Industry: Information Technology

Q&A: An Interview with China Construction Bank Supply Chain Financial Company (CCBSCF) About Their Successful SAFe Transformation

“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?

  1. 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.
  2. 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. 
  3. 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.
  4. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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. 

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Audinate: Powers Predictability and Growth with SAFe®

“You don’t have to be a large organization to take on SAFe®. You can apply enough of the Framework in a sensible enough way to have real benefits, real positive benefits. We are proof of that.”

—Chris Ware, Senior VP of Product Development at Audinate

Industry:

IT, Audio-video Networking

Quick Facts:

  • Audinate started the SAFe® journey with product management and engineering, training 40 people in an offsite location. Soon they grew to more than 100 people practicing SAFe successfully over 14 PIs. 
  • They brought in a SAFe Fellow/SPCT to support the transformation. 
  • They kicked off quickly with training first half of the week, and their first PI Planning the second half of the week
  • Adopted SAFe in a flexible, non-prescriptive matter to meet their specific needs

Audinate’s advice to those considering SAFe:

  • Share PIP backlog preparation to increase transparency and buy-in
  • Allow teams and ARTs to self-manage
  • Always look for innovation opportunities to increase iteration effectiveness
  • Focus on the development of Agile culture in the ARTs

Outcomes

“After implementing SAFe, we scaled the size of our product development team by a factor of 3 over a period of 2 years. During that time, we added two international development locations, and have just added a third development location in addition to our Sydney head office. Today we have over 100 employees trained in and using SAFe.”  

—Chris Ware, Senior VP of Product Development at Audinate

“As you grow, you get to a point where you can’t really just rely on a small number of talented people to hold everything together… We had plans to grow. We’ve been growing very strongly, 30 percent every year for the past five or six years, and we had a particular moment where we decided we were going to double the size of our engineering and product making function. And we just knew at that time that there was no way we could continue to do it in an organic fashion.

The other thing that was really important was to not waste people’s time and money in business. Wasting money is a very ‘management’ thing to worry about. But also I think there is a people element. Most people don’t want to build things that are then thrown away. The only thing you can’t get back in life is time. And so, it was important to be able to make sure that our people were spending time developing things that are really of use and are going to be used and meet the customer’s needs”  

—Aidan Williams, CEO and Co-Founder of Audinate

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Tracasa Instrumental is Modernizing Justice with SAFe®

“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.”

—Javier Laínez, Avantius SAFe Release Train Engineer, Tracasa Instrumental

Challenge:

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 building

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.”

Learn More

Tracasa Instrumental – Avantius – Justice Management System: PIP (Program Increment Planning) on YouTube.

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.

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An Oracle Success Story: How a Mission-critical Cloud Migration Brought the Business and IT Together

When your CEO sponsors a strategic initiative to replace a core system in just two years, the pressure to deliver is enormous.

When your CEO sponsors a strategic initiative to rip and replace a core system in just two years, the pressure to deliver is enormous. To add to the challenge, the migration would have to be a hard cutover from the old system to the new; there was just no way to run two systems simultaneously.

This is what the teams at Oracle’s Application Labs (OAL) were faced with when they were tasked with migrating their entire Order-to-Revenue system from on-premise to the Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP.  It’s well known that only a fraction of cloud migrations get completed on time, and even fewer deliver all the value that was hoped for. The Oracle teams were determined that this wasn’t going to be their story. 

SAFe was adopted to handle the scale and complexity of the work and to provide an engagement model that would help keep the teams connected, engaged, and aligned with each other and with the business. SAFe would also help Oracle’s thinking evolve from a project to product mindset.

The goals were ambitious, and with the addition of a new way of working, there was no shortage of skeptics. Transformation leaders took a light-handed approach to help people get comfortable with the process and slowly build trust. They’d say, “Hey, try this out, we are only going to use it for two weeks, then we can adjust.” This approach ultimately paid off in big ways.

The migration took place as planned over a summer weekend in 2021, which was, by itself, an enormous win for the OAL teams. There were bonus benefits as well. The product was better than anticipated with improvements in order productivity, velocity, data quality, and usability, as well as automation.

Perhaps the most profound effect is that their sense of identity has changed. It’s no longer IT vs. the business; it’s all one organization. From the CEO’s office to the EVP of Fusion Product Development to OAL’s leadership, there is alignment from strategy to execution. As Oracle’s VP of Global Quote to Order Operations, Maninder Bedi said, “We are working together. We became one.”

Presented at the 2022 SAFe Summit

About Oracle:

Oracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit oracle.com.

Fred IT Delivers Timely e-Prescription Solution with SAFe®

“e-Prescribing is probably the biggest example of a SAFe outcome for Fred IT. It was a real shake-up, quite transformative for our whole industry. And we were the leaders and able to pull it off!”

—Zoe Walters, Product Manager

Challenge:

Siloed development and a need to meet rapidly changing demands proved challenging for a business whose product suite is an end-to-end solution.

Industry:

Pharmaceutical, IT

Results:

  • Faster time-to-market
  • Predictability improved to 82%
  • Bugs decreased by 50%
  • Backlog reduced from 160 support items to under 20
  • Improved top-down engagement with the stakeholders

Best Practices:

  • Train leadership – Fred IT trained the executive leadership team first, which helped drive complete business transformation
  • Train extensively – most people within the company have completed an average of two courses, including everyone in the leadership team, all the way to the CEO
  • Get expert help – Pretty Agile had an engagement with Fred that went beyond initial training. Their consultants were embedded to support continuous improvement and provide team guidance through more advanced practices up to PI6 results

The Partner that Made it Happen

See Partner

Introduction

Fred IT Group is Australia’s largest provider of pharmacy IT solutions servicing more than 3000 pharmacies. The company was launched out of a deep commitment to the role of technological leadership in improving patient outcomes whilst making it easier and more efficient for health professionals to run their businesses.

Building an end-to-end solution in a siloed work culture

Over the years, Fred IT used a mix of Agile and Waterfall methodologies. However, neither approach addressed the need to respond quickly to continually changing demands or the siloed development approach across their teams.

e-Prescription Solution with SAFe®

“If you were in a team for a specific product, there was limited cross-over and discussion with other teams. Sharing of knowledge across products was ad-hoc and team members were often only expected to be skilled on one product,” says Fred IT product manager, Zoe Walters.

This was a problem for a business whose product suite is an end-to-end solution. “All of the products in our suite are fully integrated,” says Walters. “But our approach made it difficult to do this well. For example, a dispensary and back-office product might have the same reports. But, because they were developed in isolation, they were inconsistent in looks and the data captured and reported on. It was the same company, solution and report—but two different outputs.”

To transform their way of working and harmonize the development of their product suite, Fred decided to adopt SAFe®.

Training leaders first leads to early wins

With the help of Scaled Agile Transformation Partner, Pretty Agile, Fred started training people in 2018 with a goal of launching SAFe in 2019. The new initiative primarily included people from Product and Engineering, with HR, Finance, Security, and Infrastructure teams supporting the operational and strategic work. They decided to train leadership first, and then move to development teams. This approach quickly paid off. “Getting the executive leadership team in a Leading SAFe® class was regarded as a key success factor for Fred and is one of those things that made a difference to them,” says Pretty Agile founder, Em Campbell-Pretty.

“Getting the executive leadership team in a Leading SAFe® class was regarded as a key success factor for Fred and is one of those things that made a difference to them.”

Em Campbell-Pretty, Founder, pretty agile

As soon as the teams began planning and collaborating through SAFe practices, the organization experienced a noticeable difference. “The impact on prioritization was a massive eye-opener,” observed Walters. “It no longer became a matter of who screamed loudest determining what got done first, but making better decisions based on business value and impact based on the effort required. We knew in theory that it would happen, but to see it happen in reality was interesting. It became clear what needed to happen first, and made us examine the business reasoning behind it, and document and capture features and expected outcomes so we had a yardstick to measure what we’d achieved.”

One method that Fred IT uses in this decision-making process is to assess each feature/epic against the strategic investment, tech debt, maintenance, and other costs to the business. They then decide how they want to distribute that work across each PI. These guardrails allow the Lean Portfolio Manager (LPM) to manage the train capacity dedicated to each area.

 Taking the market lead in times of COVID

Adopting SAFe made a business-critical difference for Fred when COVID-19 hit Australia. Due to government mandates, citizens could not visit their doctors, so the pressure was on Fred to quickly deliver an e-Prescription solution

“COVID fast-tracked the forward momentum of the Australian e-Health industry,” says Walters. “Critically, conversations we’d been having about moving from paper prescriptions to electronic scripts for several years became concrete projects that needed to be delivered urgently.”

Already mid-way through launching a new dispense product, Fred needed to pivot its attention to successfully delivering a second product which would result in significant changes in deadlines.

“We had plans and extensive roadmaps for the dispense product in place, and the teams were already locked in,” says Walters. “But with SAFe, we could quickly and effectively change tack to deliver the e-Prescription product, despite the huge list of requirements.”

e-Prescription Solution with SAFe®

“SAFe enabled us to estimate the effort and time required, form teams, align them to the work, show the business how we’d achieve delivery, and then go ahead,” added Walters. “Using our previous approach, we’d have had no capability or ability to manage that. Instead, we would have just had a pile of work to chip away at—and hope for the best.”

“SAFe enabled us to estimate the effort and time required, form teams, align them to the work, show the business how we’d achieve delivery, and then go ahead.”

Zoe Walters, Product Manager

Practicing SAFe, the organization became more efficient and effective. They improved planning and road mapping with the Program Increment (PI) cycles and had transparency across the teams. Walters added, “As a result, they were able to plan and deliver last-minute changes to requirements and meet those fast-tracked milestones. So, it enabled us to get two different sustainable products up and running fast!”

Significant business outcomes

Fred has realized myriad benefits from adopting the SAFe way of working, from product development and delivery to cultural shifts:

  • Faster time-to-market: “e-Prescribing is probably the biggest example of a SAFe outcome for Fred IT,” says Walters. “It was a real shake-up, quite transformative for our whole industry. And we were the leaders and able to pull it off! Perhaps we could have done it without SAFe, but it would have been high risk, and supporting and maintaining the system would have been difficult. But with SAFe, we succeeded.”
  • Predictability: After several PIs, Fred achieved an average of 82% predictability on features and enablers.
  • Improvements in quality: SAFe introduced a big shift in the ownership of quality. Prior to SAFe, one person with a quality assurance title would attempt to address quality issues at the end of the development cycle. With SAFe, the entire team took ownership, and quality became embedded in the process. That approach paid off. Based on customer feedback, the quality of Fred’s products has dramatically improved and introduced bugs have dropped more than 50%.
  • Backlog reduction: Fred’s support backlog has also been significantly impacted. “We had an overall backlog of around 160 support items that needed to be reduced, and that number just never seemed to go down,” says Walters. “After a few PIs, the backlog dropped to under 20. It was a massive reduction.”
  • Cultural Shifts: “Since adopting SAFe, I feel like Fred’s a more collaborative place than before,” says Walters. “Our teams are more integrated, and there are stronger relationships between them because they’re part of every activity and process. We are sharing more, so we all know more about what’s happening across the business – and with more transparency. People are putting up their hands to help get projects across the line. We’ve become more understanding and supportive. That has been a big step forward for us as a company.”

“We’ve become more understanding and supportive. That has been a big step forward for us as a company.”

Zoe Walters, Product Manager

A transformative way of working

The SAFe way of working has significantly impacted the way Fred’s teams communicate, and it has improved their ability to adapt and pivot, manage quality standards, and coordinate the flow of work.

“Every single person at Fred IT who is using the SAFe way of working agrees that the transparency of the work and the ability to adapt quickly to changes in the market and be more agile is certainly tenfold,” says Walters.

“The difference now is that we have regular stand-ups together and can coordinate work across the board. So, for example, if we need a field change on Fred Dispense and the back-office report, the conversation is out in the open and can be planned and coordinated. It’s a massive improvement on past processes.”

The new visibility and transparency are also having an effect on future development work. Many of Fred’s government initiatives involve two different products, and one team might start before the other. With SAFe, the first team now shares all their learnings with the next team before they start. It allows for a much smoother approach and typically helps the teams avoid any potential issues.

“We now have predictability of our estimates,” says Walters. “We know how fast work can be achieved, which we didn’t know before. Previously we could only estimate delivery/release dates and resource requirements.

“SAFe was also a big shift in the team ownership of quality. Rather it being the responsibility of one person who landed the quality assurance title, it became embedded in the process – and has become a focus.

“Having SAFe processes in place means that everyone now knows what will happen each week, each month, and in each cycle.”

Summary

With the help of SAFe, Fred IT successfully overcame the challenges associated with developing a critical, time-sensitive end-to-end ePrescription solution, despite existing commitments. Previously siloed teams worked together with transparency and collaboration, and the product was successfully delivered despite significantly abbreviated timelines and a plethora of on-the-go changes to requirements.

e-Prescription Solution with SAFe®

Training At-a-Glance

Says Walters, “The enthusiasm for SAFe training is such that most people average a minimum of two courses. Tom Boswell, Enterprise Agile Coach and Release Train Engineer, added, “We’re very proud of where we got to with SAFe training. All of our leadership team—right up to the CEO—trained, which is unusual in my experience. It shows that they understood the value of investing in SAFe. We now have the capabilities to provide SAFe training and certification internally but continue to be supported by Pretty Agile for advanced courses.”

PI Planning
PI Planning at Fred IT
PI Planning
Kaizen dragon at Fred IT PI Planning

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NTT DATA – Adopting SAFe for Business Agility Improvement

Customer Story – NTT DATA: Japanese Payment Services Leader Transforms Organizational Culture and Improves Business Agility with SAFe

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NTT DATA brings the first Japanese customer story to the SAFe Summit audience. Headquartered in Tokyo and operating in more than 50 countries as a top 10 global IT services provider, NTT Data turned to SAFe to improve its ability to respond to market demands and stay ahead of a growing number of competitors. In his presentation, Product Manager Takenori Osada describes the difficulty of introducing Agile in Japan, how their culture transformed, and how they applied SAFe in their Payments Services Division and were able to see significant improvements in employee Net Promoter Scores, time-to-market, productivity, and quality.

SAFe is essential for us to be able to compete in the payment market. This resulted in an investment cost advantage.” —Director (Business owner)

Presented at the Global SAFe Summit, October, 2020.

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Cerno – SAFe Adoption to Become a Total Agile Enterprise

“We collaborate more than ever with our customers by involving them in planning as much as we can. And we deliver frequent demos—even beyond customers’ expectations. Our customers have found communication to be more effective since the SAFe implementation.”

—Sam Wu, Agile Head Coach and Training Director, Cerno

Challenge:

Deliver custom solutions faster and with higher quality for clients.

Industry:

Information Technology, Software

Results:

  • Delivery cycle time dropped by 58%
  • The rate of release failure went down from 0.6 times on average per release to 0
  • The interface automation level increased from zero to 70 percent
  • Reported defects decreased from 13 times per release to five

Best Practices:

  • Power through setbacks – Find solutions and don’t let them stop your momentum.
  • Assess regularly – Inspect & Adapt and DevOps health checks keep teams aware of progress and on track toward goals.
  • Choose a compatible partner – A partner with a business view, not just R&D, moved Cerno ahead with training and coaching.

Introduction

As a custom software factory, Cerno is poised for rapid growth as part of China’s expansive technology market. The company delivers technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, open source software, and IoT solutions for a diverse range of clients, from logistics to government.

Cerno - SAFe Implementation for IT

To compete effectively, Cerno set out to elevate the speed of delivery, reduce defects, and improve the quality of its solutions in the long term, with the ultimate objective of being more client-focused.

“We needed a next-generation software development method to meet customer needs and reach our goals,” explained Sam Wu, Agile Head Coach and Training Director, Cerno.

Cerno’s founders brought experience in developing software for the financial industry. They found the ‘weak matrix’ structure worked in HR outsourcing, but not so well in product delivery. (A weak matrix is an organizational structure in which the balance of power tilts decisively in the direction of line or functional management.)

And while the traditionally waterfall company had experimented with Lean-Agile development in the past, they lacked the training or business support to build momentum.

SAFe®: The Path from Strategy to Delivery

While attending Leading SAFe® training, a Cerno executive saw a promising path to Agile, leading Cerno to adopt the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe). “It was clear that we needed SAFe to make Cerno a total Agile enterprise, to expand Agile not only to product lines but also to the business and functional departments such as HR and finance,” explained Liu Yilei, VP, Cerno. “We saw SAFe as the model that would take us from strategy to delivery.”

“SAFe provided a comprehensive toolkit and an easy way to move forward,” added Wu, who was hired at that time to lead the effort as the internal change agent. At the same time, the company brought in SAFe Gold partner Aura International for coaching and training.

Per the SAFe Implementation Roadmap, James Li, Principal Consultant from Aura, led the SAFe Executive Workshop. Jack Xu, Senior Consultant from Aura, delivered SAFe® for Teams training and helped prepare for the first Program Increment (PI) planning event. They organized teams, reconfigured the office to better support those teams, and reorganized the product plan with user-story mapping.

For the first Agile Release Train launch, they began with four Agile teams—the entire R&D team plus Infrastructure and Operations—on an existing initiative to digitalize a logistics solution for a client.

From that first PI, team leaders embraced the Lean-Agile mindset. They identified priorities based on business value and began allowing people to self-organize. Instead of waiting to be assigned work, developers identified the work based on business objectives, committed to the work in PI Planning, and moved forward with it.

Though Cerno set out to follow SAFe by the book, they ran into roadblocks that forced mid-course adjustments. In middle of the first PI, the Systems Architect left, leading Cerno to assemble a team to assume his responsibilities.

Additionally, the customer cut some funding because of market forces. And when managers wanted to move some teams to another client project, it nearly stopped the train. Given technical and capacity challenges, Cerno chose to postpone 15 percent of the high-risk PI objectives and scale back the size of the train.

Developers also found it challenging to transition from private to public code, a decision made to reduce bottlenecks in bug fixes and hidden technical debt. As the project team transitioned away from three-week waterfall development, the coaching team helped set code standards. In time, they found that developers took more pride in their code because of its public nature.

Even with the early challenges, the Inspect and Adapt session after the first PI showed the teams had met PI objectives and reduced defects. The ART could produce 45 stories per two-week iteration, on average, by the end of the first PI, compared to 30 stories per three-week iteration in waterfall.

Routine DevOps Health Checks

When Cerno first introduced DevOps practices, the company lacked a SAFe DevOps Practitioner. Still, they made progress on a delivery pipeline and staging environment, supported a grayscale release of a product, and shortened the time to release future versions.

Additionally, they formed a new system integration testing (SIT) plan that shrunk testing time by 25 percent initially, and then by half, freeing the development team to put more effort into new features.

To expedite progress, they began conducting DevOps health checks. Early on, those checks uncovered opportunities to improve delivery. To stay on track, they now perform this exercise every PI. With the habit of regular checks, Cerno has made strides with automated testing and continuous integration/continuous deployment.

To support their efforts, they also established Communities of Practice and hold monthly technical workshops for developers.

Cerno - SAFe Implementation for IT

Delivery Cycle Time Down 58 Percent

Today, Cerno runs two ARTs with 80 people. These high-confidence teams agree on, and begin working on, requirements faster. They communicate and collaborate more tightly than before they introduced SAFe and are continuously improving.

When the ART completed work with one client, they simply switched the train to support another logistics client with a similar solution—effectively a plug-and-play release train. The company then added a second ART to deliver value to another client. Each train continues to serve a single client.

To date, Cerno has made remarkable progress:

  • Delivery cycle time dropped from 3½ weeks to two weeks, or 58 percent
  • The average offline time for a new production environment release decreased from 3½ hours to half an hour
  • The rate of release failure went down from 0.6 times on average per release to 0
  • The interface automation level increased from zero to 70 percent
  • Reported defects decreased from 13 times per release to five

Most importantly, Cerno realized its goal of becoming a more customer-centric organization.

“We collaborate more than ever with our customers by involving them in planning as much as we can. And we deliver frequent demos—even beyond customers’ expectations,” Wu said. “Our customers have found communication to be more effective since the SAFe implementation.”

“This is the first SAFe transformation case I have coached in a local company in China,” Li said. “Although there’s still more to improve, it is really a great and wonderful start! It is a significant milestone for SAFe in China.”

Looking ahead, Cerno is building toward agility beyond solution delivery, into administrative management and marketing—to become a total Agile enterprise.

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Murex – Deploying Agility at Scale in Financial Software Using SAFe

Murex - SAFe Implementation for Financial Software

“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.”

Murex - Deploying Agility at Scale in Financial Software Using SAFe

Pursuing Continuous Delivery the SAFe® Way

Low angle photography curtain wall buildings

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.”

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Cisco IT – Adopting Agile Development – A SAFe Case Study

Cisco - SAFe for Agile development

“Continuous delivery improved quality, increased productivity, and improved the employee experience.”

—Ashish Pandey, Technical Lead, CSIT Team

Challenge:

Cisco wanted to shift away from waterfall, and replace periodic major releases with continuous delivery of new features.

Industry:

Information Technology, Telecommunications

Results:

Cisco achieved significant improvements by using SAFe on two major projects:

  • 16% drop in the defect rejected ratio (DRR)
  • 40% decrease in critical and major defects
  • 14% increase in defect removal efficiency (DRE)
  • Improved employee satisfaction by eliminating the need for after-hours work and reducing meetings/calls
  • 25 percent fewer quality assurance defects
  • Sprints that ran more efficiently each subsequent time

Best Practices:

  • Carefully build teams – Build teams with the best members from any location.
  • Assemble the right tools – Cisco realized it could not have conducted regression testing every two weeks without test automation tools.
  • Adjust as needed – For un-integrated or loosely integrated products, features or components, consider eliminating the Program level of SAFe.

Introduction

Cisco IT constantly looks for new ways to go faster and simplify. As part of its digital IT strategy, the Cisco Cloud and Software IT (CSIT) organization wanted to adopt more Agile development as a way to replace periodic major releases with continuous delivery of new features.

Cisco - SAFe Agile development

“Our goals are to speed up releases, increase productivity, and improve quality,” says Ashish Pandey, technical lead for the CSIT team.

Although a few small teams had adopted Agile techniques, waterfall was still the norm for teams that were large, distributed, or working on complex projects.

To solve these challenges, CSIT moved to the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) and immediately began applying scaled Agile practices on two major initiatives: their Subscription Billing Platform, and the Webex app for Samsung tablets..

Cisco® Subscription Billing Platform Challenge

For its Subscription Billing Platform (SBP)—which supports various subscription services—the company originally formed different teams for design, build, test and deploy. In waterfall fashion, each team began work once the previous team had completed their part.

  • The separate tracks bogged down the process
  • Release cycles exceeded three months
  • They got late closure on requirements documents
  • Teams missed delivery dates
  • There were quality issues due to late integration cycles
  • Teams worked long hours to make up for schedule slippage
Cisco - SAFe for Agile development

The Solution

  • On SBP, Cisco launched three Agile Release Trains (ARTs) in 2015: capabilities, defects and fixes, and projects.
  • All three trains worked together to build and test small features within one SaaS component, while regularly delivering tested features to the system integration and testing team.
  • Every day, the delivery team met for 15 minutes and determined action items.

Results – 40% Defect Reduction

Cisco delivered the new release of SBP on time and with all planned capabilities. When the company compared this release to those using waterfall, it found a 16 percent drop in the defect rejected ratio (DRR). Plus, critical and major defects decreased by 40 percent.

Continuous delivery also increased defect removal efficiency (DRE) by 14 percent due to greater collaboration among international teams, and by helping members identify opportunities for improvement during daily meetings.

Cisco - SAFe for Agile development

The CSIT team attributes those quality improvements to several factors:

  • Improving team collaboration and focus
  • Enabling all team members to see current project status, promoting accountability
  • Helping the three teams see beyond their own track
  • Enabling teams to manage themselves

Additionally, the new way of working improved employee satisfaction by eliminating the need for after-hours work and reducing meetings and calls. Employees also saw how they fit into the bigger picture.

WebEx® App for Samsung

Challenge

In early 2014, the application for WebEx Meetings came pre-installed on Android tablets. Leading up to the release, developers had to work quickly to meet the release date, despite frequently changing requirements.

Solution

The team followed an Agile Scrum framework with three sprints for geographic rollout, the first two consisting of three weeks and the last of five weeks.

During planning, Cisco IT and others gathered requirements, and evaluated the readiness of environments, partners, and engineering and marketing teams.
Developers employed extreme programming, including test-driven development, where they first write an automated test case for a new function. Then they produced the minimal amount of code needed to pass the test and then refined code to make it simpler and easier to maintain.

Results – 25% Reduction in Quality Assurance Defects

On the WebEx app, Cisco reduced quality assurance defects by 25 percent. Plus, with developers checking code in several times a day, the business group reviewed new features sooner in the cycle than before. And each sprint ran more efficiently than the last.

Ultimately, Samsung sold more than 35 million tablets with the new app, creating wide exposure for the brand.

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Johnson Controls – Bringing More Engagement by Adopting SAFe

“SAFe brings so much more engagement, which has really been key for all parties. I wouldn’t want to do it any other way.”

—Rajbir Bal, Program Manager, Access Control

Challenge:

JCI’s access control division needed to improve coordination among firmware and software teams across three locations with the goals of improving time-to-market, quality, and engagement.

Industry:

Information Technology

Solution:

SAFe®

Results:

  • The division releases at least 2-4X more frequently than before
  • JCI reduced the size of its bug backlog by at least 3X
  • Access control delivers on its commitments 100 percent of the time
  • Customers/stakeholders appreciate the chance to provide feedback during the process—instead of at the end

Best Practices:

  • Get help – Especially early on, partner with a consultant
  • Train leadership – JCI trained resource managers, product management, and directors to get buy-in before moving forward
  • Train SPCs – They serve as change agents and coaches
  • Follow progress – JCI used automated Agile dashboards in Team Foundation Server

The partner that made it happen:

See Partner

Introduction

Johnson Controls Inc. (JCI), a global diversified technology leader, serves customers in more than 150 countries and reports $30 billion in annual revenue. The company’s access control division develops systems to help buildings achieve maximum security while increasing efficiency and lowering costs.

blue and black city buildings

Developing access control systems demands that firmware and software teams work together to deliver on a coordinated schedule. At JCI, those teams are spread across Southern California, Milwaukee, and India.

In 2014, the division began an effort targeted at improving time-to-market and the predictability of releases. They also sought to identify quality issues sooner, increase transparency, and raise team engagement.

“We were having very little success at agility planning, predicting releases and committing to and delivering on the timeline,” explained David Richter, Director of Engineering, Access Control. “We wanted to increase our flexibility and ability to react to change, and to react to our customer’s needs in a positive and respectful manner.”
But Richter and other change agents knew they would have to contend with several roadblocks along the path to SAFe transformation:

  • Changing the established paradigm of working in waterfall
  • Aligning teams in three disparate locations

Taking the SAFe route

JCI identified the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) as the most promising route for instilling lasting Lean-Agile practices.

“SAFe brought all the practices for us to start and then learn and adapt as we go,” said Rajbir Bal, Program Manager, Access Control. “It also forced us to have tough discussions early and throughout development—versus down the road when we got close to release.”

To gain leadership backing, the Director of Engineering gave decision-makers clear reasons for deploying SAFe and the expected outcomes. Concurrently, Scaled Agile Gold Partner Icon Agility Services trained leaders in Leading SAFe® so they would fully understand the Framework. This worked well as change agents succeeded in securing executive backing.

They followed with Leading SAFe® for directors, product managers, and resource managers, bringing together 15 individuals from California, Milwaukee, and India. Next, they defined the structure of the various teams that would begin the first Agile Release Train (ART), and put all team members through SAFe® for Teams training.

Two individuals, including Bal, earned certification as SAFe® Program Consultants (SPCs) in order to serve as change agents and coaches. Following certification, they became authorized to deliver SAFe® Scrum Master, SAFe for Teams, and SAFe® for Product Owner/Product Manager training.

In addition to Bal, other coaches included engineering managers and the director of engineering, while Scrum Masters became coaches at the team level. When it was apparent that Scrum Masters and Product Owners had an overlap of responsibility, or at least their understanding of it, Bal brought them together in one location for a custom Product Owner/Scrum Master workshop to clarify roles and responsibilities.

Navigating the path to alignment

In 2015, JCI launched its first ART at a Program Increment (PI) Planning meeting with about 100 people and followed Essential SAFe. Bal and others knew they were taking the first steps toward progress, however, early planning events felt chaotic.

“The first two PIs were not fun and we did not come out with committed plans,” Bal said. “Some features were not well defined, people were not clear on the process, and we needed more time to break down user stories.”

Bal attributes the discord to a couple of factors. The company included some user interface teams in that first ART, but not others, which caused misalignment. Geographic distribution also created challenges.

For more cohesive teams, they tried several approaches. First, they brought representatives from India to present on behalf of their teams. However, in doing so, they lacked the voices of those not in attendance.

Instead, they decided to start concurrent planning in the U.S. and India, with India beginning 12 hours ahead due to the time zone differences. As teams in India complete their planning days, those in the U.S. come in early to overlap with them. The Indian teams present their planning via videoconference. The same goes for day two of planning. American teams presented in what was the evening for their Indian counterparts.

Richter notes that, in those early months, JCI attempted to modify the Framework. Only some teams attended training and the company followed three-week sprints. “We tried to make changes to SAFe, but that was a disaster,” he said. “After that experience, we then started following SAFe exactly.”

Group of business people walking in a financial district, long exposure

Many people also insisted on continuing lengthy documentation of functional and design specs, after 50 years of following this practice. But that changed over several PIs. “We realized that documentation is not adding value,” Bal said. “Instead, we switched more to flow diagrams and writing code versus paragraph after paragraph of specs.”

With these tweaks, subsequent PIs progressed more smoothly as everyone became accustomed to the ceremonies and practices of SAFe. They made better use of their time at PI planning events. By the third PI, all teams also joined the train.

Over time, JCI found it more feasible to modify the framework to its own processes. In the access control division, developers must follow a specific process. They found that SAFe allowed them to implement Lean-Agile methods that worked in conjunction with these required processes. Other modifications included concurrent planning for India and the U.S., and face-to-face meetings between Product Owners and Scrum Masters to walk through the features radiator.

Acting like ‘One Big Team’

Richter and Bal saw a number of positive outcomes emerge during the transformation:

  • Increased ownership – Entire teams committed to goals in PI planning and delivered on those goals
  • Less technical debt – Issues were identified earlier in development, which allowed for course corrections along the way, instead of at the end of development
  • Greater participation – All levels joined in, including business partners and architecture
  • Earlier decisions – Using the Lean Startup Cycle, they make go/no-go decisions sooner in the cycle than they had before practicing SAFe
  • More automation – Automation reduced the overhead of testing and corrects quality issues earlier
  • Enhanced transparency – People bring up issues sooner, rather than at the end of a PI
  • Greater teamwork – Inter-team collaboration improved as well, with individuals reaching out to help others when needed

“We started acting like one big team, instead of a bunch of teams of teams,” Bal said. “We saw more engagement at all levels.”

Driving time-to-market, quality, predictability

Two female engineers discussing a project in an industrial office while looking at documents pinned on a glass wall

After early growing pains, JCI began seeing the results of its efforts:

  • Faster time-to-market – The division releases at least 2-4X more frequently than before
  • Higher quality – JCI reduced the size of its bug backlog by at 3 times
  • Predictability – Access control delivers on its commitments 100 percent of the time
  • Customer satisfaction – Customers appreciate the chance to provide feedback during the process—instead of at the end

“This wasn’t an easy process for us,” Bal said. “It takes time getting everyone jelling PI over PI. But SAFe brings so much more engagement, which has really been key for all parties. I wouldn’t want to do it any other way.”

For more details on JCI’s Essential SAFe implementation, download the supplemental PowerPoint presentation.

Download the Case Study Supplement

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