Tag: Agile at scale

Career Path for Scrum Masters: A 2025 Guide to Growth and Opportunities

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The job market looks different than it did even one year ago. Teams are leaner, AI tools are everywhere, and it seems like job titles are shifting unpredictably. Responsibilities that once sat squarely in well-defined roles now cross into others – especially as some organizations restructure and resize.

During all this change, career researchers are asking a fair question: 

Is a Scrum Master a Good Long-Term Career Path?

Becoming a scrum master is a fulfilling career path, but it requires more than planning and running standups. If you’re looking for long-term growth, you’ll need proof that you can help drive delivery, coach teams, and grow with the tools and structures around you.

Despite the changes happening across industries and technology, demand is still strong for those with the right skills.

Scrum Master Career Highlights in 2025

  • Tenure: Most scrum masters stay in an entry or junior level role for 2–4 years before moving into senior roles or broader Agile coaching functions.
  • Open roles: Thousands of companies are hiring for career scrum masters right now, especially in industries like healthcare, finance, and defense. 
  • Salary: U.S. average salaries for scrum masters in 2025 range from $105K to $140K, depending on location, industry, and experience.

Best Prior Roles to Transition into a Scrum Master Career

You don’t need to come from a traditional tech background to pursue a scrum master career path. Some of the best scrum experts bring experience from adjacent roles where communication, coordination, and delivery are critical.

Here are a few types of roles from which scrum master experts commonly transition:

Project Managers

Project managers are already comfortable with planning, risk management, and stakeholder communication. Many have experience juggling timelines and unblocking teams, which maps well to the scrum master’s focus on delivery and flow.

Business Analysts

Business analysts are fluent in data and skilled at translating requirements between business and technical teams. Their ability to ask the right questions, clarify ambiguity, and guide conversations makes them strong facilitators.

QA Leads/Testers

QA leads and testers are naturally detail-oriented, focused on quality, and closely tied to delivery cycles. Many QA professionals are already embedded in Agile teams and bring a strong understanding of iterative development, feedback loops, and team collaboration.

Customer Support Leads

Customer support leads are well-versed in rapid problem-solving, strong communication, and navigating complexity in high-pressure environments. If you’ve led a support team, you’re probably great at coaching, context switching, and staying calm under pressure. All of these skills transfer well to a scrum master career path.

Team Leads

Team leads are often responsible for day-to-day team operations, unblocking work, and driving alignment. If you’ve run effective meetings, coached teammates, or helped manage priorities, you already have core scrum master behaviors (even if the job title was different).

Training and Skills to Succeed as a Scrum Master

In particular, for scrum masters who intentionally invest in the right skills, adapt to change, and grow as a leader, choosing this career path is beneficial from any corporate angle.

Certifications

Certifications can help you get noticed, and this is especially helpful if you’re switching roles or industries. Look for certifications that are recognized and updated for modern workflows. SAFe Scrum Master (SSM) is a great place to start, especially if you’re aiming to work in larger organizations as a career scrum master.

Essential Technical Skills for Scrum Masters

You don’t need to write code, but you do need to understand the basics of how modern software gets built. Without that understanding, it’s hard to coach teams, remove blockers, or speak the same language as developers. These basics might include:

  • How CI/CD works. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are standard in most Agile environments. Understanding the flow from commit to deployment helps you spot where work gets stuck and improve team habits.
  • What a backlog looks like in Agile lifecycle management (ALM) tools, and how it’s managed. Whether it’s Jira, Azure DevOps, or Rally, you need to know how backlog items are structured, prioritized, refined, and broken down. It’s not just about tickets, it’s about understanding the flow of value.
  • How to interpret burndown and velocity metrics. These metrics are only useful if you can read them in context. Is the team improving? Is work sized realistically? Can you make data-driven decisions about planning and risk?
  • Where dependencies show up and how they’re managed. Scrum masters need to spot cross-team blockers early. Understanding upstream and downstream dependencies (and how to visualize and track them) is essential to keeping delivery on track.

Must-Have Soft Skills for Career Scrum Masters

Soft skills are still the most important part of the job for career scrum masters. Technical capabilities help reinforce your understanding of product development and specifications, but it’s your influence that shapes team culture and builds trust. You’ll need to:

  • Facilitate clearly and with purpose. Meetings shouldn’t feel like routines; they should drive clarity and alignment. Whether it’s sprint planning, retros, or standups, your ability to guide discussions is critical.
  • Coach without micromanaging. Great scrum experts empower teams to self-organize. That means offering guidance without the need for control.
  • Listen well and navigate team dynamics. Teams are made of humans, not roles. Listening actively and noticing patterns in tensions, disengagement, and unspoken blockers can help you intervene early and constructively.
  • Ask the right questions. Your job is not to have all the answers. You need to spark the right thinking. Good questions unlock problems, clarify assumptions, and help teams get unstuck.
  • Influence stakeholders without formal authority. Scrum experts often need to align with Product Owners, managers, or other teams, and you won’t always have direct control. Your ability to build trust, frame conversations well, and speak in terms of outcomes is what gets things moving.

Scrum Master Certifications That Stand Out in 2025

In 2025, there’s no single ladder to climb. Instead, you can grow by deepening your expertise, expanding your influence, or shifting into adjacent roles that match your strengths. There’s more than one way to grow, and more than one destination.


How to Advance Your Scrum Master Career

Growing your career as a scrum master isn’t about waiting for a promotion, it’s about showing you’re ready for what’s next. Whether you’re aiming for a senior role, coaching position, or leadership track, the key is to build visible impact, broaden your skill set, and stay aligned with where the industry is headed.

  • Demonstrate concrete results like improved delivery speed, fewer defects, stronger team engagement.
  • Show progression you’ve achieved through supporting multiple teams, coaching newer scrum masters, additional competencies gained, etc.
  • Develop specific technical capabilities, understand the delivery pipeline, learn how data flows through the system, and know how to spot bottlenecks.
  • Consider training like an Advanced Scrum Master Certification path. 

Want more detail and specific recommendations for advancing as a scrum master in a SAFe organization? Our 2025 Careers Snapshot breaks down trends, titles, and what skills are most in demand right now.

Advanced Roles for Experienced Scrum Masters

The career path for scrum masters can lead to more advanced roles as the scope of your influence expands from a single team to multiple teams, and eventually across the broader organization. Here’s what that progression can look like:

  • Entry-Level: Scrum Master, Agile Team Facilitator
    You’re focused on a single Agile team. Your role is to remove blockers, lead specific events, and help the team deliver value consistently. You’re likely developing a deeper understanding of the technical work that teams complete, and you’re developing ways to improve flow and measure areas for improvement.
  • Mid-Level: Senior Scrum Master, “Team-of-Teams” Facilitator
    You might support multiple teams, help align cross-team efforts, and start mentoring newer scrum masters. At this level, your ability to navigate complexity and support growing teams while maintaining focus on value delivery is key.
  • Program Level: Release Train Engineer (RTE), Program Coach
    You coordinate work across multiple agile teams (often in a SAFe environment) and ensure alignment at the ART level or higher. You’re thinking in terms of delivery cadence, PI planning, and managing larger-scale dependencies.
  • Org-Level: Agile Coach, Director of Agile Practice, Transformation Lead
    At this stage, you’re shaping agile maturity across the organization. You’re advising leaders, designing coaching strategies, and helping teams adopt practices that fit both their context and the company’s goals. Your work focuses less on day-to-day particulars and more on business metrics.

Alternate Career Options for Scrum Masters

After gaining a few years of experience, scrum masters assemble a rare combination of leadership, systems thinking, and delivery awareness. These skills can open up several adjacent career paths.

Product Owner or Manager

As part of their daily work, scrum masters already partner closely with Product Owners. Product management could be a natural transition if you’re curious about the “why” behind the work and you enjoy solving user problems, shaping roadmaps, or defining value. The transition is easier if you’ve already helped refine backlogs, worked with stakeholders, or led cross-functional planning.

Program or Delivery Management

If you’re great at juggling dependencies, managing timelines across multiple teams, and keeping complex projects on track at a higher level in the organization, program management could be your next step. It’s a strong fit for scrum masters who’ve supported larger initiatives, coordinated across teams, or worked closely with RTEs or had exposure to portfolio leadership or solution engineers/architects.

Agile Coaching or Transformation Roles

Working as a scrum master can unlock a joy in enabling others through mentorship, helping teams level up their performance, or guiding leaders through Agile adoption. Roles like Agile Coach, Transformation Lead, or Practice/Program Director might be a natural evolution if you thrive on bigger training and enablement challenges. These roles require a broader view of the organization, systems-level thinking, strong facilitation skills, and the ability to influence without control.

People Management & Team Leadership

If you’ve developed strong team-building skills like conflict resolution and you enjoy growing individuals, you may be well-suited for a team lead or people manager role. This is a common path in companies that promote from within. Additionally, your understanding of Agile principles and team structures can help bridge the gap to more traditional management functions.

Operations or Business Process Roles

Scrum masters who thrive on solving bottlenecks and improving how work flows through a system may find satisfaction in operations roles. These positions often focus on optimizing processes, testing and implementing tools, and coordinating across departments, which is ideal for those who love smoothing out friction in processes.

Learning & Development

If you’ve led team training, coached new employees, or created Agile learning resources, you might enjoy moving into corporate learning and development functions. This is a great fit for scrum masters with a teaching mindset who want to scale their impact through education and enablement programs.

These paths don’t require you to leave agility behind. Instead, they re-apply your skill set in different ways. Many of these roles let you stay close to product teams while opening up new challenges, leadership opportunities, or focus areas that align with your strengths.

Take the First Step in Your Scrum Master Career

Start your scrum master career journey today! The role is evolving, but it’s far from disappearing. Whether you’re stepping into the role for the first time or looking to grow into something bigger, there’s a real path forward. Start by understanding the landscape. Then invest in the right training, gain experience where it matters, and position yourself for the kind of impact that opens doors.


Why The WSJ Got It Wrong About Certifications — And Why SAFe Still Delivers

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The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) recently ran a piece claiming most certificates and digital badges don’t really pay off. Their data showed that only 1 in 8 non-degree credentials delivered a notable pay increase within a year.

That may be true for many credentials. But here’s the problem with painting them all the same: not all certifications are created equal. When a credential is industry-driven, recognized by employers, and tied to in-demand skills, the results look very different. That’s where SAFe® certifications stand out.

Credentials That Actually Matter to Employers

The WSJ is right about one thing: a lot of certificates lack strong employer input, which makes them hard to translate into promotions or pay raises.

SAFe isn’t one of them. It’s the most widely adopted framework for business agility worldwide, built on lean, agile, and systems thinking, and shaped through direct collaboration with enterprises that employ hundreds of thousands of practitioners. That’s why roles requiring SAFe certification show up consistently in job postings and hiring priorities across industries.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

This isn’t just theory—it’s backed by hard data:

  • According to the 2025 SAFe Careers Snapshot, professionals with SAFe certifications earn, on average, $12,000 more annually than non-certified peers.
  • Job postings that reference SAFe often advertise salaries $24,000 higher than national averages for comparable roles.
  • Advanced SAFe-certified roles like SPC or RTE routinely command six-figure salaries, with senior practitioners earning $150,000+.

Compare that to the WSJ’s analysis, where most certificates showed little to no financial lift, and it’s clear: SAFe is an outlier.

A Smarter Way to Evaluate Credentials

The WSJ highlighted how hard it is for workers to know which certifications are worth it. That’s exactly what the Credential Value Index set out to solve—measuring certifications by wage gain, demand, and job mobility.

On all those dimensions, SAFe scores high because it’s employer-driven and outcome-focused. It’s the kind of credential the WSJ itself suggests workers should seek out—one that leads to real, measurable value.

Global Recognition and Long-Term ROI

SAFe certifications aren’t just about one job or one company. They’re recognized across technology, finance, government, healthcare, and more. With over 1 million practitioners worldwide and adoption by more than 70% of Fortune 100 companies, SAFe has staying power.

And while some certificates fade as trends shift, SAFe has evolved—most recently with SAFe 6.0—to stay current with digital transformation and AI-era demands. That makes it not just a short-term investment, but a career-long asset.

The Bottom Line

Yes, there are plenty of credentials that don’t deliver. But lumping them all together misses the bigger picture.

SAFe certifications are different. They consistently deliver higher salaries, stronger career mobility, and recognition in some of the world’s biggest enterprises. We have trained 2 million SAFe certified professionals and have helped 20,000 organizations reach their agile investment goals.

So if you’re investing in your future, choose a certification that employers not only recognize—but reward. Choose SAFe.

What is a Scrum Master? A Complete Guide to the Role, Required Skills, and Certification

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When you first hear the job title, you may wonder: what is a scrum master? Let’s start there – a scrum master helps facilitate the work of a team using scrum. Most often, their job is to enable, coach, and support software development teams to build and deliver products through scrum methods. 

Your next question is likely – what is scrum? Or, this sounds like a project manager – how is a project manager different from a scrum master? Why should I even consider becoming a scrum master?

To start, as traditional career paths are disrupted, we know that many professionals are seeking ways to advance their careers and learn skills that can flex and adapt across industries. The SAFe Careers Snapshot shows that a majority of open scrum master positions in 2024 required or strongly preferred a certification to show competency, especially if job candidates had less hands-on experience in a prior role. With scrum master training and experience, you can start to pioneer a new career path that’s flexible, fulfilling and financially rewarding.

The Definition of Scrum

Scrum describes a set of practices that emphasize transparency, iterative development, built-in quality, and incremental value delivery within time-bound periods. These practices combine to create a simple and effective agile development approach that keeps cross-functional teams focused on the continuous release of customer value. 

In SAFe, teams use scrum principles to execute in alignment with the broader agile framework used across other teams and departments.

Scrum Master Responsibilities Explained

A Scrum Master’s main job is to help teams work efficiently using Scrum. At a high level, they:

  • Facilitate key events like stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives. Their role is to keep these points of synchronization focused and productive.
  • Clear roadblocks that could be slowing the team down. This might include lack of alignment, external pressure, dependencies, and more.
  • Coach the team to help improve value delivery. Scrum masters help team members understand and apply Scrum principles that drive quality and speed without sacrificing predictability. 
  • Protect focus by shielding the team from distractions so they can deliver work without unnecessary interruptions.
  • Foster a culture of learning, iteration and adaptability through team demos, retrospectives, and inspect and adapt sessions
  • Work cross-functionally to ensure smooth collaboration across departments and alignment with company goals. This includes planning, execution, delivery, and measurement of results.

The application of scrum within an organization can vary widely, which will ultimately determine day-to-day responsibilities. As an example, the following image shows how a scrum master works within the context of an organization using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe):

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Scrum Master Methodology

What Are the Required Skills for a Successful Scrum Master?

Now that we understand the responsibilities of a Scrum Master, let’s talk about what a good scrum master looks like. Scrum Masters come from various backgrounds, and they typically excel at coaching, teaching, and attention to detail. Additionally, they likely bring a strong mix of empathy and high emotional intelligence to help encourage a collaborative environment. The most common skills for scrum masters typically include:

  • Strong facilitation experience
  • Problem-solving and conflict resolution
  • Clear Communication and ability to provide clarity
  • Proficiency with ALM and/or project management tools
  • Understanding of key metrics like burndown, velocity, and flow

Employers may also seek varying depths of technical capabilities or background in conjunction with these “soft” skills.

What are Similar Roles to a Scrum Master

When researching what a scrum master is, you’ll likely see lots of different job titles. Though some are simply called “scrum master,” here are other common job titles:

While this is a long list, one of the most common comparisons is a scrum master vs a project manager. What are the biggest differences?

Scrum Master vs. Project Manager

Focus

A scrum master focuses mainly on the team and the process, removing impediments and coaching the team to improve their efficiency and collaboration.
A project manager focuses on delivering the project on time and within budget by managing all logistics, resources, and risks.

Methodology

A scrum master operates within the Agile framework, as an example, SAFe. They are responsible for ensuring that the team follows SAFe, events (like daily stand-ups and sprint reviews), and artifacts (like the product backlog).

A project manager can work with a variety of methodologies, including traditional “waterfall” project management, Agile, or a hybrid of both. The methodology used depends on the project’s nature and the organization’s structure.

Leadership Style

A scrum master acts as a servant leader. They empower the team to self-organize and make their own decisions. The scrum master’s job is to support the team by removing obstacles and fostering an environment where they can be as productive as possible.

A project manager typically uses a more directive style of leadership, through assigning tasks, making critical decisions, and holding the ultimate accountability for the project’s outcomes.

Scrum Master Certifications & How to Choose One

A Scrum Master certification is a professional designation that establishes your credibility and is a recognizable standard of baseline knowledge. The amount of time and financial investment required will vary across different types of certifications, and it’s wise to research the marketability of the certification and the reputation of the training provider before making your final decision.

Multiple organizations offer scrum master training and certifications, including Scrum.org, Scrum Alliance, and Scaled Agile Inc. These certifications span a range of difficulty, experience levels, and areas of specific Scrum methods. Some of the most popular, rigorous, and well-recognized scrum master certifications for professional development and advancement include:

  • Certified Scrum Master (CSM) – This entry-level certification from Scrum Alliance focuses on foundational Scrum knowledge, demonstrated through a required exam.
  • Professional Scrum Master (PSM) – Scrum.org breaks this certification into three levels (PSM I, II, & III) to verify increasing levels of experience and competency, though courses don’t need to be taken sequentially.
  • Certified Scrum Professional CSP-SM – A more advanced offering, this certification from Scrum Alliance is intended to develop coaching, facilitation, and leadership skills for scrum masters. 
  • SAFe Scrum Master (SSM) – This certification covers a scrum master’s role and responsibilities within SAFe, with a particular focus on coordinating teams within an enterprise environment.
  • SAFe Advanced Scrum Master Certification Path – This certification path was built for experienced Scrum Masters who want to deepen their knowledge in SAFe and improve advanced facilitation, develop coaching techniques, and optimize team performance.

Choosing the right certification depends on your goals. For example, a Scaled Agile scrum master certification will help you learn foundational aspects of the role and demonstrate your understanding of SAFe. Since SAFe is the most widely used agile framework by enterprises globally, a SAFe Scrum Master certification can better position you for a role within a larger, global organization.

When Do Organizations Need a Scrum Master?

The scrum master serves an important role, even in small organizations. While some companies – especially software development firms – are founded with agile practices at their core, others undergo agile transformations over time. Scrum masters become especially important, though, as organizational leadership seeks to help teams adopt agile practices more effectively and consistently across departments and business units.

Scrum masters can help organizations yield agile benefits at the team level consistently and sustainably with an emphasis on continuous improvement and a clear focus on measuring value.

Scrum Master Salary and Career Outlook

Scaled Agile Inc publishes an annual SAFe Careers Snapshot that summarizes trends for different kinds of agile roles, including the required skills, desired certifications, and salaries. Our 2025 careers snapshot found that, the average salary of a scrum master breaks down as follows:

  • Scrum Masters: $105,972
  • SAFe Certified SAFe Scrum Masters: $119,500

The Scrum Master serves an important role in both large and small organizations. While some companies – especially software development firms – are founded with agile practices at their core, others undergo agile transformations over time. Scrum masters become especially important as executive leadership seeks to help teams adopt agile practices to drive business outcomes more effectively and consistently across teams, departments, and business units.

How to become a Certified Scrum Master

Earning your scrum master certification starts with finding a training provider. Most organizations that create and maintain certification materials, including Scaled Agile, will provide a certification class finder of approved providers. Training providers may offer in-person options, virtual sessions, or both. If you’re interested in earning a SAFe Scrum Master certification, you will receive:

  • Attendance at a multi-day training course (typically instructor-led)
  • A corresponding course exam
  • A shareable certificate of completion and/or digital badge
  • Professional membership in a community of practitioners

Plus, you can review the complete guide to Scaled Agile certifications for more detailed information on training, the certification process, pricing, and a lot more!

Overcoming Organizational Change Fatigue – A Brief Guide for Leaders

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by Dr. Ilga Vossen, Stephan Kahl, Odile Moreau, Caroline Schäfer & Yannick Penz

This is the second in a series of articles on leadership and Agile transformation. Thought leaders from Deloitte and Scaled Agile worked together to share their insights and advice.

Have you recently heard executives demanding, “we need to become more data-centric, agile at scale or AI-driven”? Have you read requests in corporate newsletters or interviews such as, “we need to increase supply chain resilience, lower carbon footprints, increase cyber security and compliance”? 

The need to move the needle through technological and organizational transformation to resolve multifaceted issues is present and pressing in many organizations.

At the same time, there is a huge pressure on delivery and performance in daily business. Both pressure points contribute to an increasing workload, a sentiment of unresting and never-ending change demands and unsettling emotions. In a nutshell, the organizational energy is stressed out and exhausted.

Then, despite strong efforts in the workforce, not much change is happening in either direction. Does this sound familiar? Your organization might be in change fatigue.

What is Change Fatigue?

Change fatigue can be described as a mental and sometimes even physical exhaustion towards change initiatives, making it impossible for people to work towards the change. 

Think of our capacity for change like a muscle. It can be trained to be stronger, but if it’s continuously stimulated strongly, energy will drain at some point eventually. Ultimately, this can result in chronic change fatigue and inability to bring up energy. Transformations demand changes in behavior, learning and building new skills. All of which requires high mental effort. As change fatigue paralyzes the whole organization, we are well advised in reducing it or avoiding it in the first place if we want to achieve real transformation.

To understand change fatigue and how to tackle it, we first need to understand which aspects create and drain mental capacity.

In coaching sessions, we observe the core drivers of mental load with regards to transformations:

Expectations Toward Organizational Change

Expectations are primarily shaped through experiences of the affected people (direct or observed) with previous change initiatives and through communication by leadership. Mental load increases if the expected outcomes of the transformation are negative for the individual. 

If the expectations towards the change are primarily negative, it will lead to anxiety and stress and drain mental capacity. Similarly, uncertainty drains capacity. We explore the effect of why agile transformations require effective leadership, but most importantly, if the workforce expects that the change initiative is just a management fad and will soon be replaced by another initiative, it is most unlikely for anyone to engage in change activities.

Effort to Transform vs. Effort to Maintain Daily Operations

If the organizational change is inflicted in bold steps, this leads to more mental load of course. If on top of that daily operations already require more time than available, we have an organization perfectly set up for achieving change fatigue instead of real transformation.

Additional to this, there may be individual issues draining mental capacity such as health or family.

What to Do About It?

Although these patterns are common, there are ways to combat change fatigue. Simply reducing mental load is not enough if the organization is already experiencing it.

Acknowledge The Situation

Leaders and Agile Coaches need to create room for conversations and openly acknowledge the draining sentiment of change fatigue. Allowing the expression of exhaustion in a psychological safe space despite the pressure on performance helps reduce negative emotions.

Find The Root Cause & Act Accordingly

Next, of course, leaders are well advised to discuss and analyze the cause of the change fatigue, as not all factors explored may be equally relevant, and act accordingly.

How to Avoid Change Fatigue in the First Place

Are you about to start a transformation initiative and you don’t see your organization fatigued from other initiatives already? Here’s how to avoid change fatigue before it sets in:

1. Make the Target Desirable

Highlight benefits of the transformation for your workforce. These will most likely not equal the economic benefits of the company. Numbers don’t inspire; a better work life does. Incentivize desired behaviors and get role models for change into the spotlight. It’s all about creating positive expectations towards the change.

2. Descale daily operations to make room for change 

Make sure your people have room for change. It’s not enough to speak about prioritizing change. Leadership needs to deprioritize other running initiatives to free up time from their workforce, especially in the beginning of the transformation.

3. Speak With One Voice

Show courage and ensure that your whole leadership is committed to the change. There can be no room for ambiguity in communication. Inconsistency leads to uncertainty and fuels mental load.

4. Invite, Don’t Inflict 

Create participants instead of affected colleagues. Co-create the transformation. 

While it may be tempting to pursue many change initiatives at the same time, organizations tend to achieve more by doing less. Descale the work, provide focus on what’s most important, and create real change. 

This article the second out of ten in a series entitled Leadership & Change in Agile Transformations.

Kick-starting the SAFe Journey at a Traditional Organization – Implementing SAFe

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It’s incredible that the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is now 10 years old, and the Agile Manifesto is now over 21 years old. What began in software development is now expanding to encompass the entire enterprise, changing how people work and how every aspect of business is run.

In the last few years, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for and execution of digital transformation. Yet, many organizations are still struggling to get business results from their investments or haven’t made them at all.

To compete in this new era, these companies must look at agility as a core business competency. Many of these traditional organizations are looking for a playbook they can follow as they embark on their agility journeys. In my experience, organizations come from one of the following contexts:

  • The organization has done a successful pilot (typically with a small number of Agile teams) and now wants to scale to the rest of the business unit or line of business (which is NOT yet Agile)
  • An organization wants to implement SAFe to address its defined burning platform
  • A consultant has done an assessment and recommends initiating an Agile transformation
  • Some combination of the first three

Regardless of an organization’s starting point, it’s important to understand the current state of transformation and validate assumptions with due diligence before creating a path forward.

Before beginning, perform due diligence

For a transformation to succeed, it’s crucial that organizations articulate the “why” tipping point for their journey before they begin. In addition, it’s important for organizations to gather data points to validate any success patterns they have experienced using the SAFe Implementation Roadmap. Some of the questions to ask regarding this due diligence (in no particular sequence) include:

  • What change agent and team member training is completed and planned?
  • What is the current state of the foundational building block (Agile team)?
  • Which steps of the SAFe Implementation Roadmap have been completed?
  • Which SAFe configuration are you using and why?

Answers to these powerful questions bring organizations clarity about the purpose for their transformation and alignment through awareness of their true current state.

Kick-start the Transformation with This Approach

Various factors influence the decision to move forward with a SAFe implementation. For more traditional organizations with a waterfall or hybrid mindset, unaligned ways of working, and inconsistent terminology interpretation, the below transformation approach can help shape their paths.

Create and measure a maturity baseline

Having a simple maturity model without new terminology is crucial, and organizations should define one that works for their context. HCL Technologies, a next-generation global technology company, designed a maturity model (see Figure one) to set a baseline in a traditional organization, business unit, or line of business. This model, which can be tweaked given the client’s context, captures key characteristics of an organization on various dimensions.

SAFe implementation
Figure 1. Organization Maturity Model example

Keep in mind that in many situations, assessment “fatigue” is also real. So it’s critical to design and administer maturity measurements effectively with minimally invasive approaches, including the right combination of:

  • Interviews (one-on-one and/or in group settings)
  • Observations from attending various meetings
  • Simple assessments (eight to nine questions)

Putting it into practice: evidence from the field

HCL requested to lead the transformation for a client in the health industry using a hybrid SAFe methodology. The client organization had six ARTs and over 400 people involved in development, testing, and support. By conducting role interviews (Architect, RTE, Product Management, executive leadership, and so on) at various levels of the organization, HCL gathered the necessary data points to set a baseline for the client’s maturity level.

HCL also conducted 18 detailed, one-on-one interviews and observed several ongoing meetings and events for three weeks. They used a similar maturity model to Figure one, which helped establish alignment for priority and focus areas.

When another client organization in the pharmaceutical industry assessed the workforce enablement dimension of its current state, it found no or inconsistent use of tooling. Upon discovering this, leadership aligned and identified tooling as an opportunity and key enabler for the company’s digital strategy execution.

Script the critical moves

With relevant data points from baseline measurements, highlight the bright spots and rationalize target maturity level with relentless socialization for buy-in and alignment. Defining building blocks, or pieces of work, is the next key element in this approach, with categories like:

  • Organizational readiness
  • Content readiness
  • Logistics and planning event readiness
  • Enablers

Putting it into practice: evidence from the field

One of the crucial aspects of making this approach palatable for the health industry client was meeting the client where they were. Providing maturity model dimensions mapped to proven PI readiness success patterns helped accomplish that and reduced the cognitive load of transformation change because the client didn’t have to learn new terminology.

Data points from the maturity assessment findings helped the client prioritize specific readiness aspects before the first PI Planning event. Here are some examples of these readiness aspects:

  1. Case for change and communication strategy (organization readiness)
  2. Capacity allocation for various work types (organization readiness)
  3. Capacity allocation of subject matter experts for enablers (content readiness)
  4. Team topology at the ART and team levels (organization readiness)
  5. Training and workshops, including SAFe® for Teams, before PI Planning (enabler)

The transformation team at the pharmaceutical client’s organization prioritized standardized tooling by implementing Jira Align at the enterprise level. This tool provided a central location for all work and enabled visibility of all work types.

Shrink and scale the change

After the building blocks are designed, the next key element is to “shrink the change” to reduce business disruption. Building blocks provide the opportunity to shrink change and make it more digestible. Initial success as small as one ART motivates the broader organization and provides a blueprint for replication.

Design building blocks in a way that provides the flexibility to shrink change first and scale from one ART to multiple ARTs or from Essential SAFe to Full SAFe later. Based on complexity, baseline maturity level, solution size, and development value stream(s) involved, the organization can establish either:

  • Eight to 12 weeks of runway preparedness (see 10 weeks translated into five iterations in Figure two) or
  • Eight to 12 weeks of executing a readiness plan before the first official planning event launch
SAFe implementation
Figure 2. Mapping Maturity Model Dimensions to Scalable Building Blocks for PI Readiness

Putting it into practice: evidence from the field

After prioritizing readiness building blocks for organization readiness, content readiness, and enablers, it took 10 weeks for the health industry client to create and socialize the readiness plan and align stakeholders. It took an additional 10 weeks to implement the plan. Once this client implemented backlogs and boards to visualize their work, they experienced improved coordination and dependency management and better visibility and transparency across ARTs.

Before implementing Jira Align at the pharmaceutical organization’s enterprise level, the organization’s transformation team developed an implementation roadmap, which included multiple rolling wave phases across the program and portfolio.

Experience Benefits without a New Language

While there is value in using SAFe toolkits and resources, those require an understanding of SAFe terminology. For traditional organizations that prefer to begin their transformation journey without learning a new language, the steps outlined above have generated desirable outcomes with reduced risk.

Putting it into practice: evidence from the field

As a result of this transformation approach, the healthcare client experienced the following positive business outcomes:

  • A single solution backlog across all ARTs of the solution train, a focus on enablers, and improved overall flow
  • Improved defect resolution lead time by 35 percent
  • Changes in value delivery and ways of working, specifically a QA shift left, resulting in quality improvements of 27 percent in lower environments
  • Crucial data points to strengthen the business case for traditional software development life cycle (SDLC) to move toward Agile SDLC through lean governance and process automation for better user experience

The pharmaceutical client experienced the following positive business outcomes from its enterprise-level Jira Align implementation:

  • Agile teams supported in capacity allocation, overall planning, and road mapping activities
  • Predictable delivery with fully aligned organizations across every level of scale
  • Aligned strategy through a federated, unified platform spanning program, product, portfolio, and development team layers (level of scale).

Large Solution Refinement: Paving the Super-Highway of Value Delivery

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This post is the second in a series about success patterns for large solutions. Read the first post here.

Backlog refinement is integral to the Scrum process because it prevents surprises and maintains flow in iterative development. Regular backlog review ensures the backlog is ready for iteration planning. An Agile team understands how much they still need to refine the backlog items before the next iteration planning and beyond.

When applying SAFe® to large, complex, cyber-physical systems, you must expand backlog refinement to include more viewpoints. The complexity of a large solution is rarely fully comprehended by one or a few individuals, and the size of the large solution exacerbates the impact of risks that can escape into large solution planning.

So how do we find the balance between overpreparation, which limits ownership and innovation by the solution builders, and under-refinement, which can undermine the solution and the flow of value delivery?

To answer these questions, we adapted the following success patterns for large solution backlog refinement.

Use the Dispatcher Clause

The dispatcher principle guides large solution refinement by preventing the premature dispatch of requirements to Agile Release Trains (ARTs), solution areas, or Agile teams. Premature dispatching can cause risks like:

• Misalignment in the development of different solution components
• Missed opportunities for economies of scale across organizational constructs
• Sub-optimization of lower priority solution features

In contrast, making the right trade-off decisions at the right level drives holistic and innovative solutions.

Key stakeholder viewpoints that are often overlooked include marketing, compliance, customer support, and finance. Ensuring these voices are heard during refinement work can prevent issues that might remain undetected until late in the solution roadmap.

For complex solutions, we discovered that a planning conference is more effective than pre-and post-PI Planning events alone. This event mimics a PI Planning event and is intended to align upcoming PI work across ARTs and solution areas. To keep the conference focused and productive, it should only include representatives from the participating ARTs. We will cover specific planning conference details in a later blog post.

The goal of the planning conference is to provide a boundary for the large solution refinement work. Preparation for key decisions that can be made in the planning conference should be part of the refinement work. But making key decisions is part of the planning conference. However, key stakeholder inputs that cannot be reasonably gathered during the planning conference should be included in the refinement work.

For example, in Figure one, a review of the key behavior-driven development (BDD) demo and testing scenarios by a customer advisory board is valuable input in refinement. The customer advisory board will not attend the two-day planning conference, so their advance input provides guardrails on the backlog work that’s considered.

Agree on the Definition of Ready

The definition of the readiness (DoR) criteria for a large solution backlog is often multidimensional. Consider, for example, the architectural dimension of the solution. The architecture defines the high-level solution components and how they interact to provide value. The choice of components is relevant to system architects in the contributing ARTs and stakeholders in at least these areas:

• User experience
• Compliance
• Internal audit and standards
• Corporate reuse
• Finance  

Advancing the backlog item—a Capability or an Epic—through the stages of readiness often requires review and refinement from the various stakeholders.

Figure one is an example Definition of Ready Maturity Model. It shows the solution dimensions that must be refined in preparation for the solution backlog. Levels zero to five show how readiness can advance within each dimension. The horizontal contour lines show that progression to the intermediate stages of readiness is often a combination of different levels in each dimension.

Applying SAFe for Agility
Figure 1. Definition of Ready Maturity Model example

This delineation is helpful when monitoring the progression of a backlog item to intermediate readiness stages on a Kanban board.

The key to balancing over-preparation and under-refinement is to distinguish between work that an ART or solution area can complete independently without a high risk of rework. For example, final costs could be prohibitively high without a Lean business case to scope the solution. Another common high-risk impact of under-refinement is unacceptable usability caused by the siloed implementation of Features by the ARTs.

The Priority BDD and Test Scenarios in Figure one represent how features are used harmoniously. These scenarios provide guardrails to help ARTs prioritize and demonstrate parts of the overall solution without significant rework of a PI.

Identifying the dimensions, levels, and progression of readiness is a powerful organizational skill for building a large solution.

Leverage Refinement Crews

Regular large solution refinement is necessary to ensure readiness. The complexity of a large solution warrants greater effort and participation than Solution Management can cover. And the number of key decisions grows in direct proportion to the size of a solution.

Our experience shows that roughly 10 percent of those who participate in large solution development should participate in a regular refinement cadence. If the total participation is 450 people, then 45 representatives from across ARTs or solution areas should set aside time for weekly refinement iterations.

Backlog refinement for a large solution requires more capacity than a typical backlog refinement session. The refinement crews determine a cadence of planning, executing, and demonstrating the refinement work. One-week iterations, for example, help drive focus on refinement to ensure readiness.

We also discovered that refinement crews of six to eight people should swarm refinement work within iterations. These groups are usually created based on individual skills and their representation within stakeholder groups. Alignment with crews and dimensions or skillsets is determined during the planning of refinement iterations. The goal is always to move the funnel item to the next refinement maturity level in the next iteration.

Our experience says that each refinement crew requires at least three to four core participants. The other crew members can come from stakeholder organizations outside the Solution Train.

Readiness progress must be reviewed on a regular cadence with solution train progress. Progress can be represented in the Solution Kanban between the Funnel and Backlog stages, as shown in Figure two. In our example, these stages replace the Analyzing state provided as a starting point in SAFe.

Applying SAFe for Agility
Figure 2. Refinement Stages in Solution Kanban

The organization must also allow each refinement step to vary over time, as it makes sense for the solution. For example, as the development of the solution progresses toward a releasable version, the architecture should stabilize. Therefore the readiness of the backlog item in the architecture dimension should progress very quickly, if not skip some readiness steps. As solutions approach a major release, the contributors’ capacity can shift from readiness to execution of the current release or readiness for the next release.

Because refinement happens in a regular cadence of iterations, weekly, for example, the refinement crews should be empowered to make these decisions in refinement iteration planning.

Employ Dynamic Agility

So is there a definitive template of dimensions with levels and a step-by-step process for determining the DoR? Not quite. And we don’t think that a prescriptive process is best for most organizations.

Instead, we advocate for using the organizational skill of dynamic agility.

As the size and complexity of a solution grow, so do the number and type of variables: compliance type, hardware types, skills required, size of the development organization, size of the enterprise/business, specialization of customer types, and so on. This complexity is augmented by company culture challenges, workforce turnover, and technology advancements in emerging industries.

Individuals’ motivation and innovation suffer when they get lost in the morass of complexity. When things don’t get done, more employees are added to help fix the problem. This workforce growth only magnifies the complexity again.

In contrast, the organizational skill of dynamic agility stimulates autonomy, mastery, and purpose for individuals within teams, teams-of-teams, and large solutions.

Consider the House of Dynamic Agility represented in Figure three.

Applying SAFe for Agility
Figure 3. House of Dynamic Agility

How can dynamic agility be applied to large solution refinement? DoR identification and maintenance of its dimensions and levels happen through a regular cadence of the right events. How often should these occur, for how long, and who should attend? What elements will represent and communicate the DoR? What roles are best suited to own and facilitate the management and use of DoR over time? How will collaboration across the organization happen most efficiently for maximum benefit? These questions are best determined in the context of the large solution.

Conclusion

Large solutions require a balance of preparation and execution to achieve an optimal flow of value. Conducting backlog refinement in preparation for a large solution planning conference and PI Planning lets decomposed work items be implemented without risk of rework. Avoiding over-specification in refinement allows ARTs to innovate and accomplish within the guardrails of refinement. Enabling large solutions to leverage dynamic agility builds ownership, collaboration, and efficiency in a large-scale endeavor.

Look for the next post in our series, coming soon.

About Cindy VanEpps, Project & Team, Inc.

Cindy VanEpps - SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT)

From crafting space shuttle flight design and mission control software at Johnson Space Center to roles including software developer, technical lead, development manager, consultant, and solution developer, Cindy has an extensive repertoire of skills and experience. As a SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT) and Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) expert, her thought leadership, teaching, and consulting rely on pragmatism in the application of Agile practices.

About Wolfgang Brandhuber, Project & Team, Inc.

Chief Scrum Master, and Agile Head Coach in various Agile environments

Dr. Wolfgang Brandhuber has been a Scrum Developer, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Chief Scrum Master, and Agile Head Coach in various Agile environments. His passion is large solutions. Since the advent of the large solution level in the Scaled Agile Framework in 2016, he has set up and helped solution trains improve their complex systems. During his 18 years as a professional consultant, he worked over 16 of those in the Agile world and more than nine years with SAFe. Among other certifications, he is a certified SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT), a Kanban University Trainer (AKT), and an Agility Health Trainer (AHT).

About Malte Kumlehn, Project & Team, Inc.

Malte Kumlehn, Project & Team, Inc.

Malte helps deliver complex ecosystems, people, Cloud, AI, and data-powered digital transformations toward business agility. He pioneers intelligent operating models for portfolios with large solutions as a SAFe® Fellow, advisory board member, and executive advisor in this field. He guides executives in developing the most challenging competencies that allow them to deliver breakthrough results through Lean-Agile at scale. His experience has been published by Accenture, Gartner, and the Swiss Association for Quality over the last ten years.

Learn more about Project & Team.

Solution Areas: A More Dynamic Form of Agility – Agility Transformation

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This post is the first in a series about success patterns for large solutions.

When applying the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) to large, complex, cyber-physical systems, we have discovered a pattern called solution areas to manage the complexity. A solution area is made up of two to four Agile teams that collaborate daily to solve problems together. A solution area is neither a fixed organizational structure with given roles, events, and artefacts, nor another scaling level between Agile teams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs). Instead, it dynamically adapts to the given work. This solution area pattern is an example of a paradigm shift toward a much more dynamic form of agility. And this shift requires development of organizational skills, as we will explain in this blog series.

Revive the Feature Team Idea

In Agile development, we often speak about feature teams as an important pillar in Agile organization design. The idea of a feature team usually means that a single Agile team has all the skills and tools necessary to produce meaningful end-customer value on its own. This is often hard to achieve when hundreds of engineers must work together to create a complex cyber-physical system.

In such an environment, Agile teams have so many dependencies between them that a single team can hardly produce end-customer value alone. When producing only a portion of an end-customer value, it becomes hard for single Agile teams to pursue meaningful objectives on their own. Changes to their team goals can therefore only be made with the consent of other teams because these changes could potentially impact the other teams’ work.

As a result, a key motivator of why we introduced agility in the first place is lost. We are no longer able to react quickly to learnings and changing requirements, as the effort to recreate alignment between the teams can be considerable. In such an environment the communication efforts are eating up a non-negligible part of the team’s capacity, the result of which is a loss of focus on value and the pivots necessary to achieve it. A typical pattern that arises under these circumstances is ‘spoon-feeding teams.’ For example, in the backlog refinement meetings before Program Increment (PI) Planning, work items are prepared to fit the skill sets of certain teams. The result is that only a specific team can handle a specific work item, thus locking teams into big up-front design.

Solution areas can often solve this problem. Two to four teams collaborating daily, in many cases, can have all the skills and tools necessary to pursue meaningful objectives and produce real end-customer value together. On the one hand, they’re often big enough to take on responsibility for substantial changes to the system, and on the other hand, they are small enough to react quickly to learnings and changing requirements. With the right communication and collaboration structure, solution areas can revive the feature team idea one level higher in the form of feature solution areas.

Self-Organize around the Flow of Value

One of the most important design criteria of a solution area is that the communication and collaboration structure is dynamic and tailored to the objectives of the teams. By introducing solution areas, we don’t want to establish an additional scaling level between Agile teams and ARTs with a set of fixed events, roles, and artefacts. A solution area is like a collection of boundary conditions within which the teams can organize themselves around the flow of value according to their needs. To give you an example, we take a closer look at the synchronization of the events.

Suppose we have four Agile teams in a solution area with the same iteration cadence of two weeks. Every team has an iteration planning at the start of each iteration, daily stand-ups on each working day, and an iteration review and retrospective at the end of the two weeks. A first step in establishing a solution area would be to synchronize each of these team events among all the teams, as illustrated in a 3×3 matrix.

Solution Areas: A More Dynamic Form of Agility
Figure 1: event synchronization matrix

Using this matrix, the teams try to find the leanest synchronization mechanism that fulfills the communication and collaboration needs of the four teams. Let’s take iteration planning as an example. One option could be that the product owners are meeting for 30 minutes in the pre-event of the iteration planning to make sure they all understand the solution area’s iteration goals. After that, each product owner goes back to its respective team for the main event where each team plans its upcoming iteration in the next two hours. After that, all teams meet in a big-room event to align and adjust their iteration plans with all the other teams in the solution area. This post-event could be scheduled for another 90 minutes.

Another option could look completely different regarding the sequence of the sub-events and the timing. For instance, the teams may create a first draft of an iteration plan for themselves within a one-hour time box in the pre-event. Then for the main event, all teams meet for three hours to collaboratively create an iteration plan for the solution area. In the post-event, the scrum masters of the four teams come together to talk about resolving impediments and managing any risks that came up.

After creating an aligned understanding of the communication and collaboration needs of all the teams within the solution area, the ART needs to find a constellation that matches these needs with the least amount of meeting overhead possible. Once found, these synchronization mechanisms are not carved in stone. They can change dynamically according to the objectives of the solution area for a given timebox, like a PI. At first, we usually revisit synchronization mechanisms every PI. Over time, the solution area can change its synchronization within a PI if necessary.

Like the events, we can also synchronize roles, artefacts, and collaborations. For each pillar in the House of Dynamic Agility (see Figure 2), we can use similar matrices to create an aligned understanding of what the specific needs are, and which composition best matches those needs.

For example, the definition of done could be changed or refined to represent the type of work (hardware, software, modeling) or the maturity in the progression toward delivery (regulatory compliance items and reviews).

The House of Dynamic Agility helps leadership master this grammar of transformative co-creation while faced with profound disruption. Moving from an output efficiency-centric focus to an outcome customer-centric operating system requires leadership transformation mastery.

Example system

The solution area for spacecraft navigation systems consists of four Agile teams: LiDAR, RADAR, GPS, and Navigation Control. In the PIs or iterations where the individual types of navigation are focused on hardware upgrades, software algorithm improvements, and other items that are encapsulated within those navigation sub-components, these teams will each send a representative to a post-iteration planning event as their only iteration planning coordination. However, in a PI where they are implementing an anomaly detection feature, they will hold pre-iteration planning coordination with a team representative, and each team will hold an individual iteration planning and one big-room post-iteration event to educate all the participants in the navigation solution area.

The test case and results artefacts they create in earlier iterations are draft artefacts as far as the compliance team is concerned. The integration tests conducted in early iterations use models and are focused on navigation only. As they approach formal verification and validation (V&V), the teams in the solution area will closely collaborate and communicate with the compliance teams and formal V&V testers.

Solution Areas: A More Dynamic Form of Agility
Figure 2: House of Dynamic Agility

Encapsulate Complexity

Another benefit of solution areas is the encapsulation of certain areas of complexity within a large system. Consider a typical cross-functional Agile team. When a software programmer, a database architect, and a tester work together on the same user story, nobody outside this Agile team cares about the dependencies between these team members. In other words, this Agile team encapsulates a part of the complexity of the system.

The same is true for solution areas. As all teams within a solution area are closely synchronized, they also encapsulate a certain part of the complexity, usually a larger part compared to an Agile team, which is aligned to a complex component of the large system. The dependencies between the teams and team members within the solution area are a concern within the solution area only.

Looking at a solution area board, only the dependencies below the thick blue line are of interest to other solution areas, ARTs, solution trains, or suppliers. The dependencies above the thick blue line are managed by the teams within the solution area itself.

Solution Areas: A More Dynamic Form of Agility
Figure 3: solution area board

This also leads to an important design principle: there should be more dependencies between teams within a solution area than dependencies between the solution area and the outside world. The stronger the collaboration within a solution area, the more cross-functional teams become, which then creates better decision-making.

Maybe the most important aspect of encapsulating complexity is the switch from linear or orderly value streams to unordered or “messy” value streams. Our characterization of “messy” value streams as an enabler for creativity is inspired by Tim Harford’s book: Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World. Within a single Agile team, we usually don’t have clearly ordered value streams. People collaborate with whomever on whatever makes the most sense at that point in time. It could be something planned or completely unforeseen. It could contribute to an iteration goal or a PI objective. Or it could be something that deviates from any planned work, such as investigating a new path or following a new learning.

Especially when creating something new, this creative freedom of a messy value stream can lead to better, high-quality products. With the right synchronization mechanisms tailored to the needs of individual solution areas, the ability to react to unforeseen changes in development can be fast enough to support messy value streams. This establishes a creative environment like a single Agile team at one level higher. 

React Quickly to Changing Value Stream Networks

Forming solution areas around architectural domains helps create better solutions, faster. But what about cross-domain problems? For many large system problems, several domains must work together to come up with satisfying results. These problem spaces often show up like bubbles on top of the architectural layer, meandering around for a while whilst people are working on certain aspects before they are completely solved and vanish. Sometimes problem spaces can be planned for; sometimes they show up completely unforeseen.

With solution areas already in place around architectural domains, a next step could be forming new, cross-domain solution areas which exist only if necessary to address the problem space. These new cross-domain solution areas bring together people or complete Agile teams from different solution areas. They are only temporary, existing from one iteration to several PIs.

Ramping up cross-domain solution areas can be seen as an additional organizational skill on top of the organizational skill of synchronizing Agile teams within a domain-aligned solution area. Management should not decide the structure of new solution areas; the people closest to the problem should. Management only sets the boundary conditions for the self-organization of the people doing the work.  

The goal is to enable an organization to ramp up new organizational structures quickly when needed and ramp them down the moment a problem is solved so that organizational structures can flow around architectural needs.

Solution Areas: A More Dynamic Form of Agility
Figure 4: domains, problem spaces, and solution areas

Find the Sweet Spot for Organizational Learning

Organizational skills that facilitate dynamic agility require training in the form of a focused effort to help parts of the organization identify options, build new structures, and abandon them as soon as the problems are solved.

Like with a professional sports team, this approach needs qualified coaches and an aligned vision of how to play this Agile game. The vision needs to be broken down into moves that team members can master, one move at a time.

A successful approach relies on finding the right level for this training. Single Agile teams are often too small to react on their own in a significant way to changes in the complex value stream networks in which they participate. Yet, ARTs are often too large to change their structures frequently and fast enough. Solution areas have the right size and focus to react quickly and change structures around the flow of value in a meaningful way. The solution area construct is often the sweet spot for organizational learning, replacing organizational structures with organizational skills.

Solution areas are given the language and technology to facilitate the inter-relationship of the system elements (for example, leadership, employees, and customers) as part of the whole ecosystem to which they belong.

Find the Minimum Viable Structure

When striving to build large systems in an Agile way, adding scaling levels on top of each other isn’t helpful. From our experience, the core proposition of the organizational architecture of large systems must be dynamic and tailored to the needs. Stated another way, we must descale before we scale up. We want to have the minimum viable organizational architecture— the bare minimum to satisfy the cognitive, communication, and collaboration demands of the teams involved.

This efficiency goal is not achievable by following a set of fixed roles, events, and artefacts, but only by enabling the teams to dynamically and frequently change their communication and collaboration structures according to the objectives on which they focus. This dynamic agility approach can reduce the impediments to the flow of value, leaving room for innovation and learning when scaling up to large, complex system delivery.

Read the second post in our series here.

About Wolfgang Brandhuber, Project & Team, Inc.

Chief Scrum Master, and Agile Head Coach in various Agile environments

Dr. Wolfgang Brandhuber has been a Scrum Developer, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Chief Scrum Master, and Agile Head Coach in various Agile environments. His passion is large solutions. Since the advent of the large solution level in the Scaled Agile Framework in 2016, he has set up and helped solution trains improve their complex systems. During his 18 years as a professional consultant, he worked over 16 of those in the Agile world and more than nine years with SAFe. Among other certifications, he is a certified SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT), a Kanban University Trainer (AKT), and an Agility Health Trainer (AHT).

About Cindy VanEpps, Project & Team, Inc.

Cindy VanEpps - SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT)

From crafting space shuttle flight design and mission control software at Johnson Space Center to roles including software developer, technical lead, development manager, consultant, and solution developer, Cindy has an extensive repertoire of skills and experience. As a SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT) and Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) expert, her thought leadership, teaching, and consulting rely on pragmatism in the application of Agile practices.

About Malte Kumlehn, Project & Team, Inc.

SAFe Fellow Malte Kumlehn headshot - blog author

Malte helps deliver complex ecosystems, people, Cloud, AI, and data-powered digital transformations toward business agility. He pioneers intelligent operating models for portfolios with large solutions as a SAFe® Fellow, advisory board member, and executive advisor in this field. He guides executives in developing the most challenging competencies that allow them to deliver breakthrough results through Lean-Agile at scale. His experience has been published by Accenture, Gartner, and the Swiss Association for Quality over the last ten years.

Learn more about Project & Team.

The Unparalleled Value of Emotional Intelligence – Business Agility Value Stream – Part Two

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If you’ve read the first post in my blog series, you may have been inspired to think about how the emotional intelligence competencies manifest in every step of the business agility value stream. From identifying and sensing the opportunity to learning and adapting to ultimately delivering on the business opportunity. So, if we can measure emotional intelligence competencies, my hypothesis is that they, directly and indirectly, impact flow and outcomes as well.

Let’s go step by step in the business agility value stream and see how applying emotional intelligence directly impacts flow and outcomes.

business agility

Sensing the opportunity involves market research, data analysis, customer feedback, and directly observing customers in the marketplace. Applying your own self-regulation, empathy, and social skills can help you have more productive empathy interviews, obtain less-biased, face-to-face research, and control how you react to customer feedback. 

This key step in the organizational agility competency involves not only leaders applying ‘go see’, but offering the same ‘go see’ opportunities to other key roles in the development value stream so that they can better understand and reason about the problem to solve. This expands the social networks so that they can apply and evolve their emotional intelligence competencies to effectively communicate, pitch, reason, and articulate effective hypothesis statements that inspire and engage innovation.

Funding the minimum viable product (MVP) requires the motivation and social skills to help drive change, innovate, and communicate intent at scale. We all know this isn’t easy. It requires you to craft the “why” and use your social skills of influence and conflict management to negotiate and secure the funds. Some of the recommendations from the Lean Portfolio Management competency where we can leverage these social skills include:

  • Engage in participatory budgeting
  • Establish flow and stakeholder engagement through the portfolio Kanban system
  • Roadmap the portfolio
  • Integrate enterprise architecture and SMEs
  • Realize epics
  • Establish Lean budgets and guardrails 

Organizing around value requires even more of the social skills around communication, building new bonds, and fostering the information coherence necessary to build some of the world’s most complex systems. As well as the ability to connect to the customer so that our people embrace and understand what value they’re trying to deliver.

Team and technical agility and organizational agility not only aid in building these bonds but can leverage and grow all of the emotional intelligence competencies of self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. This can be amplified with the coveted help from our scrum masters and RTEs. 

Connect to the customer leverages our Agile product delivery and enterprise solution competencies and their design thinking skills to listen, reflect, empathize, and connect with the people for whom we’re designing solutions. 

This requires going deep into the empathy competency of emotional intelligence by leveraging our service-orientation mindset so that we can foresee, recognize, and meet customer needs. Diversity is also important for the ongoing development of opportunities and awareness in all societies and social circles. If we can evolve the empathy competency in all aspects of product and solution delivery, we have the opportunity to excel beyond our competitors in delivering value. 

Delivering that MVP calls upon our product and solution delivery folks to lead, and our social networks to collaborate, iterate, communicate, and deliver using their motivation and social skills. It also pulls highly on our social networks to have courage, collaborate and cooperate, take risks, and instrument rapid change so that we can learn and adapt to our ever-changing market landscapes.

Pivot or persevere pulls on the need for empathy when things don’t turn out as desired and the time comes to pivot or persevere. Our Lean portfolio management fiduciaries reason about the data, facts, and outcomes of the MVP and could quite possibly pivot to a direction of a higher cost of delay at any moment. This means we need to abandon our emotional attachment to what we created and turn to the next-highest value delivery. Self-regulation and empathy both play strongly in this step of the business agility value stream. Having the emotional awareness of why our folks are for or against any change in this step can help mitigate any delays in fostering rapid change and learning. 

Deliver value continuously imposes that our product and solution delivery people and ARTs always work together to share knowledge, build out that continuous delivery pipeline, and innovate. The continuous delivery pipeline and our DevOps mindset enable that fast-feedback loop to foster our continuous learning culture. Our iterative and incremental heartbeat also facilitates that continuous value delivery and learning cycle. All require using our social skills to grow and enable knowledge transfer and information coherence so that the social network can continue to thrive and innovate.

Our learn and adapt cycle is integral to the process, Measuring our emotional intelligence competencies will help us learn and grow our own selves alongside the SAFe core competencies. After all, if we don’t learn about ourselves, how can we show up with our truest authenticity to grow and foster that continuous learning culture?

Lean-Agile leadership enables the business agility value stream, as does the evolution of everyone’s emotional intelligence. Leaders model and leverage all of the emotional intelligence competencies so that our development value streams can evolve both their business agility competencies and their emotional competencies. If we don’t consider human emotion, we can inhibit flow, people shut down and lose their motivation, and thus jeopardize providing value to our customers.

business agility

Now, if the business agility value stream is a perspective across operational and development value streams, then the benefits, interactions, and human impacts that the emotional intelligence of the development value stream network provides to the operational value stream will propagate and evolve. The interactions and modeling of emotional intelligence will have a bi-directional impact that will engage and accelerate the operational value stream in delivering value. 

I hope I’ve provided a perspective that it’s not just mastering the SAFe business agility process competencies that enable business agility. The evolution of human emotional intelligence impacts the flow and outcomes of the business agility value stream every step of the way. As I mentioned in part 1 of this blog series, Goleman’s personal competencies of self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation fuel our human agency and our ability to manage our own emotions. The social competencies of empathy and social skills fuel how we handle relationships. Together, the evolution of emotional intelligence within our organization increases our ability to deliver value to our customers, as well as value to our individual people. What enterprise doesn’t want that?

At this point, you may be asking, “Well, how can I bring these into my SAFe transformation and journey toward business agility?” 

Here are a few techniques to get you started on your emotional intelligence journey:

  • Start with you. Allow time for self-reflection, self-work, and to recharge yourself. Leverage your retrospectives, your own personal plan-do-check-adjust cycles, and the teaming activities to evolve your emotional intelligence competencies. Integrate some emotional intelligence workshops with your leaders and teams to help evolve and experience the competencies, starting with self-awareness and self-regulation. This will help build trust so you can continue to unfold into the deeper and perhaps more sensitive competencies of empathy and social skills. 
  • Grow your own internal and external coaching network. In the same way that sports teams need coaches, our operational and development value streams and the individuals within them need coaches too. They help with all aspects of emotional intelligence, wherever folks may need or want assistance. They can provide the tools and techniques to become more self-aware, provide exercises for self-regulation and motivation, and practice empathy. Not to mention offer assistance to help people evolve their social skills. And even more powerful, coaches model the behaviors so that our social networks can lean into what they see and learn.
  • Create a community of practice around the competencies and practices. In the latest Leading by Example module that Scaled Agile released, one of the beautiful outcomes was a cohort that trusted each other and was willing to share their deepest challenges with authenticity. This type of network provides the power of a safe space that people can always come back to, to practice, share ideas and concerns, and grow without judgement or fear.
  • Help evolve assessments around Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence Competency Framework. And measure the evolution within your people and the enterprise. You’ll start to see some correlations between the SAFe measurements of flow, competencies, and outcomes.
  • Share with our community. We’d love to hear how evolving your enterprise intelligence will help your employees achieve their aspirations and help customers receive better products and solutions.

And, reach out to me. I’d love to hear how it’s going so I can learn and grow with you! I may not have been born with emotional intelligence but I’m passionate about learning and evolving with you. Find me on LinkedIn.

About Jennifer Fawcett

Jennifer is a retired, empathetic Lean and Agile leader, practitioner,

Jennifer is a retired, empathetic Lean and Agile leader, practitioner, coach, speaker, and consultant. A SAFe® Fellow, she has contributed to and helped develop SAFe content and courseware. Her passion and focus have been in delivering value in the workplace and by creating communities and culture through effective product management, product ownership, executive portfolio coaching, and leadership. She has provided dedicated service in these areas to technology companies for over 35 years. Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn.

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How 90 Teams Used Measure and Grow to Improve Performance by 134 Percent

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This post is part of an ongoing blog series where Scaled Agile Partners share stories from the field about using Measure and Grow assessments with customers to evaluate progress and identify improvement opportunities.

One of our large financial services clients needed immediate help. It was struggling to meet customer demands and industry regulations and needed to align business priorities to capacity before it was outplayed by competitors. The company thought the answer would be to invest in business in Agility practices. But so far, that strategy didn’t seem to be paying off. 

Teams were in constant flux and the ongoing change was causing unstable, unpredictable performance. The leading question was, “How can we get more output from existing capacity?”

Among the client’s key challenges:

  • No visibility into common patterns across teams
  • Inspect-and-adapt data was stuck in PowerPoint and Excel
  • Output expectations didn’t match current capacity
  • Teams weren’t delivering outcomes aligned to business value

Getting a baseline on team health 

We introduced the AgilityHealth® TeamHealth Radar Assessment to the continuous improvement leadership team, and it decided to pilot the assessment across the portfolio. Within a few weeks after launching the assessment, the organization got a comprehensive readout. It identified the top areas of improvement and key roadblocks for 90+ teams. 

These baseline results showed a lack of a backlog, not to mention a lack of clarity around the near-term roadmap. Teams were committing to work that wasn’t attached to any initiatives and the work wasn’t well-defined. Dependencies and impediments weren’t being managed. And the top areas of improvement matched data collected during inspect and adapt exercises over the previous two years. Even though the organization had previously identified these issues, nothing had been done to resolve them, as leaders did not trust the data until it came from the voice of the teams via AgilityHealth.

The ROI of slowing down to speed up

Equipped with this knowledge, leaders took the time to slow down and ensure teams had what they needed to perform their jobs efficiently. Leaders also developed a better understanding of where they needed to step in to help the teams. The organization re-focused efforts on building a sufficient backlog, aligned with a roadmap, so teams could identify dependencies earlier in the development lifecycle. 

This intentional slow-down drove a return on investment in less than a year and $6M in cost savings—equivalent in productivity to the work of five extra teams—while generating an additional $25M in value for the company.

By leveraging the results of the AgilityHealth assessment, leaders now had the data they needed to take action:

  • A repeatable process for collecting and measuring continuous improvement efforts at the end of every planning increment (PI)
  • Clear understanding of where teams stood in their Agile journey and next steps for maturity
  • Comprehensive baseline assessment results showing where individual team members thought improvement was needed, both from leaders and within their teams

What’s next

An enterprise transformation doesn’t stop with the first round of assessments. Like other Fortune 500 companies, this client plans to continue scaling growth and maturity across the enterprise, increasing momentum and building on what it’s learned.

The company plans to introduce the Agility Health assessment for individual roles, so it can measure role maturity and accelerate the development of Agile skills across defined competencies. It will continue to balance technical capacity with an emphasis on maintaining stable, cross-functional teams since these performance metrics correlate to shipping products that delight customers and grow the business. And to better facilitate “structural agility” (creating and tracking Agile team structures that support business outcomes), it will focus on ensuring the integrity of its data.

Get started

You too can leverage AgilityHealth’s Insights Dashboard to get an overall view of your organization’s Agile maturity: baseline where you are now, discover how to improve, and get to where you want to be tomorrow. Get started by logging into the SAFe Community and visiting the Measure and Grow page.

About Sally

Sally is a thought leader in the Agile and business agility space

Sally is a thought leader in the Agile and business agility space. She’s passionate about accelerating the enterprise business agility journey by measuring what matters at every level and building strong leaders and strong teams. She is an executive advisor to many Fortune 500 companies and a frequent keynote speaker. Learn more about AgilityHealth here.

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