“You don’t have to be a large organization to take on SAFe®. You can apply enough of the Framework in a sensible enough way to have real benefits, real positive benefits. We are proof of that.”
—Chris Ware, Senior VP of Product Development at Audinate
Industry:
IT, Audio-video Networking
Quick Facts:
- Audinate started the SAFe® journey with product management and engineering, training 40 people in an offsite location. Soon they grew to more than 100 people practicing SAFe successfully over 14 PIs.
- They brought in a SAFe Fellow/SPCT to support the transformation.
- They kicked off quickly with training first half of the week, and their first PI Planning the second half of the week
- Adopted SAFe in a flexible, non-prescriptive matter to meet their specific needs
Audinate’s advice to those considering SAFe:
- Share PIP backlog preparation to increase transparency and buy-in
- Allow teams and ARTs to self-manage
- Always look for innovation opportunities to increase iteration effectiveness
- Focus on the development of Agile culture in the ARTs
Outcomes
“After implementing SAFe, we scaled the size of our product development team by a factor of 3 over a period of 2 years. During that time, we added two international development locations, and have just added a third development location in addition to our Sydney head office. Today we have over 100 employees trained in and using SAFe.”
—Chris Ware, Senior VP of Product Development at Audinate
“As you grow, you get to a point where you can’t really just rely on a small number of talented people to hold everything together… We had plans to grow. We’ve been growing very strongly, 30 percent every year for the past five or six years, and we had a particular moment where we decided we were going to double the size of our engineering and product making function. And we just knew at that time that there was no way we could continue to do it in an organic fashion.
The other thing that was really important was to not waste people’s time and money in business. Wasting money is a very ‘management’ thing to worry about. But also I think there is a people element. Most people don’t want to build things that are then thrown away. The only thing you can’t get back in life is time. And so, it was important to be able to make sure that our people were spending time developing things that are really of use and are going to be used and meet the customer’s needs”
—Aidan Williams, CEO and Co-Founder of Audinate
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