“…people who work together in harmony and deliver the best service to the business customers, beneficiaries in happy relationships and all that? That’s what gets me up in the morning. I want to make sure that people are working together fine. And what frustrates me the most is to see within our government agency how so much energy is wasted in silos, wasted because people are not communicating properly and all this nice energy is lost. And so that’s really too bad.”
— Cecile Auret, Internal Change Agent and SAFe 6.0 Practice Consultant, France Travail
Industry:
Government, Public Sector
Quick Facts:
France Travail employs approximately 59,000 people, with 1600 working to develop digital services
The organization paid a total of 36 billion Euros to beneficiaries in 2023
They processed almost 8 million benefit requests in 2023
They saw 478 million visits to their website in 2023 (59% of those on mobile devices)
They processed 17 million phone calls to call centers
And, they saw 6.6 million in-person visits to local branches
After launching its first Agile Release Train more than six years ago, today, approximately 70 percent of France Travail’s software production is delivered through ARTs
Key Takeaways:
ARTs are not enough to cut through silos. Even when trains are working happily together, they can hit a ceiling if the silo mentality and culture above the trains doesn’t change.
Everyone is an actor in the transformation. By trying things and improving in their area, individuals can plant seeds for the rest of the organization. With persistence, at some point, it attracts sponsorship from the management level.
Change needs to happen on every level: middle managers, top managers, change agents, and the team level.
The Framework offers both stability and ideas for improvement, with the big picture as the main compass for the organization to navigate change.
Overview
France Travail is the French public employment service, a government organization that supports unemployed citizens and employers, offers financial benefits, and provides intermediation services. They offer assistance to people who are in transition, in between jobs, or looking for new employment. They also support small employers and recruiters that don’t have the infrastructure for recruiting.
France Travail is a big agency on its own, but in January 2024 it became part of a larger network of partners: The network for employment. Together, the network helps people not only find work, but also remove impediments to work, such as securing housing and finding daycare. France Travail also develops an IT platform of digital services for all the partners.
“Don’t accept the status quo. Try things… If you believe you can improve, try things. And don’t let others tell you that you shouldn’t try. Be confident and try… and eventually you’ll attract interest from top managers.”
— Cecile Auret, Internal Change Agent and SAFe 6.0 Practice Consultant, France Travail
“The most significant gain, in my view, is intangible: Today, the relationship between IT and business is peaceful and collaborative. People work with much more ease and face fewer conflicts.”
—Roberto Lopes de Carvalho, Secretaria da Fazenda do Estado de São Paulo
Industry:
Government
Quick Facts:
São Paulo State Department of Treasury (SEFAZ-SP) has approximately 8,000 employees.
The department manages $230 billion in taxpayer revenue.
Its structure includes 18 regional tax units, dozens of tax posts, as well as administrative and service units covering all 645 municipalities in the state.
With SAFe Essential chosen as the starting point and with the help of Adaptworks as a trusted partner, the first ARTs (Agile Release Trains) were launched in July 2019.
SAFe allowed the department to leverage cutting-edge technologies in electronic systems and digital services.
Outcomes & Lessons Learned:
Between 2019 and 2021, the department saw a 296% increase in the number of features delivered or in progress.
Teams saw a 12% reduction in the number of incidents to manage.
The department reported a 42% increase in infrastructure project delivery rates.
They adopted a clearer definition of responsibilities between business and IT.
Stakeholders reported stronger alignment between development, security, and infrastructure through DevOps.
Overview
With the challenge of managing 230 billion in revenue collection from taxpayers in the State of São Paulo, SEFAZ-SP followed a path with the help of SAFe to establish new milestones in the public management of its services.
This journey led to results such as increased efficiency, continuous value delivery, and greater collaboration between the areas involved in the deliveries.
About SEFAZ-SP
The Secretaria da Fazenda do Estado de São Paulo, responsible for the highest ICMS revenue collection among Brazilian states, is headquartered in the capital and operates throughout the state of São Paulo. Its structure includes 18 regional tax units, dozens of tax posts, as well as administrative and service units covering all 645 municipalities in the state.
With a workforce of approximately 8,000 employees, the institution combines the most modern concepts and practices of public management with the continuous improvement of high-quality services for citizens, both in-person and remotely. It leverages cutting-edge technologies in electronic systems and digital services.
Problem Statement
After an evaluation process that took place in 2017, SEFAZ- SP encountered a scenario typical of organizations that are in the early stages of an Agile transformation.
As a response to the situation it was facing, SEFAZ-SP adopted Scrum as a work process for its teams. The results and benefits of this adoption quickly became evident through increased delivery speed and improved alignment between Product Owners and business areas.
According to Margarita Gómez, Executive Director of the PeopleGov Lab at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, one of the main challenges of public service in Brazil is aiming for a government that is agile, flexible, and innovative.
And it was precisely in this direction that SEFAZ-SP initially guided its transformation strategy, under the leadership of Roberto Lopes de Carvalho, Deputy Director of the Information Technology Department, responsible for the entire organization, structure, and service delivery related to technology products and services.
“We were facing a problem with incremental and waterfall management models, using PMI techniques for tracking. Essentially, there was a constant state of conflict and contract renegotiation between technology and business areas, which we decided to address by adopting Scrum for team management. We started with a few teams and quickly expanded as the initial experience was excellent,” says Roberto Lopes de Carvalho, Secretaria da Fazenda do Estado de São Paulo
An important step had been taken, but there was still something SEFAZ-SP needed to address to further accelerate its transformation: Scaling all its Agile initiatives across the institution without compromising the quality, efficiency, and value generation that had been individually achieved by the teams up to that point.
The Challenge
Over time, it became clear that although teams were delivering individual results, they still needed better alignment with operations and the institution’s service area. The challenging scenario involved a large number of applications requiring integrations with both internal and external services. Even though development had become faster, it still lacked synchronization and cadence across the various teams.
“For a while, we experienced the phenomenon of a fast car without a rearview mirror. It was common for a team to be developing an application, complete one stage, and then realize that the next stage—handled by another team, sometimes requiring a different integration—was not yet ready,” adds Carvalho.
The lack of synchronization and alignment, along with the loss of knowledge at the end of projects due to the reallocation of professionals, raised a red flag for Roberto.
The Path Forward
In 2019, after an evaluation led by Roberto and supported by market references and data, SEFAZ-SP decided that SAFe could meet their needs.
The process began with a consultation with Scaled Agile, where SEFAZ-SP sought a certified and reliable partner capable of offering the full portfolio of SAFe training, along with the consulting support they needed.
Adaptworks was recommended as the pioneer in bringing SAFe to Brazil in 2014 and for establishing itself as the leading SAFe company in Latin America, recognized for its consulting support to various organizations and for having trained over 5,800 professionals in SAFe.
With SAFe Essential chosen as the starting point, the first ARTs (Agile Release Trains) were launched in July 2019. As the process gained momentum, representatives from all technology areas, agile teams, and key stakeholders from business areas were integrated into the ARTs, assuming roles such as Business Owners, Product Managers, and Product Owners.
One of the initial challenges was skepticism and resistance to the ongoing changes, as well as uncertainty among professionals regarding their roles and responsibilities within the new framework.
This natural adaptation process was mitigated through SAFe alignment ceremonies and coordination meetings with all stakeholders.
“We found a work framework with well-defined roles, which greatly helped in identifying the right people for each role and clarifying their responsibilities. Once we overcame this initial challenge, we had to launch the ARTs and form the teams — each sometimes at different levels of maturity and with varying experiences in agility. However, we always respected these differences and embraced the methods or solutions that each ART discovered for itself,” highlights Carvalho.
Over the course of several months, Adaptworks contributed to the learning journey of Business Owners, RTEs, Product Managers, and agile team members by delivering 100% of the SAFe training offered by Scaled Agile.
Adaptworks also provided support for launching the ARTs, which played a key role in enabling SEFAZ-SP to maintain and offer its 72 digital services to the citizens of São Paulo.
Results
The result of the partnership between SEFAZ-SP and Adaptworks is reflected in the absolute numbers achieved between 2019 and 2021:
In addition to the gains mentioned above, other notable improvements have emerged from SEFAZ-SP’s adoption of SAFe, generating a positive impact across the organization:
Clearer definition of responsibilities between business and IT
Stronger alignment between development, security, and infrastructure through DevOps
A shift in how technology-related matters are perceived, leading to greater alignment with the modernization of strategic planning, which now incorporates quarterly OKRs synchronized with Program Increment (PI) cadences.
“I think our story has resonance with lots of other people, probably like myself, who find themselves in positions of leadership in today’s world and maybe don’t have the background in technology particularly. That’s one thing I will say, and I think this is sometimes controversial, but I often get nods when I say it. Technology is not the main event.”
—Saima Satti, Head of Global Exams Business Improvement, British Council
Industry:
Education, English language, and Cultural Sectors
Quick Facts:
Founded in 1934, the British Council has focused on building connections for 90 years.
It is a UK charity governed by Royal Charter and a UK public body. Most income comes from partnership agreements, contracts, philanthropy, teaching and exams, and they also receive grant-in-aid funding from the UK government.
The Council is currently present in 100+ countries.
As part of their growth and development, the British Council’s Global Exams Business Improvement team created a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence and embedded a SAFe think tank.
Most of the team’s leadership is SAFe certified.
Outcomes & Lessons Learned:
It’s not all about technology. The adoption of SAFe enabled the development and delivery of over 150 initiatives including a balanced proportion of both Technology and non-tech improvements that deliver value across the world.
SAFe enabled the delivery of value more efficiently and more broadly across the globe.
The adoption of LPM and work on multiple portfolios with an overarching Portfolio of Portfolios was game changing for the teams, stakeholders and ultimately the realisation of value. Even though we realised we were already working at portfolio level when we started our SAFe journey we adapted and embedded accordingly ensuring SAFe worked for us .. and it did! Key lesson there is to try and find a way through and not get overly worried that your context is already more complex.
With SAFe, they were able to shift their focus to “people, passions, and pivots” and accelerate the flow of value.
Critical to success was culture and it was important to foster a culture of safety through communication events, peer support, and sharing vision and strategy across every level.
Involve everyone, from the most junior person to leadership. Respect your people and culture.
Work toward alignment, transparency, and continuous improvement.
If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the business and they will take care of the customer.
Overview
The British Council is an organization that works for a more peaceful and prosperous world by building connections and trust between people in the UK and countries worldwide. Working with people in over 200 countries and territories and with presence on the ground in more than 100 countries.
Uniquely combining the UK’s deep expertise in arts and culture, education and the English language, global presence and relationships in over 100 countries with unparalleled access to young people, creatives and educators, and their own creative sparkle, the British council will reach 650 million people this year alone.
One of the focus areas of the organization is administering examinations, helping people gain access to trusted qualifications to support their career and study prospects. About 5 million exams are administered at more than 850 locations worldwide.
The British Council’s Global Exams Business improvement team, dispersed across 23 countries, implemented SAFe to help break down silos and to reduce wasted time in handovers between tech teams, systems teams, process, and implementation. They also wanted to align their culture around a shared strategy and vision and were able to do so with SAFe.
“By partnering with Accenture to introduce SAFe, we expect to break down departmental barriers, achieve total agility from strategy to execution, and ensure the deep integration of business and technology, thereby accelerating product innovation and service optimization and enhancing market competitiveness.”
—Pengcheng Guo, Chief Technology Officer, CCBSCF
Introduction
China Construction Bank Supply Chain Financial Company (CCBSCF) is a state-owned financial services company that has implemented SAFe across three different business lines. Their Lean-Agile transformation linked multiple functional teams such as marketing, product, R&D, testing, and PMO to form three Agile Release Trains covering more than 200 employees. They have completed 6 PIs so far, achieving real improvement in demand management transparency and customer value delivery efficiency, and are still in the process of continuous optimization.
To understand their success and how they achieved this transformation, we have the following insights from Pengcheng Guo, Chief Technology Officer at CCBSCF:
Q: What was the biggest goal or challenge driving your SAFe transformation?
A: The biggest challenge in promoting SAFe in CCBSCF was that it often adopts the traditional sectional management mode, and there is a severe department silo, with each functional team in charge of its own business, which causes inefficient cooperation. At the same time, the technology team used the traditional waterfall mode of development, and in the process of promoting the projects of long-cycle and large teams, the degree of information transparency is insufficient.
The problems that impede the enhancement of quality and efficiency are concealed, which is not conducive to optimizing Improvement. The organizational formation and history form a massive resistance to SAFe transformation. The biggest goal of promoting SAFe transformation is to overcome these resistances, realize business agility, and improve the quality and efficiency of customer value delivery.
Q: What methodologies or approaches did you try before SAFe?
A: Before introducing SAFe, CCBSCF had tried to implement a two-week iteration of the small waterfall working model, such as focusing on development work in the first week and testing in the second week. In addition, we also adopted a project-based management model, which aimed to facilitate the mobilization of technical team resources and management cost inputs. However, these approaches did not solve the problem of functional team departmental walls and needed to be more conducive to the transparent transfer of information.
Q: What inspired you to choose SAFe specifically?
A: To improve the quality and efficiency of customer value delivery, the industry’s leading consulting firm, Accenture, introduced SAFe to CCBSCF. The primary reason for choosing SAFe as the primary transformation Framework includes:
SAFe is a business agility framework that creates a mechanism for cross-functional collaboration between business and technical role teams, helping to reduce the impact of departmental silos and improve the quality and efficiency of customer value delivery.
SAFe is an enterprise-level framework that provides solutions for the overall optimization of the enterprise, covering multiple levels from the top level of strategic budgeting to the bottom level of requirements implementation, rather than just optimizing for a functional team or a product line.
SAFe contains Lean thinking and emphasizes the flow of value and the transparency of information in the process.
The SAFe DevOps helps CCBSCF build relevant pipeline tools and indicator systems, guiding each team to continuous improvement through data analysis, and is conducive to the overall digital transformation of the company’s management in the future.
By partnering with Accenture to introduce SAFe, we expect to break down departmental barriers, achieve total agility from strategy to execution, and ensure the deep integration of business and technology, thereby accelerating product innovation and service optimization and enhancing market competitiveness.
Q: What are the biggest improvements you’ve seen since implementing SAFe?
The main improvements achieved since the adoption of the SAFe include improved transparency of production and research work. Before the transformation, the market business team was not satisfied with the transparency of the work and did not understand the specific progress of the requirements or the actual basis for the scheduling of the requirements. There were also challenges and questions about the workload estimation and risk judgment of the team.
During the transformation process, the ART utilized DevOps tool management and demand progress communication mechanism to maintain close communication with the market business team. At the same time, the Agile team level utilized KANBAN, daily standup meetings and other mechanisms to pull through information to the managers to ensure that resource usage and risk issues could be understood.
After the improvement, the production and research work capacity has dramatically improved.
We also have seen dramatic improvement in value delivery efficiency. Before the transformation, the company’s business was affected by factors such as poor efficiency in production and research, long waiting times for requirements to go live, an increasing number of accumulated unrealized requirements, and low customer and business satisfaction with production and research services.
During the transformation process, first, by establishing ART and Agile teams, the problems hindering the efficiency of the production and research process were fully exposed, and various waiting wastes in the process were eliminated through architectural decoupling and division of labor optimization. Secondly, through VMO and Requirement Value Post-Assessment Mechanism, production research resources are linked with the company’s core strategic work to ensure that production research resources are focused on high-priority requirements and achieve corresponding results as soon as possible. Thirdly, we utilized various product and technology methods to build standard products for modules with high repetitiveness and high consumption of resources to strengthen the reuse of product modules and technical services and save resource investment.
After the improvement, the efficiency of production and research work has been significantly improved, and the three columns of value stream train teams that have completed the transformation have all enhanced their business value delivery efficiency by more than 40% compared with the pre-transformation period. The total number of accumulated unrealized requirements has dropped, and the number of historical legacy requirements continues to decrease. There is an inflection point where the time to go online for demand is shortened.
Another improvement we saw is a strengthening of the digital management capability of production and research. Before the transformation, the team needed to have standardized DevOps tools, and some of the requirements needed to be recorded in the performance tools in a timely and accurate manner. We need more comprehensive and systematic digital management tools on the organizational level. At the same time, the production and research metrics could have been better. Quality and performance metrics must be integrated into more granular lines of business and teams. The metrics results relied on manual calculations, which could not be accurately generated promptly.
During the transformation, based on the SAFe methodology, we reconstructed the requirements management function in the DevOps tool. We added the function of cross-ART requirements dependency management, which supports the entire life cycle management of requirements from when they are proposed to when they are completed and deployed to the production environment. At the same time, the quality and efficiency metrics of R&D work have been reformulated, and the relevant metrics support splitting to each ART and Agile team. The results can be generated quickly and accurately through the DevOps tool.
After the improvement, the digital management system of R&D work has been enhanced, and there is more data support for problem positioning, optimization effect, and team performance evaluation, which is conducive to more objective and scientific continuous improvement of R&D work.
Finally, we’ve seen that business and technology are more closely connected. Before the transformation, business, and technology worked separately, with businesses building products and services for the market focusing more on specialized areas of work without forming a synergy to enhance customer value.
During the transformation, business and technology cooperated deeply, and technology had the opportunity to understand the business scenarios more deeply, which made it possible for technology to empower business in depth.
After improvement, business and technology realize closer integration. For example, in the review of customer transaction materials, the use of OCR and NLP and other AI technologies, significantly improving the efficiency of material review and saving the company’s operating costs; in the process of platform data transmission, the application of blockchain technology to ensure the security of data tamper-proof, to further enhance the protection of the service compliance.
Q: Beyond the business benefits, how has this enhanced jobs or the company culture on a human level?
A: Since adopting SAFe to drive the Lean-Agile transformation, the company’s culture has realized enhancements in the following areas:
Equal cooperation and active complementary position among team members: Previously each functional team was in charge of its business, and team members are now gradually breaking down the original departmental barriers and roles. They are working cross-team towards the common goal of delivering high quality and efficiency in customer value and practicing customer-centered service. In addition, team members have the opportunity to have their opinions heard. By conducting regular NPS questionnaires and practicing the Gemba Walk mechanism, managers can understand the ideas of frontline employees and provide timely feedback.
Managers have a sense of coaching management. They are no longer command-control managers, or relying on some experts to manage teams, but instead, identify problems with front-line teams and try to solve them together. The content of management work has gradually changed from uploading tasks to building a cooperation platform, teaching standard methods of problem analysis and solutions, assisting in eliminating possible obstacles, and promoting optimized solutions that have been proven successful and feasible, etc. The management team has also developed a sense of coaching.
Build a learning organization gradually: Several business line teams organize regular CoP activities, where team members actively share theoretical knowledge and practical experience and jointly discuss the problems and countermeasures faced during the transition period. In this atmosphere of active sharing, the team is more adaptable and innovative.
Q: When you look at the SAFe journey overall, what are you most proud of?
A: Looking back on SAFe’s practical journey, we are most proud of the following three aspects:
Transformation Scaled: During the transformation for more than one year, we introduced the CEO and all management colleagues of the company to identify value streams and set up three Agile Release Trains for different types of business lines, such as customer-oriented solution delivery, public operation service, and middleware tech service, spanning various roles, such as marketing, product, R&D, testing and PMO, and led a team of more than 200 employees to realize Lean-Agile transformation.
Actual improvement effect: After 6 PIs, each train and Agile team identified a series of problems hindering quality and efficiency improvement with the help of the SAFe. The team’s delivery efficiency has been significantly improved through process optimization and structural upgrading, and the transparency of production and research work has been dramatically enhanced. By efficiently utilizing production and research resources, the SAFe transformation work achieved a positive input/output ratio.
Exploration and Innovation in Transformation: Based on the SAFe, we have innovated and practiced several specific mechanisms, including designing a cross-ART communication mechanism to realize efficient collaboration among multiple ARTs and improving the process of requirements refining. Achieving a balance between determining requirement content and monitoring requirements implementation through a two-level feature grooming mechanism based on the nature of the features.
In an era where the digital battlefield is just as critical as the physical one, the US Army is at the forefront of a transformative shift in software development and acquisition strategies. The Army Directive 2024-02, “Enabling Modern Software Development and Acquisition Practices,” heralds a new age of agility, rapid delivery, and continuous improvement. This transformation is vital for maintaining superiority in the digital warfare landscape.
Enter the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®). SAFe for government offers a structured yet flexible approach that aligns perfectly with the directive’s goals.
Are you curious about how SAFe can revolutionize your operations? Download our comprehensive white paper, SAFe: The Solution for the US Army, and dive into the details.
Modernizing Software Development: A New Approach
Traditional software development methods, characterized by rigid, prescriptive requirements and lengthy development cycles, are being replaced by more adaptive and iterative processes.
Army Directive 2024-02 calls for:
High-Level Need Statements: Moving away from detailed specifications to concise, high-level requirements
Flexible Acquisition Strategies: Using methods like the Software Acquisition Pathway and modular contracting to adapt swiftly to changing needs
Streamlined Processes: Reducing time-to-delivery through modernized development, testing, and cybersecurity processes
Continuous Improvement: Emphasizing ongoing development and refinement throughout the software lifecycle
Talent Development: Building expertise in modern software practices within the Army’s ranks
SAFe’s principles and practices meet these new demands, making it an ideal framework for the US Army’s Agile transformation.
Want to learn more about how SAFe can help your government agency? Download our white paper now.
How SAFe Supports Army Directive 2024-02
Aligning requirements and acquisition practices
SAFe’s methodology, which emphasizes capturing requirements through iterative ‘user stories,’ directly supports the directive’s move towards high-level need statements. This approach ensures that development is closely aligned with user needs and can adapt as those needs evolve. Additionally, SAFe’s exemplar Request for Proposal (RFP) language facilitates the creation of flexible contracts, promoting rapid and iterative software delivery.
Streamlining processes
SAFe advocates continuous integration, deployment, and automated testing—key strategies for modernizing software development processes. By breaking down development into small, frequent iterations, SAFe helps reduce delays and accelerate time to market, perfectly aligning with the directive’s objectives.
Adopting a continuous improvement model
The directive’s shift towards continuous improvement throughout the software lifecycle mirrors SAFe’s Build-Measure-Learn concept. This model focuses on ongoing adaptation and refinement, ensuring the software remains relevant and effective.
Developing talent and expertise
SAFe provides a comprehensive framework for training and certifying personnel in Agile roles such as Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Release Train Engineer. This structured approach to talent development ensures that the Army’s workforce has the skills necessary to support its Agile initiatives. Programs like the Digital Capabilities Contracting Center of Excellence and the Software Management and Response Team can leverage SAFe expertise to drive this transformation.
Real-World Success: SAFe for Government
Several US Army initiatives have already seen success with SAFe in a government context:
General Fund Enterprise Business System (GFEBS): Transitioned from a traditional waterfall methodology to SAFe, enabling faster delivery of software enhancements and better alignment with evolving requirements
The Software Factory in Austin, Texas: Embraced SAFe practices to train soldiers in coding and foster organic software development capabilities
Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS): Utilizing SAFe to transform its software development approach, PEO EIS is enhancing its workforce’s skills through Agile training and promoting industry collaboration to support Agile transformation
SAFe for Government events, including conferences, workshops, panel speakers, and supporting artifacts, promote Agile governance and modern software development practice for the government sector.
Download the white paper to read more about these success stories and how they can apply to your agency.
Conclusion
The US Army’s adoption of SAFe methodologies in response to Army Directive 2024-02 represents a significant leap towards modernizing its software development processes. By aligning with SAFe’s principles of agility, continuous improvement, and efficiency, the Army is better equipped to meet the demands of the digital warfare landscape. This transformation enhances the Army’s operational capabilities. It also fosters a culture of innovation and rapid delivery, ensuring that the US Army remains a formidable force in traditional and digital arenas.
Join us in embracing the future of SAFe for government—together, we can achieve greater agility, responsiveness, and efficiency. Download the white paper, SAFe: The Solution for the US Army, to learn more about how SAFe meets the requirements of Army Directive 2024-02.
“SAFe provides us with a frame of reference that facilitates the cadence of work, principles and values that allow us to concentrate in an organized manner on providing the best service to the Administration of Justice and to the more than 80,000 users who use the Justice management system Avantius for the electronic processing of judicial files.
The collaboration, communication and learning that we obtain through its [SAFe’s] practice guarantees that with each Planning Increment, our product is more robust, more innovative and closer to the needs of our users, leading the digitalization of Justice in Spain.
Our team enjoys and is proud of the results obtained with this way of working.”
Design, build, maintain and evolve Avantius, the best digital solution for electronic judicial files, which makes judicial processes more efficient every day, offering an immediate benefit to society.
Industry:
Government, IT
Results:
Increased predictability of releases with a cadence of 3 per year. “Before using SAFe we were not predictable,” explains Laínez. “It was usually one or two releases per year, but we couldn’t make it at the planned dates.”
Improved product quality as measured by a 47% decrease in bugs from 2020 to 2022
Increased engagement of team members by 25% as demonstrated by Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) and engagement surveys.
Boosted customer satisfaction ratings by 30% based on Net Promoter Scores
Improved flow and efficiency: As a result of the digital transformation with SAFe, the judicial system saw improvement in pending cases and congestion rate (registered/resolved matters) across all regions.
Reduced time for cases in process: The system also saw improvements in duration of cases, with the estimated average time of civil matters in process dropping by as much as 3.9 months, according to a Report of the General Council of the Judiciary CGPJ.
Best Practices:
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
Overview
In the justice sector, the relationship between the authorities and the citizens they serve is crucial. Improving transparency, accountability, responsiveness, service accessibility, and the user experience has direct impacts on citizens’ quality of life.
Digitalization of judicial systems not only has important benefits for the justice system, but it also drives economic and social progress. Electronic file management systems grease the wheels of justice. Clerks no longer have to perform tedious manual searches for documents or wade through warehouses full of file boxes. The technology allows for e-signatures, saving people unnecessary trips to sign documents in person. Background documents are centralized and encrypted for security. Citizens no longer have to languish in the system while lawyers and court officers manually gather discovery documents. Legal officers and staff are able to do their jobs more efficiently, improving the flow of cases through the system. Historic records are better organized and more secure.
Tracasa Instrumental (the technology company of the Government of Navarra) experienced this all firsthand when they built Avantius, a digital legal process management system and put it to use in the autonomous communities of Navarra, Cantabria, Aragon, the Basque Country and the country of Andorra.
With the help of SAFe, Avantius became the common vehicle for the modernization of justice in the North of Spain.
About Tracasa
Tracasa Instrumental has a staff of more than 600 qualified professionals who develop technological solutions and services, mainly for the public sector (Government of Navarra and Local Corporations). Of them, 89 people make up the high-performance team that maintains and evolves Avantius, organizing around value in 12 Agile teams with a high degree of maturity.
About Avantius
Avantius is Spain’s Procedural Management System used daily by more than 7,000 users of the Justice administration and more than 77,500 professionals and external collaborators who take advantage of its facilities for the digital processing of files and its integration capabilities with state services.
In total, more than 4,700,000 citizens benefit from the digital services provided by Avantius to accelerate faster and more efficient procedural management every day.
Avantius allows comprehensive management of judicial files, with maximum security and within a single electronic judicial file, facilitating the work of all operators participating in a judicial process.
In April 2019, Avantius was certified by the General Council of the Judiciary of Spain as the only valid procedural management system that is mandatory for judges to work with the Electronic Judicial File.
Javier Amézqueta, Justice and Interior Area Director, right, and Javier Laínez, Avantius SAFe Release Train Engineer, Tracasa Instrumental, left.
The Path to SAFe: A Timeline
“Tracasa has incorporated Agile methods into the way its teams work since 2012,” says Roberto Clerigué, Director of Operations at Tracasa Instrumental and Product Owner of Tracasa’s SAFe LACE. “In 2018, due to alignment and synchronization needs with the growth in the number of autonomous communities and users that used the Avantius justice management system, we began to study what the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) proposed. In 2019, we saw that we needed a partner that could help guide the implementation of SAFe in an orderly manner and based on experiences.”
Tracasa then contracted with Estratecno, a Scaled Agile Gold Transformation Partner, and began training and SPC support for the implementation of SAFe in Avantius and other management areas of the organization.
“Furthermore, in February 2020, we learned more about the SAFe proposal with a meeting in Madrid in which Chris James, CEO of Scaled Agile, participated,” Clerigué recalls. “We were able to learn more about the SAFe proposal, which led us to promote, in a more decisive way, the implementation of SAFe in our company. Although the pandemic slowed down some initiatives, during that year Leading SAFe, SAFe POPM, SAFe SSM and SAFe RTE trainings were completed.”
In 2021, Avantius’ first PI Planning was launched following the SAFe implementation roadmap along with an implementation of portfolio management for the company’s four-year strategic plan. “We are very proud of the results obtained so far.”
Now the Avantius team is made up of more than 89 professionals distributed across 12 teams. These teams have an Agile Release Train (ART) structure following a SAFe Essential configuration that supports a clearly defined development Value Stream for Avantius based on the operational Value Stream of legal processes supported by the different Avantius components.
Ready for the Future With the advancements from Avantius’ way of working based on the SAFe framework, the justice area of Tracasa Instrumental is ready to scale its contribution and face new challenges with confidence.
“The contribution of an Agile scaling framework, as consistent and proven as SAFe provides us, allows us to focus on growing clients, users and new areas of action at a pace that a few years ago we could not dream of,” says Javier Amézqueta, director of the Justice area of Tracasa Instrumental and fundamental promoter in the Lean Agile evolution of the Avantius team.
Amézqueta also credits SAFe with allowing Tracasa to attract more talent and enjoy a more aligned and productive work environment. “It allows us to incorporate the great professionals that we want to grow with us to face the challenges that we must face in the coming years,” he adds.
Of course, there are direct business benefits too, he notes: “SAFe provides us with greater predictability in the delivery of value, increases the satisfaction of team members associated with intrinsic motivation factors and helps us prioritize demand to plan without exceeding the capacity of the train equipment.”
Navarra, recognized as an international success story for the methodology used by Tracasa Instrumental in the Avantius judicial management system. This company of the Government of Navarra is the first Spanish public entity to obtain this recognition worldwide. News article.
Lean-Agile Mindset & DevSecOps in a Multi-billion Dollar Defense System
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How do you achieve unprecedented communication between contractor, government, and stakeholders in a large acquisition?
Northrop Grumman and US Air Force agile transformation leads describe how they have worked together to leverage SAFe and DevSecOps to scale Agile practices to refine requirements, enable customer and stakeholder collaboration, and facilitate technical planning for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) modernization program. The development occurs under a multi-billion dollar contract involving hundreds of companies and over 10,000 people across the US.
“GBSD’s 50-year mission is vital to our nation’s security and adoption of a Lean-Agile mindset is essential to meeting GBSD’s schedule and capability requirements.“
Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:
David Gellen, Agile Transformation Lead for GBSD /Northrop Grumman
Micheal Burkhart, Lead for Agile Transformation of the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program /U.S. Air Force
In this ongoing series, our customers and partners share their stories from the field about working with SAFe ceremonies, implementing SAFe, and fostering business agility. In this episode, Phil Gardiner, enterprise Agile coach at SAIC (a Scaled Agile partner) talks to us about his coaching experiences in the public sector, including how “business agility” can be applied in government and some interesting a-ha moments.
Click the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to the SAFe Business Agility podcast on Apple Podcasts
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.
Phil Gardiner is on a mission to help organizations transform the way they work. Having served as an internal change agent, an enterprise coach, and a ‘coaches’ coach,’ Phil has enabled large-scale Lean-Agile transformations within the telecom, entertainment, finance, cybersecurity, healthcare, and government markets. His current focus is to enable people within the federal government space achieve greater business agility within their agencies and programs.
In this ongoing series, our SAFe members, customers, and partners share their real-life stories about their field experiences working with SAFe ceremonies and implementations of SAFe in government. In this episode, we speak with Mark Byers and Dan Montgomery from Octo Consulting—a Scaled Agile partner. They’ll share their experiences working with federal government agencies and contractors in a fully virtual environment, some tips on making this smooth, and some key government trends.
Click the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to the SAFe Business Agility podcast on Apple Podcasts
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.
Mark Byers is the SAFe Practice Lead at Octo Consulting Group, a Scaled Agile Partner. Dan Montgomery is the lead for Octo Consulting’s Agile and DevSecOps Center of Excellence.
“We are delivering faster and more predictably than in the past, which has changed many minds and driven a shift in long-ingrained ways of working.”
—Mark Braam, IT Manager/RTE, Interaction Services at DTCA
Challenge:
DTCA sought to improve its speed and predictability in bringing new technology to the organization and citizens.
Industry:
Government
Results:
Major releases 3X more often
80% reduction in technical debt
Half of managers moved into other roles
Greater engagement and collaboration across all levels
Best Practices:
Go ‘by the book’ – Follow SAFe training and ceremonies closely for the best results.
Anticipate organizational change – SAFe facilitated a cultural and organizational shift at DTCA.
Give teams freedom – Trust teams and give them space to do their jobs.
Shift to product thinking – Product vs. project thinking provides continuity and life cycle management and a more long-term outlook, plus brings more attention to improvement, maintainability, lifecycle management, and cost of ownership.
Introduction
With 26,000 employees, the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA) is one of the largest government agencies in the Netherlands, and is responsible for collecting taxes and customs, and extending tax credits and benefits to Dutch residents.
DTCA relies on technology to sharpen productivity and simplify online tax and customs procedures. Yet in this process-oriented and risk-averse culture, technology evolves slowly. Initiatives have typically begun with piles of paperwork and then have taken months or years to reach completion, often to suffer from frustrating quality issues.
To address its ongoing challenges, DTCA began moving toward a Lean approach and also started applying Scrum practices. These first steps toward an Agile way of working did help but were not enough to achieve goals such as improving delivery times and elevating quality.
SAFe: A Path to Delivering Value
In the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®), DTCA found a method for achieving agility at scale—and long-sought results.
“To deliver more value, we knew that projects and teams needed to be aligned more effectively, and we believed the shift to SAFe would help us get there,” explained Mark Braam, IT Manager/RTE, Interaction Services at DTCA.
The Tax Allowances division, which handles tax credits and benefits for health care, rent, and childcare, began first. Per the SAFe Implementation Roadmap, they provided role-based training to virtually all Agile Release Train (ART) members, relying on an independent Certified SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) for training and coaching.
Early on, managers and team members sceptically viewed the effort and the time they would need to dedicate to training and planning events. Ultimately, they had to trust that pulling 140 people into an event for two days every 12 weeks would pay off in the end—and it did. The first ART began delivering business value during the first PI.
“Before SAFe, we released our software twice a year, with all the fixed requirements and the changes on these requirements during the development phase,” recalled Ramzi Barkoudah, Release Train Engineer (RTE) of the Tax Allowances ART. “But now we are releasing every four weeks. Seeing those benefits helped gain the support of the business and the leadership of the company.”
As one example, every year, tax allowances, which have been granted in advance, are calculated and extended based upon the determined annual income of each citizen. This massive process involves allowances for millions of citizens. In the past, DTCA could implement changes in this process only once or twice a year. With a major investment in the delivery pipeline and improving the delivery process by implementing SAFe, the organization now makes changes to the process in small batches, releasing changes every four weeks.
Progress in the Tax Allowances ART inspired the Interaction Services division to make the leap as well. Going ‘by the book,’ they asked everyone joining the first ART to go through role-based training, approximately 140 people.
When it was time for the first Program Increment (PI) Planning event, team members arrived excited and optimistic. They quickly saw the impact the Framework brought as the number of risks on the Program Board grew to 100. Identifying those risks allowed teams to resolve them together, one by one, and to categorize each before moving on to set PI objectives.
IT/Business Collaboration = More On-Target Products
In a culture of such ingrained practices, DTCA has had to educate team members and Product Owners continuously on the value of spending time in PI Planning, and to prove that SAFe delivers better results than traditional project management.
Siebren Biesma, Process Director for Supervision in Interaction Services, has spent nearly 35 years at DTCA. With SAFe, he has seen new ways of working replace long-held practices.
Before, Biesma’s team would spend months writing plans for projects with occasional interaction with him. Then, IT teams would go away to work on the project—often for at least a year.
Today, Biesma remains engaged from the start. “With SAFe, as a Business Owner, I’m always participating,” he explained. “The RTE asks a number of questions and I need to explain loudly and clearly what I want. It forces me to be prepared and prioritize what’s most important.”
Biesma stresses that relentless involvement, from PI to PI, not only creates a more on-target product, but builds in flexibility to make adjustments along the way. Product Ownership continuously informs the development process—ensuring that the final product meets their needs and that funds are allocated in the right areas. While budgeting itself hasn’t changed, transparency regarding the budget has.
“In PI planning events, I get a better understanding how much we’re spending and if it’s on the right things,” Biesma added.
Biesma and fellow decades-long colleagues have noticed a significant cultural shift; they clearly know who is doing what, and collaborate and discuss more than before. Such collaboration has led to tighter alignment between the business and IT, which Willy Rovers, Managing Director of IT, says is one of the biggest benefits of SAFe use in government organisations.
“To maintain optimal alignment with societal and market changes, the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration’s processes must be continuously and short-cyclically adjusted,” Rovers said. “Business and IT use SAFe to be able to realize and implement the required IT facilities quickly and predictably.”
Braam gives credit to the teams for self-organizing, increasing their engagement. Train leaders asked 100 people to assign themselves to one of the teams, with each team comprising seven to nine people. They provided guidelines around the composition of each team, such as the ratio of junior to senior people.
“We stepped aside and let people self-organize instead of management telling them where to go,” Braam said. “After a week, we only had to ask about 10 people to move to other teams. It was quite a victory for us.”
Technical Debt Down 80 Percent
DTCA continues to run two large ARTs (125+), with four Value Streams (one in Tax Allowances and three in Interaction Services). In fact, DTCA follows a hybrid way of working where every department can choose either SAFe or a more ‘traditional’ project management-oriented way of working, depending on what fits best. The organization has driven notable results across the two ARTs and within a few smaller ARTs:
More frequent releases – Major releases come out 3X more often, from 4 to 12 in a year.
Improved software quality/technical debt – DTCA improved quality by reducing the number of ‘problems’ by 80 percent, and security issues by 87 percent (Interaction Services).
Less management overhead – The number of people with the word ‘manager’ in their titles dropped in half. These individuals moved into other roles.
Increased engagement – People are more engaged, connected with each other, and willing to help others.
“We are delivering faster and more predictably than in the past, which has changed many minds and driven a culture shift in long-ingrained ways of working,” Braam said. “And we expect even more progress as we move ahead on current objectives such as continuous deployment and release on demand.”
Training At-a-Glance
The organization trained more than 250 people across multiple SAFe courses:
