Specialization: Services

SproutLoud

SproutLoud - A Case Study of Agile Planning with SAFe

“SAFe helped us with a magic formula to bring alignment across all teams at an enterprise level, which we struggled to achieve previously. Scalability, visibility, predictability, and most importantly alignment, have improved drastically in the past year. SAFe has become integral to how we develop, deploy, and deliver our technology to customers. In short, SAFe helped us to re-define and invigorate our product development initiatives”

—Ramesh Nori, SPC, Director of Agile PMO and AGILE Coach

Challenge:

For 10 years, SproutLoud experimented with Scrum and Kanban at scale, but it needed a new approach as its product and infrastructure became more complex.

Industry:

Advertising and Marketing

Solution:

SAFe®

Results:

  • Upgrades on a two-week cycle
  • Higher code quality through continuous delivery
  • Improved collaboration between stakeholders, which resulted in better product definition
  • A focus on value delivery
  • Enhanced alignment between the business and IT
  • A higher priority on innovation and education

Best Practices:

  • Start with training – Train teams and leadership first
  • Assign SAFe roles – Identify roles such as Product Manager, RTE, System Architect, and DevOps. Also identify the Portfolio team and the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in an ART.
  • Start with an ART – Then use Inspect and Adapt techniques to improve

Introduction

SproutLoud launched in 2006 with six people and a vision: to change channel marketing. Since then, the company has done just that, and in turn, has grown to nearly 200 employees.

SproutLoud helps major brands be more successful selling their products through local channels with its platform of software, services, and support.

n 2009, as its client base and product offerings expanded, SproutLoud began experimenting with Lean-Agile practices, including Scrum and Kanban at scale. The very speed of its growth made scaling critical.

Over the next few years, IT leaders tried various sprint lengths and increased the sophistication and size of their efforts, adding story-point estimation, cross-functional teams, and value-based management. While teams embraced some aspects—such as empowering teams to be self-organizing—they resisted others, like day-long planning meetings.

In 2014, when the Florida-based company opened an office in South America, IT leadership knew it was time for a new approach.

“The models we had were not on par with our growth,” explains Ramesh Nori, SPC, Director of Agile PMO and Agile Coach. “As our product became more complex, our infrastructure needed to be more robust, and we had to expand beyond IT. It was time to think about a scaling model to increase predictability, alignment, and performance across the enterprise.”

IT and the business finally align

In mid-2015, a search for scaling models led SproutLoud to the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®). “When we found SAFe, we thought, ‘That’s a perfect match!” Nori said. “It resonated very well with our needs and issues at that time.”

“SAFe addressed our pain points, offered suggestions on allocating resources filling in new roles, and introduced a way to approach distributed decision-making, which we really needed at the time,” adds Anjan Upadhya, CTO.

With backing from the executive team, SproutLoud moved forward quickly with deploying the Framework. Admittedly, nine years of work on Lean-Agile practices eased the transition as many were already familiar with the fundamental concepts.

One individual from SproutLoud headed to SAFe® Program Consultant (SPC) training in Washington, D.C. Following that, teams went through SAFe® for Teams while managers took the Leading SAFe® course.

Even though many stakeholders were not yet certified as SPCs, SproutLoud held its first Program Increment (PI) planning meeting and launched its first Agile Release Train (ART) in 2015. “We began using the Framework immediately in our existing development process, which helped us scale from three to seven teams,” Nori said.

They followed with Inspect and Adapt sessions at the end of each PI—as well as at the end of each sprint—to evolve the product development cycle constantly and adhere to the Framework on an iterative basis.

With the introduction of SAFe, SproutLoud brought together teams and business owners for PIs, creating new alignment between the two groups. “Business owners explained the ask, making requests much clearer for IT teams,” Nori said. “That was really fundamental.”

As SproutLoud brought on over 50 new employees from 2015 to 2018, SAFe helped the company absorb them much more smoothly than before. “With clearly defined roles, the team dynamic became very clear and easy to understand,” Nori said. “Even if we had to reconfigure teams, the Framework kept team members on the same page.”

Overcoming resistance, challenges

With the move to SAFe, SproutLoud team members began the process of becoming familiar with the Framework, adjusting to the new way of working, and over time began to embrace it and see the benefits.

The company also contended with having the right people in the right roles for the Framework to succeed—a key step before the transformation begins. Looking at products in terms of strategic themes, Epics, and Features helped teams work through the transformation.

The fundamental change was with introducing two new teams—the Product team and the Engineering team to help with the business and technical sides of the products to be developed.

“Also, we now have a dedicated product team with a product manager and product owners working to help with artifacts such as Epics, Features, and Stories,” Nori said. “This has helped ease the stress on the system due to poorly defined work items. It is a journey and we are making good strides in the right direction.”

Finally, the company also focuses on maintaining excellent code quality through the continuous delivery cycle. SproutLoud addressed these challenges by offering regular training sessions, along with making changes to the development cycle involving enhanced GIT-automated flows.

SproutLoud - A Case Study of Agile Planning with SAFe

Deploying regular product upgrades

Currently, SproutLoud runs one ART with 10 teams in the company. After about two years of working within SAFe, Nori and Upadhya credit the Framework with providing excellent insights into challenges related to misalignment, lack of prioritization, and lack of Lean-Agile principles at the Portfolio level—which has a direct impact on delivering value to clients.

SproutLoud now deploys upgrades to its platform on a two-week cycle, and clients gain instant access to those innovations. The ultimate goal is to have on-demand releases in place. The SproutLoud team is working diligently toward that goal while fully embracing the Framework and its recommendations.

“Prior to SAFe, large batch releases stressed the system as a whole, not including the downtime effects,” Nori said. “But post-SAFe implementation, we are doing smaller incremental releases, which has helped reduce the system downtime for launches.”

In addition, the Product team is now offering on-demand training to clients and stakeholders on all the new products that were delivered to production.

After many years of trying Lean-Agile practices without SAFe, leaders were pleased to see improvements quickly:

  • The development teams are more empowered and engaged than before with product development initiatives, which is directly attributed to having an exclusive Product team and an Engineering team
  • The emphasis on Agile metrics brought alignment among all tiers of the product development organization as everyone is speaking the same common language
  • The company’s focus is now set on PI objectives, which are directly attributed to value delivered to the clients
  • With a Lean-Agile mindset, innovation is continuous and SproutLoud introduced in-house hackathons
  • SproutLoud formed an exclusive Product Management team with product managers and product owners to help manage the product from concept to final delivery
  • The company formed an exclusive Systems Engineering team with systems architects and engineers to help manage the technical side (enablers) of the product being planned for delivery

SproutLoud also now extends beta access to clients to collect feedback before products hit the market, which contributes to improved quality.

“As a growing company that never took funding, it’s a challenge to adopt the Framework while balancing costs,” Upadhya said. “We worked on changing our mindset first and then getting people into the right roles. We’re still not 100% there with getting ideal roles filled, but we’ve made significant progress—and we’re seeing the results.”

Most importantly, SAFe helped create essential alignment between the business and IT. “SAFe helped us with a magic formula to bring alignment across all teams at the enterprise level, which we were struggling to achieve previously,” Nori said. “Scalability, visibility, predictability, and most importantly alignment, have improved drastically in the past year. SAFe has become integral to how we develop, deploy, and deliver our technology to customers.”

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Australia Post – Implementing SAFe in Delivery Services

“SAFe has really helped bring the organization along its transformation journey. Its real value has been in the way it links strategy with decentralized execution, using metrics to enable a high level of transparency and fact-based decision making to focus on achieving business outcomes.”

–Natalie Field, Head of MyPost Consumer

Challenge:

Effectively deliver solutions that sustain and further enable Australia Post as a trusted services provider, and delight customers with personalized digital products and services.

Industry:

Delivery Services

Results:

  • 100-fold increase in yearly production deployments with 98% cost reduction, enabling iterative product development
  • 400% Agile Release Train productivity increase over 18 months
  • Strong overall delivery predictability of 80%+
  • First-Time Delivery rate improved by 7 percentage points
  • Net Promoter Score rose by 8 points
  • Increased employee satisfaction and engagement

Best Practices:

  • Establish a learning and improvement mindset – Place a primary focus on learning and continuous improvement across all facets of delivery to achieve consistent growth in maturity and effectiveness.
  • Measure outcomes – Enabling a metrics and measurement capability links teams to business strategy and is key to ensuring business outcomes are effectively achieved.
  • Align to DevOps principles – Building a strong technology delivery platform aligned to DevOps principles enables iterative and innovative product
  • Focus on the entire system of work – Build organizational advocacy and sustainability by facilitating change and enablement for shared teams that support and govern Agile Release Trains.

Introduction

Australia Post is Australia’s iconic postal services provider. For 208 years, the organization has been integral to how people and communities connect across Australia. Through a collective workforce of over 50,000 people, Australia Post serves communities, citizens, and businesses, from large corporations to government departments.

Australia Post - Implementing SAFe in Delivery Services

Like many organizations, Australia Post’s business has been disrupted and must transform to adapt to the digital era. Traditional business pillars such as letters are in persistent decline, while the company faces fierce competition, but also immense opportunity with the growth of ecommerce. For Australia Post, that opportunity lies in creating sustainable competitive advantage through trusted relationships between consumers, businesses, and government.

Given these forces, Australia Post needed a new way of working to both sustain and further enable the organization as a trusted services provider, and to delight its customers with personalized digital products and services.

SAFe: Driving Change with Lean Structure and Common Language

Over the past four years, Australia Post has invested in its technology, people, and culture to change the way it works to focus on customer experiences and continuous innovation. To help achieve this agility in business, Australia Post selected and adopted the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) not only as an operating model but as a tool for change. With SAFe, the organization aims to describe, communicate, and build an understanding of how to leverage Lean and Agile principles across the organization.

“The structure and discipline outlined in SAFe have been a powerful way to communicate a different way of working,” says Daniel Fajerman, Head of Digital Engineering. “Using an industry-proven framework offered a strong basis to start the conversation about working differently, providing a common language and consistent base to work off.”

Achieving Sustainable Change

The goal at Australia Post is sustainable, lasting change that fundamentally shifts how the organization approaches and delivers against its strategies. To do so, Australia Post must equip its people with knowledge and the ability to advocate for and be a part of this new way of working.

A broad and comprehensive training and enablement strategy was rolled out across the organization to build experience and maturity. With help from Mark Richards of CoActivation, a Scaled Agile partner, Australia Post trained more than 900 people in Leading SAFe® and SAFe for Teams® courses. This included key roles across executive leadership, within business functions such as finance, risk, architecture, security, marketing and sales, and of course technology leadership and teams.

Australia Post - Implementing SAFe in Delivery Services

From the beginning, Australia Post applied a persistent focus on cadence and synchronization – keys to building alignment and embedding disciplined delivery practices across diverse teams. With all of Australia Post on the same sprint (and then Program Increment) cadence, scaling teams and ultimately forming these into Agile Release Trains (ARTs) became a natural evolution.

Achieving sustainable change focused on four key interrelated areas of emphasis across the organization:

  • Cross-functional, long-running teams – Moving from transient project teams to cross-functional, long-running teams aligned to customer experiences was a foundational, critical change to the way people work.
  • Culture – Australia Post invested significantly in evolving the culture of the organization to one where curiosity, innovation, and a learning mindset predominate.
  • Technology enablement – Beyond cultural and process changes, improving delivery flow and time-to-value requires an effective build pipeline and deployment infrastructure aligned to DevOps principles.
  • System of work – Implementing a new way of working spans well beyond delivery teams to every part of the organization that supports the delivery of business initiatives. The change team worked closely with shared services groups to tailor approaches to enable and meet their needs under the Framework, including new innovative funding and governance models.

This multi-pronged approach formed sustainable building blocks for change and enablement. With the goal of implementing Agile Release Trains (ARTs), the early focus was on long-running teams and culture to allow maturity to build and grow. The greatest traction came with the advocacy and leadership of business sponsors and leads, who understood the increased business opportunity and had confidence in the delivery model.

MyPost Consumer – Creating a Platform for Personalized Services

Australia Post - Implementing SAFe in Delivery Services

Today, five ARTs now support Australia Post’s value streams and associated enterprise strategies. One of those trains, the MyPost Consumer ART, sits within Australia Post’s Consumer market segment value stream. Established in 2015 to play a significant role in the shift toward customer centricity, MyPost Consumer is creating an omni-channel platform to offer personalized services to customers. The train’s primary focus: the parcel delivery experience, which sits at the heart of Australia Post’s business.

The train is made up of 110 cross-functional roles, with each team responsible for specific components of the parcel delivery experience. As a multi-channel, multi-technology program, only 30% of features are purely digital. The most impactful features require changes to multiple channels and enterprise technology systems.

“Getting the job done right is about focusing as much on how we work together, as what we are working on,” says Natalie Field, Head of MyPost Consumer. “We know there are many unknowns in achieving our program strategy and we don’t, and won’t, always get it right. However we also know that by respecting each other, and staying committed to rapid learning cycles, we will always come up with great solutions. “

The train has achieved strong outcomes over the past couple of years. Australia Post attributes the success of the train to several pillars:

Create a customer-centric culture
Building a customer-centric culture meant creating an environment that empowers the entire team to make fact-based, data-driven decisions and equipping everyone to be advocates for the customer experience.

Focus on metrics to drive business outcomes
A strong focus on measurement has resulted in significant positive impact across the organization’s primary success measures. To help achieve this outcome, teams are equipped with technology tools and the ability to collect and report on data. This empowers teams to learn fast about in-market feature performance and make changes when necessary. The result is a data-driven approach to how the train identifies, prioritises, implements, and learns from each Program Increment.

Improve continuously for greater predictability and performance
Success of the train hinges on an ability to improve continuously and focus relentlessly on evolving the experience to meet customer needs. The train adapts and responds to market demands, continually improving technology capabilities to advance the business across its digital channel, retail stores, delivery network, and call centre.

Raising Satisfaction and Throughput, with Lower Cost

A strong focus on measurement and learning to maximize business outcomes resulted in significant positive impact:

  • Improved first-time delivery – The First-Time Delivery rate jumped by 7 percentage points over 12 months.
  • Reduced cost – Australia Post reduced its infrastructure costs by 98%.
  • Predictability – The train consistently delivered on 80% or more of its objectives.
  • Customer satisfaction – The Net Promoter Score rose by 8 points over the course of one year.
  • Employee engagement – Employee satisfaction and engagement increased.
  • Industry accolades – The train was voted the Best Customer Centric Project in Australia / New Zealand by the CX Management Conference.
Australia Post - Implementing SAFe in Delivery Services

Australia Post continues to evolve and grow to meet the needs of its business. Its focus on continuous improvement means the organization ever challenges itself to create the next wave of trusted services for its customers.

“SAFe has really helped bring the organization along its transformation journey,” Field says. “Its real value has been in the way it links strategy with decentralized execution, using metrics to enable a high level of transparency and fact-based decision making to focus on achieving business outcomes.”

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Vantiv – Lean-Agile Transformation with SAFe®

“Since beginning our Lean-Agile journey with SAFe, Vantiv has focused its strategic efforts and its execution. We have improved the predictability of product delivery while maintaining high quality, and have become even more responsive to customers—resulting in higher customer satisfaction. And just as important, employee engagement went up over the past year.”

—Dave Kent, Enterprise Agile Coach, Vantiv

Challenge:

Deliver solutions with more sustainable, long-term impact, and do so quickly to stay ahead in a competitive industry

Industry:

Information Technology, Financial Services

Solution:

SAFe® v4.0

Results:

  • In 2015, Vantiv delivered 7 percent more features and capabilities with 9 percent less staff.
  • In response to an internal customer’s request, teams delivered on time—if not ahead of schedule—with a significant positive impact to financial results.
  • Teams delivered on commitments 80 to 100 percent of the time.
  • Year over year, the number of changes in its solutions has doubled, yet the number of quality incidents reported by customers has not increased.

Best Practices:

  • Quarterly Business Reviews—Collaborative meetings keep product teams and the business on the same page.
  • Get experienced help—Agile coaches provided experience and practical examples that made a difference compared to previous efforts.

The partner that made it happen:

See Partner

Introduction

Payment processing leader Vantiv Inc. powers more than $25 billion financial transactions every year, from the largest retailers in the U.S. to your local coffee shop. The company makes payments smarter, faster, and easier by partnering with software companies and technology service firms to embed payments processing in front and back office applications. Its commerce technology integrates into a broad set of point of sale systems, reaching merchants through an extensive partner network of thousands of point-of-sale software developers and value-added resellers.

Vantiv - Scaled Agile Business Solutions with SAFe

The company also offers a comprehensive suite of traditional and innovative payment processing and technology solutions to merchants and financial institutions of all sizes, enabling them to address their payment processing needs through a single provider.

Exceptionally responsive to customers, Vantiv creates many of its solutions specifically for individual organizations. While retaining its renowned enterprise service, the company sought to take a longer-term view by developing solutions to meet the needs of a broader range of its customer base. The goal is to deliver solutions with more sustainable, long-term impact, and do so quickly to stay ahead in a competitive industry.

SAFe: For Consistency and Continuous Improvement

In 2015, Vantiv embarked on several business transformation initiatives under a common umbrella called True North. True North seeks to create a culture of clarity, direction, and continuous improvement; and rewire the company for excellence in product, IT, marketing, and strategy.

For an objective view, Vantiv brought in a well-respected thought leader in product management and product development. The consultant made two key recommendations: take a more holistic view with a product-led strategy, and pursue a Lean-Agile approach for product development across the enterprise. At that time, there were pockets of Scrum within IT.

To address both those goals, the company started a Lean-Agile transformation of its entire enterprise, however, momentum was hindered by a lack of focus on people and teams and little understanding of Agile. For help, Vantiv turned to Scaled Agile Gold Partners, CA Technologies and Icon Technology Consulting, along with the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) for the structure and methodology needed to deploy Lean-Agile practices.

“To be successful with Agile, we realized that we needed a more concerted effort at the team level and more consistency in how we deliver,” says Henry Noble, Program Director, Transformation. “We found SAFe the ideal framework for achieving that.”

1000+ SAFe Users

With the help of their partners, Vantiv held a series of “Agile Awareness” roadshows around the company’s various locations. They answered questions and encouraged employees to talk about past Agile efforts.

Next, Vantiv employees attended a 2-week formation program with an introduction to Lean-Agile practices and tools. Dedicated coaches worked daily with the group that ultimately formed into seven teams. They began working in two-week sprints, but held off on forming their first Agile Release Train (ART) until they were ready to fully embrace the new way of working.

Though initially hesitant, teams soon embraced with the new approach. “The biggest misunderstanding that developers had was that if you’re Agile you’re fluid,” Noble says. “But they soon learned there is quite of bit of structure required to be successful.”

Teams soon became more engaged, and after 6-8 weeks teams had matured enough to be ready to assemble an ART. For the first Program Increment (PI) planning meeting, in June of 2015, the event brought together 150 people.

“We see a common pattern where the first PI event for each newly formed train feels like they’re not ready, but post PI event every participant says it’s one of the best planning meetings they have ever attended,” Noble says.

From there, Vantiv’s Agile maturity accelerated with multiple Agile Release Trains containing multiple teams and all of the enterprise leveraging the SAFe framework.

Vantiv - Scaled Agile Business Solutions with SAFe

Collaborative Quarterly Reviews

Part of the transformation required improved alignment between business goals and product development.

“Our quarterly business reviews were a great opportunity to provide greater transparency and feedback, and demonstrate how the whole organization adjusts and collaborates to help address customer needs,” says Dave Kent, Enterprise Agile Coach at Vantiv. “Participation in this strategic planning by all stakeholders not only helps with product leadership, but also shows how powerful it is when product and IT strategy are aligned.”

Gains in Every Area

Eighteen months after deploying SAFe, the company has measured improvements:

Productivity

In 2015, Vantiv delivered seven percent more features and capabilities with nine percent less manpower. “We can comfortably say we’re delivering more capabilities with less staff while going through a transformation at the same time,” Noble says. “We do more with less by eliminating waste and focusing on core functionality.”

Time to Market

Vantiv has met its goal of becoming more focused on product delivery—creating innovative solutions ahead of market demand.

Predictability

At the ART level, teams delivered on commitments 80 to 100 percent of the time by focusing on incremental delivery and listening to the stakeholders’ feedback.

“To continue to stay ahead of the market, we focused on our responsiveness and predictability, resulting in firm commitments to our customers and providing transparency to the organization,” says Henry Noble, Program Director, Transformation at Vantiv.

Quality

Year over year, the number of changes to its solutions has doubled, yet the number of quality incidents reported by customers has not increased. “Our quality continues to improve, with quality now being built in from the smallest pieces,” Kent says.

Employee Engagement and Retention

With greater transparency comes more trust and employee engagement, making for a real culture change. That led to a decrease in attrition over the past two years, and Vantiv has been voted Best Place to Work in Cincinnati.

“SAFe provides alignment and transparency,” Kent says. “Individuals feel like they truly understand their part in the whole, and how their work aligns with the goals of the company.”

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