Industry: Telecommunications

Telstra – Adopting SAFe as a Recipe for Success

Industry:

Telecommunications

Overview

Telstra is Australia’s leading provider of mobile phones, mobile devices, home phones and broadband internet. When Telstra’s Enterprise Data Warehouse delivery team began their SAFe Agile journey, they scaled from 1 to 5 teams in a matter of months and found themselves struggling to make the leap from agile projects to an Agile program. “After reading Dean Leffingwell’s Scaling Software Agility and Agile Software Requirements,” notes Mark Richards (Agile Coach) and Em Campbell-Pretty (General Manager, EDW Delivery), “we were inspired to establish Telstra’s first Agile Release Train.” Later, they both followed up with SPC certification to further enhance their knowledge and skills.

Telstra - SAFe Telcom

This presentation, from Agile Australia 2013 in June, covers how SAFe provided a recipe for success, reflecting on how Telstra translated Program-level SAFe theory into practice, transforming not only the delivery capability of the EDW team, but also the culture. Adopting Leffingwell’s Scaled Agile Framework, the Theory and the Practice.

Most importantly, they are getting great business results, including:

  • Average delivery cycle time down from 12 month to 3 months
  • 6X increased in delivery frequency
  • 50% cost to deliver reduction
  • 95% decrease in product defects
  • 100% projects delivered on time and on budget
  • Happy project sponsors
  • Happy teams

As we noted, Em and Mark placed an early emphasis on rapidly evolving the culture that supports Lean-Agile development, and they had some fun with it too, as you can see if you check out the The Power of Haka! on Em’s PrettyAgile blog.

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CSG International – Achieving Lean-Agile Transformation Using SAFe

Lean-Agile Transformation Using SAFe

Sometime after the publication of Scaling Software Agility in 2007, Dean Leffingwell started working with Mauricio Zamora, Scott Prugh (and later Mark Fuller) in a Lean-Agile transformation using SAFe at CSG International. More than 90,000 customer service agents rely on CSG (NASDAQ: CSGS ) customer care and billing solutions each day to support more than 48 million North American video, voice, and data subscribers. The company has been around for over 30 years, and the solutions have evolved during that period such that there are now more than 10 separate technology platforms at work and a significant amount of legacy code. It’s a demanding, extremely complex environment, hosting millions of transactions per day.

Industry:

Information Technology, Customer Service

We began before SAFe was codified into the framework it is today, so at CSG we truly learned together, with Mauricio, Scott, and Mark, all adding value to the conceptualization of SAFe 1.0-2.0 and on.

As SAFe evolved, CSG trained a number of internal SPCs who eventually trained over 2,000 employees using Leading SAFe.

As development practices improved, the system started putting more and more pressure on faster delivery, not just faster development, and Scott Prugh, and others, turned their minds to the DevOps challenge. Along the way, Scott became a contributor to SAFe, as the author of the Continuous Delivery Guidance article.

Fast forward to 2014. At DevOps Enterprise Summit 2014, Scott describes how they have applied SAFe, and more importantly, the Lean and Flow principles that underlie it, to substantially improve productivity and throughput from development through deployment.

If you have ever wondered how, specifically, Lean-Agile principles—like cadence and synchronization, cross-functional teams, visualizing work, backlog management, reducing batch size, synchronized release planning, and more—can increase the quality, throughput, and delivery of large scale software in a seriously complex legacy environment, you have to watch this 20-minute video!

After all, until it’s deployed, all that cool new software doesn’t provide any real value to anyone.

Mauricio helped start Scaled Agile, Inc., and was a principal developer of SAFe

Mauricio “Mo” Zamora
July 23, 1969—November 24, 2011

Mauricio helped start Scaled Agile, Inc., and was a principal developer of SAFe, but tragically, he passed away on Thanksgiving, 2011. His work lives on inside SAFe, where it improves the lives of practitioners every day; that was Mo’s personal mission. We think about Mauricio most every day, and his professionalism, knowledge, passion and integrity still set the standard we all try to adhere to.

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