurance Company, as of the most recent review and report by each rating agency. Northwestern Mutual’s ratings: A.M. Best Company A++ (highest), 5/2016; Fitch Ratings AAA (highest), 11/2016; Moody’s Investors Service Aaa (highest), 1/2017; Standard & Poor’s AA+ (second highest), 6/2016. Ratings are subject to change.
Northwestern Mutual is the marketing name for The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company (NWM), Milwaukee, WI and its subsidiaries.
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:
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.
