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

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)

This transformation approach can be customized to fit other use cases with simple tweaks. Read my next post (coming soon) to learn more about other use cases.

About Bharat Shah

Bharat Shah is an SPCT candidate, certified architect, and trainer

Bharat Shah is an SPCT candidate, certified architect, and trainer who has trained over 800 participants in Lean-Agile and DevOps transformation. He is passionate about digital business and driving enterprise-scale business agility journeys.

About Tracey Orphey

racey Orphey is a SAFe-certified Release Train Engineer

Tracey Orphey is a SAFe-certified Release Train Engineer and PROSCI-certified Change Practitioner with an extensive background in digital transformations and Agile programs. She is known for her authentic and forthright approach to cutting through the noise of transformation and has successfully managed change and training programs across various industries.

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

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

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

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

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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