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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“We definitely know our time to market is much shorter. And when we want to start something, we can start it almost right away.”
—Benny Johansson, Head of Payments and Accounts, Handelsbanken
Challenge:
Business groups could encounter unnecessarily long development time frames and slow, project-based development. Capacity and prioritization challenges sometimes remained unsolved.
Industry:
Financial Services
Results:
Average process time for developing features improved by 30%.
On ART self-assessments, portfolio alignment and continuous delivery increased by more than 50% while core execution on PI Planning areas improved by 10-20% over two years.
The company has expanded to 24 ARTs and completed more than 5,000 in-house trainings for employees across the organization.
The bank’s capacity to reallocate staff quickly to urgent tasks increased significantly.
Lessons Learned:
Consider bringing Lean-Agile coaching capability in-house—as close to executive level as possible.
Train key stakeholders early.
Establish and train a guiding coalition early that represents IT, business, HR and other key groups to support an organization-wide transformation.
Continuously communicate C-level business and IT sponsorship and support for the transformation.
Introduction
Founded in 1871, Swedish bank Handelsbanken may have a very long history, but it remains remarkably progressive. For the fourth consecutive year, Handelsbanken was recently named the most innovative large bank in Sweden.
For decades, the bank has made news for its innovative practices that sometimes break with the financial industry norms. For example, in the 1970s, the bank decentralized its regional branches, freeing them to run as their own businesses and make local decisions. Along with that, they loosened budget constraints, choosing to focus on customers over products.
While the bank didn’t actively pursue growth, it happened organically as it created more value for customers.
Handelsbanken is ranked as the safest commercial bank in Europe, according to Global Finance magazine. It also holds higher overall credit ratings from Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch than any other privately owned bank in the world.
One of the steps Handelsbanken has taken in its ongoing evolution was bringing Agile practices to IT and business development so that they could meet the increasing demands for digital services and compete in rapidly growing markets. The bank found its existing structure gave it a head start.
“Handelsbanken’s culture is fundamentally decentralized and compatible with an Agile way of working,” explains Heléne Grönberg, Head of the Lean Agile Center of Excellence (LACE). “The local branches have a strong pragmatic and down-to-business culture and Agile has contributed to us staying true to that culture in the development area as well. It has contributed not only to remaining competitive, but also to innovating further.”
A Proven Path
As the company experimented with Agile methods, those efforts remained limited to a few IT teams. The company knew it needed to do more to keep pace with regulatory demands and meet customers’ appetites for digital banking options.
“We were not executing on our plans at the pace we wanted and many of our initiatives didn’t meet timeline targets or include all the functionality requirements,” said Benny Johansson, Head of Payments and Accounts. “We wanted to cut our time to market and improve.”
As it looks to be a leader in customer offerings, Handelsbanken needs a collaborative partner to contribute to those goals. The bank explored the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and gained trust knowing that several large companies and banks in its region had found success with it.
“We perceived SAFe as the most complete framework with a holistic approach,” Grönberg said. The structure of the framework helps us think big, focusing on flow and results.”
Closing the Distance Between IT and Business
Early on, the bank formed an Agile coaching group, which would later become the LACE in 2019.
The first Agile Release Train (ART) took on the ambitious goal of enabling automated decisions for mortgages. And with SAFe, the company achieved that sooner than expected.
“Two weeks after the first meeting, we had PI planning and started the first steps of development,” recalled Renée Ekström, Acting Head of Development – Credits & Financial Instruments. “Nine months later, we had the first release to customers. Since then, we have continuously added value to this first delivery.”
Since that initial success, the company has expanded to 24 ARTs, and the LACE has completed more than 5,000 trainings for employees across the organization.
“In our size of transformation, we see that a group-wide LACE creates favorable conditions for building mutual support and a comprehensive system, and in Handelsbanken’s LACE there are more than 20 experienced Agile coaches who make this possible,” Grönberg said.
Today, nearly all development happens within the trains, and involves much closer collaboration between IT and business groups to set priorities and deliver maximum value.
“As we strive to create the best offers for our customers, business-oriented IT solutions are crucial. SAFe has contributed to deeper cooperation between parts of the bank,” Johansson said. “It really helps us understand and solve complexities.”
Johansson and Ekström note much greater transparency. They also see team members across business and IT groups being more engaged, committed, knowledgeable, and involved in prioritization.
“Everyone knows what’s important and can come together around those values,” Ekström said. “Increased cooperation and involvement increase job satisfaction for me personally and for colleagues on all levels.”
Faster Starts, Faster Completions
Since adopting SAFe, the bank has seen average process time for developing features improve by 30%. When the pandemic hit, that speed allowed the bank to reorganize rapidly to adapt the bank’s own way of working to become digital on a completely different scale. The bank was also prepared to quickly introduce new government requirements, such as temporary amortization freedom on mortgages. Two ARTs shifted rapidly to develop these functionalities.
“We definitely know our time to market is much shorter,” Johansson said. “And when we want to start something, we can start it almost right away.”
On ART self-assessments , scores across every area of PI planning have steadily improved with each Program Interval. Over two years, portfolio alignment and continuous delivery increased by more than 50% while core execution on PI Planning areas improved by 10-20%.
Just as critical are benefits such as reduced risk by completing smaller iterations, which allow teams to learn and adjust. After proving them out with minimal effort, then the bank can move forward on major initiatives.
Handelsbanken has achieved all this in a relatively short time and looks forward to extending SAFe to more teams, trains and to the surrounding system.
“Everyone understands it is a journey to transform such a large organization into a Lean-Agile way of working and thinking to achieve real value,” Grönberg said. “But already, we are well on our way to enhancing our development operation even further, without having to reinvent ways of working and role descriptions. And the time saved can be put to better use, creating customer value.”
“In the LACE, we now humbly see that we have a journey ahead to mature, improve, and accelerate the delivery of value—with the shortest possible sustainable lead time—step-by-step together with our talented colleagues in and around the development organization,” Grönberg added.
Navigating the resistance, culture issues, and product strategy transparency challenges when adopting Lean Portfolio Management
Does your organization have trouble prioritizing? Does your organization understand how much investment they are making into certain product and technology areas? Are your C-levels aligned around the current year goals? Do they have common incentives? Do you have the right tooling to support this process?
All these questions were asked at the beginning of our Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) transition at a division within S&P Global and not all the answers were clear.
After training our C-levels in a Leading SAFe® class, the consensus was that we needed to implement LPM NOW!
In this story, we share the resistance, culture issues, and product strategy transparency challenges that we navigated when adopting LPM. We will also dive into the outcomes that made the implementation worth it. By the end of this talk, you will leave with five things that might help you with an easier LPM implementation journey.
About S&P Global:
S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI) provides essential intelligence. We enable governments, businesses and individuals with the right data, expertise and connected technology so that they can make decisions with conviction. From helping our customers assess new investments to guiding them through ESG and energy transition across supply chains, we unlock new opportunities, solve challenges and accelerate progress for the world.
Presented at the 2022 SAFe Summit by:
Mary Thorn Vice President IT Strategy and Transformation, S&P Global
Customer Interview: SAFe at American Express — What it Means to Keep the Trains on Track While Still Debating Value Streams
Share:
Director of Enterprise Agility Success, Oden Hughes sits down with Dean Leffingwell to talk about what it takes to manage and nurture a large-scale application of SAFe at a company like American Express focused on providing the world’s best customer experience. She’ll discuss the challenges of establishing alignment between organizations with conflicting views, and why they run their Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) as a cost center. She’ll share patterns of success, how they’ve created a tailored approach to agility for improved results, and why success depends on much more than courses, workbooks, and SAFe principles.
Presented at the Global SAFe Summit, October, 2020.
Customer Story – Allianz: AGCS’ SAFe Journey To Become a Data Driven Enterprise
Share:
After multiple mergers, our data systems were disjointed. To add to this, the newest International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS17) is set to go into effect in January 2023, making data management crucial from a regulatory perspective. We implemented the latest version of SAPHANA, a database management system in partnership with Accenture. This brought our data together under a centralized solution while offering near real-time data processing and better reporting and analytics.
SAFe provided the structure we needed to scale Agile in a complex SAP and non-SAP landscape. SAFe allowed us to organize around value and grow seamless integrated cross-functional teams aligned with the company’s long-term strategy. At Allianz Global Corporate our SAP DevSecOps automation pipeline helped to reach SAP Delivery Agility which paved the way to build the capabilities needed to reach SAP Business Agility. SAFe addressed the complexities and gave us the framework for building portfolios, roles, and jobs to achieve our goals for customer centricity, speed, and quality. DevSecOps is a mindset, an enterprise-wide culture and practice. We will showcase how Allianz Global Corporate applied the five core concepts of DevSecOps and Release on Demand across the five core concepts and become a Data-Driven Enterprise.
Presented at the Global SAFe Summit, October, 2020.
MetLife is one of 12 Fortune 500 companies to thrive for over 150 years. Met has a scale and a proud history … and the many challenges of incumbency including legacy systems and challenges to speed. Agile is quickly being embraced as the way to achieve speed in innovation for MetLife after adopting SAFe.
In this 45-minute video, Cheryl Crupi shares the story of how a small team sold MetLife’s new CEO and his new executive group on Agility. This short, immersive session enabled this executive group to experience Agile for themselves and resulted in a third of the group to request individual follow-up on how they can embrace Agility, including HR, Legal, Marketing and regional business presidents.
Presented at 2019 Global SAFe Summit by: Cheryl Crupi
Assistant Vice President, Global LACE MetLife
Gaining C-Suite support for SAFe Enterprise Agility
MetLife is one of 12 Fortune 500 companies to thrive for over 150 years. Met has scale and a proud history … and the many challenges of incumbency including legacy systems and challenges to speed. Agile is quickly being embraced as the way to achieve speed in innovation.
In this 45-minute video, Cheryl Crupi shares the story of how a small team sold MetLife’s new CEO and his new executive group on SAFe Enterprise Agility. This short, immersive session enabled this executive group to experience Agile for themselves and resulted in a third of the group requesting individual follow-up on how they can embrace Enterprise Agility, including HR, Legal, Marketing and regional business presidents.
“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.”
“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.”
“SAFe provided the agility, visibility, and transparency needed to ensure we could integrate with numerous other efforts, get predictable in our delivery, and ensure timelines are met.”
–David McMunn, Director of Fannie Mae’s Agile COE
Challenge:
Within three years, the organization would need to stand-up an entirely new business model that would change the way securities are issued to the market—and do so within aggressive timelines.
Industry:
Financial Services, Government
Results:
Releases now happen every month, instead of once or twice a year.
They integrate reliably every two weeks.
Fannie Mae reduced delivery risks.
The organization reduced the defect rate substantially.
Teams now deliver more than 30 attributes per sprint compared to 2-5 before.
Velocity increased from 10 story points to more than 30.
Best Practices:
Sync cadence – Establishing a common cadence was critical to success. Engineering practices must evolve in order to comply with bimodal governance.
Work on database modeling upfront – For any data-heavy effort, perform advance work on database modeling to avoid the impact of changes identified later in the sprint.
Develop a playbook – Such guidance reduces rework for multiple teams working in parallel.
Introduction
Fannie Mae is the leading provider of mortgage financing in the United States. Operating under a congressional charter, Fannie Mae—and its sibling organization Freddie Mac—play an important role in the nation’s housing finance system; they provide liquidity, stability, and affordability to the mortgage market.
Coming out of the housing crisis in 2013, Fannie Mae recognized that the lending environment it was moving into required it to be even more responsive to meet rapidly changing customer needs. Further, Fannie Mae recognized that agility was critical to achieving this objective—not just in technology, but across the organization.
In January 2015, Fannie Mae was preparing to align with guidance provided by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and Congress, under a new joint venture named Common Securitization Solutions (CSS). As part of this effort, Fannie Mae undertook an initiative to transform some of their key internal business processes to align with CSS to build a universal securitization platform for the issuance and management of mortgage-backed securities.
Within three years, Fannie Mae planned to develop an entirely new business model that would change the way securities are issued to the market—and do so within aggressive timelines. More than 20 development teams, encompassing over 300 individuals, were needed to integrate development and testing efforts across 30 assets. As Fannie Mae prepared to implement this change, the organization encountered several challenges as the new model was being defined based on continuously evolving requirements.
“When you’re doing a large-scale integration with a lot of data, the number-one factor for success is early integration and early testing,” says Atif Salam, Director of Enterprise Data at Fannie Mae. “The federal mandate required us to mitigate risk from the get-go, and we realized early on it would not be possible following a waterfall approach. There was no better way for us to mitigate that risk than to adopt Agile.”
Overcoming Initial Roadblocks
Enterprise Data’s efforts to adopt Agile uncovered several challenges, both internal and external:
Challenge #1: No Agile capability evident for the initial two teams at the outset of the Enterprise Data initiative.
The first Enterprise Data teams were brand new to Agile, the Scrum methodology and, having been formed specifically for this initiative, working with each other.
Prior to adopting SAFe, Enterprise Data developed a standard on-boarding approach and entrance criteria for standing up new teams. Additionally, external Agile subject matter expertise was brought in to train and work with the teams, and an Agile Mature Model (AMM) was created to baseline behaviors and practices, as well as identify areas for optimization.
Thereafter, once the decision had been made to adopt SAFe, the program began to work through the SAFe Readiness Checklist. The AMM was used to set target benchmarks that all program teams were required to meet in order to ensure there was sufficient capability in place from which to scale.
Challenge #2: At the outset of the Enterprise Data initiative, a Scrum team could only complete a single user story due to inflexible architecture, end-to-end testing challenges, and numerous build constraints. Further, it was typical for the work to be gated by subject matter expertise between developers who viewed data attributes as a data point, comprised of both sourcing and vending complexities, that could only be implemented sequentially.
In response, technical leads focused on eliminating constraints, reducing complexity, and optimizing workflow. Specifically, Technical Leads worked with the teams to leverage cross-functional team/paired programming constructs to augment technical expertise. As a result, the teams began to view data attributes not as a data point, comprised of both sourcing and vending complexities, but rather as having two distinct pieces of business value, specifically sourcing and vending.
Additionally, they made the effort to move system integration testing (SIT), as well as user acceptance testing (UAT), left into the Scrum team. As a result, and over time, each team began to complete multiple user stories within a given sprint. Additionally, the organization adopted an emergent design mindset, formed cross-functional Agile feature teams, and aligned to a common cadence that synchronized their activities (e.g. sprint planning, Scrum-of-Scrums, sprint reviews).
Challenge #3: At the outset of Enterprise Data’s journey, complexity was further complicated by the fact that teams were required to develop and integrate their code in the same mainline, thereby replacing branching as an accepted technical practice. Additionally, Fannie Mae required new release traceability management that would satisfy corporate and federal governance requirements.
To address these challenges, technical leads and shared services focused on building a continuous integration capability, across all teams, using the same codebase. The organization had always had application lifecycle management (ALM), however, it needed to rethink continuous integration to realize true efficiencies. Over the course of 10 months, the organization focused on leveraging automation to reduce the time to implement builds from once every six months to multiple times a day.
Additionally, Enterprise Data adopted behavior-driven development engineering practices for traceability, automated testing, and prototyping.
Challenge #4: Upstream technical dependencies specific to architecture, database design/modeling, and test data provisioning prevented the teams from completing a single user story within the two-week sprint cadence.
In addition to the technical challenges the teams were facing, there were also multiple upstream dependencies on architecture, data modeling, and test data management that they had to resolve before a User Story could be implemented by a team working in a two-week cadence.
Initially, working ahead of the teams, a group of business analysts were assembled and assigned to groom the program backlog sufficiently so that User Stories met, or exceeded, 80% of the sprint team’s Definition of Ready. Despite this focus, however, there was barely enough ready work in the program backlog for the teams to bring into their respective sprint planning. This was due to the lead times required to resolve upstream dependencies as well as the need to respond to continually changing requirements.
In preparation for scaling, Enterprise Data worked with their business stakeholders to create a roadmap of features spanning one business quarter. Simultaneously, they focused on optimizing backlog health, sufficient in depth to support the Agile teams, for at least two consecutive sprints. Additionally, adopting a system perspective, the entire value stream was analyzed to better anticipate, and mitigate for, internal/external technical dependencies.
Challenge #5: The organization’s culture was accustomed to working within a traditional implementation methodology.
At the outset, Fannie Mae had a traditional command and control culture, supported by a broader ecosystem of corporate functions that had to change to support Agile. Those leading the change made a significant effort to work with leadership and management to pivot from the traditional role of directing delivery to becoming Lean-Agile leaders and critical change agents, both supporting the teams as well as modeling the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto.
As already noted, leadership and management changed their focus to clearing impediments impacting the teams. Additionally, they influenced corporate functions to align in support of Agile, get the business integrated and involved, as well as to put the pieces in place to create an environment focused on continuous learning. “Historically we would have seen challenges as failures in requirements or development rather than opportunities to fail fast and learn, and improve,” Salam explains.
While still new to their roles, the Lean-Agile leaders infused a sense of purpose in the teams and gave them autonomy to implement the work while decentralizing decision-making and minimizing constraints.
SAFe: Agility. Visibility. Transparency.
Although Fannie Mae had pockets of Agile capability up to this point, leadership understood that a scaled Agile methodology was required to achieve their objectives. Fortunately, individuals within the company had prior success with large-scale Agile deployments using the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®).
Fannie Mae teamed up with an external Scaled Agile Gold partner to develop and mature its Scrum capability and then deploy SAFe. As the first to make the SAFe transition, the Enterprise Data division became the torch bearer.
“We had multiple waterfall efforts, third-party integration, and a hard regulatory mandate that made coordination and execution exceptionally difficult,” explains David McMunn, the Director of Fannie Mae’s Agile Center of Excellence (COE). “SAFe provided the agility, visibility, and transparency needed to ensure we could integrate with the numerous other efforts, get predictable in our delivery, and ensure timelines are met.”
Fannie Mae applied a dogmatic approach to ensure the organization was developing a consistent set of practices across multiple teams at the outset. External coaches delivered Agile, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Leading SAFe (SA), and SAFe for Teams (SP) training. The SAFe training was then mandatory for every new team joining the effort.
Fannie Mae launched its first Agile Release Train (ART) encompassing six programs, across 12 teams, with more than 130 people, in June of 2015. Admittedly, that first Program Increment (PI) offered some learning experiences.
“In spite of all the preparation that went into the backlog, setting expectations, confirming attendance from stakeholders, and the training prior to planning, the first PI was somewhat of a chaotic experience,” says Scott Richardson, Chief Data Officer at Fannie Mae.
Context setting provided by the business, product, and architecture leads took time away from team break-out sessions and, as a result, the teams struggled to resolve all of the open requirements and scope questions to complete their plans.
“But by the end of the second day,” Richardson continues, “we started to see progress.” The teams had mapped out their dependencies on the program board, resolved, owned, accepted, or mitigated (ROAM) all of the known risks in the PI and achieved a Fist of Five confidence score of 3.
“The session offered the very first opportunity for all stakeholders to work together on this multi-million dollar program.” Richardson adds. “A new way of managing large-scale integration efforts at Fannie Mae was emerging that would spread across the technology enterprise.”
Over the next few PIs, the organization knew more clearly how to prepare for the PI planning meeting and confidence scores began averaging 4 and higher.
Modeling Confidence in the New Methodology
During cross-team planning in an early PI, it became clear that several teams were not on track to deliver important capabilities within the targeted timeline. “Some of my best new Agile team leaders offered to throw more people at the problem ‘just this once,’ and crash the schedule like they did in the old days,” Richardson says. “It’s in those moments that you need to model confidence in the Agile method, to be the calm in the eye of the storm.” Instead, the Agile team leaders were encouraged to go back to the Product Owners regarding the change in priorities and empower them to devise a new minimum viable product. “Within a couple of hours, everything was back on track with planning, and ultimately all the teams delivered, and the external customer delivery was on-time,” Richardson says. “Now they carry this story with them, and are empowered to solve problems and make decisions in truly productive ways. It’s part of the culture.”
Gains across the Board
Today, Fannie Mae has come a long way. The Enterprise Data division delivered an integrated solution on time and with much higher quality than was expected for an effort of this size. From a broader perspective, the transformation to SAFe revolutionized how the organization plans for the delivery of large-scale programs.
Fannie Mae has seen improvements on multiple fronts:
Reduced risk – Fannie Mae reduced delivery risks through the relentless focus on innovation and automation to ship “production ready” code with higher and higher frequency. They significantly mitigated the risk inherent in complex integration between legacy and new architectures/applications, as well as between internal and external systems.
Faster feedback cycles – Enterprise Data delivers system demos and integrated code every two weeks. Releases now happen every month, instead of once or twice a year, for the largest application across the enterprise, with millions of lines of code.
Improved predictability – Teams, within the program and across the enterprise, integrate reliably every two weeks.
Boosted quality – The organization reduced the defect rate substantially.
Increased business value – Teams now deliver more than 30 attributes per sprint compared to 2-5 attributes when Agile was first adopted within Enterprise Data.
Better team progress – Teams undergo regular AHR (Agility Health Reviews) cycles and have matured to higher Agile Maturity Model levels.
Greater efficiency – Fannie Mae realizes significant efficiency through a reduction in technical debt.
After the initial deployment, the division rolled out SAFe to the rest of the organization, training up to 600 people on Leading SAFe, SAFe Advanced Scrum Master, SAFe Scrum Master, SAFe Product Manager/Product Owner, and SAFe for Teams, depending on roles. Several employees went on to achieve their SPC certification.
Currently, Fannie Mae runs three ARTs. The Enterprise Data ART recently completed its 13th PI. Additionally, there are more than 200 Lean-Agile teams across Enterprise IT, encompassing over 3,000 people. Functional and business portfolios are adopting lightweight Lean-Agile values and practices as part of their day-to-day activities.
“This way of working has spread across the organization,” Salam says. “It’s changing the way we deliver for the customer, the way we hire and do our budgeting, and is continuously extending further and further into the business.”
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