Tag: business agility

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.

B3, the Brazilian Stock Exchange, Aligns Teams and Delivers Faster with SAFe

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B3 SAFe planning

How do you adapt your organization’s culture so it’s more responsive to customer needs and can compete with emerging alternatives without disrupting what’s working or adding unnecessary layers of complexity—all while undergoing a major paradigm-shifting merger? This was the challenge facing Latin America’s largest stock exchange, B3 S/A Brasil Bolsa Balcao (B3), back in 2019.

Recently, Marcio Tambelini, SPC and Lean Agile Transformation Coordinator at B3, sat down with us at the 2023 SAFe® Summit Nashville to discuss his organization’s journey with SAFe over the past few years. He talked candidly about the challenges that led to B3 considering Agile methodologies, what motivated them to adopt the Scaled Agile Framework®, and their results. 

  • Challenges
  • Process
  • Results
Leaders at B3 gather in person
Leaders at B3 gather in person to prioritize and align work for the PI as part of the Brazilian company’s multi-year SAFe initiative.

B3 Challenges

Every organization has its own operating culture and norms. In the case of a merger, the challenge becomes combining those norms and establishing a new, unified way of working. 

This was the situation facing B3 in 2019. At that point, B3 was two years into a merger that had ushered in a new era of its history. BM&FBOVESPA, a leading regional exchange, had joined forces with CETIP, a merger securities clearinghouse, creating B3. The combination positioned B3 as a key player in Latin America’s financial landscape. But it also created a need for shared values and common goals. 

“We had a distance between these areas, and every area had different problems,” said Tambelini.

A growing number of competitors were also emerging in the Brazilian market, putting additional pressure on B3 to deliver new features, capture new markets, and respond to challenges faster and more predictably. 

When leaders started exploring options for improving their culture, they were drawn to Agile for its focus on speed and collaboration. They were also interested in SAFe to provide the necessary training for scaling Agile practices.

“We decided that Agile would bring us common objectives and common challenges,” said Tambelini. “This was very important for us because each area had personal problems and personal challenges. So we decided to work together, and Agile methodology was the best way to resolve this problem for us.”

Leaders at B3 prioritize and align work for the PI
Leaders at B3 gather in person to prioritize and align work for the PI as part of the Brazilian company’s multi-year SAFe initiative.

B3 Process

B3 started small with one Portfolio, using SAFe to guide the adoption of Agile principles at scale. In 2021, after proving the value of the Agile approach, they decided to upgrade to a SAFe Enterprise subscription. This would allow them to make training and resources available to the entire organization and better align the Agile adoption of separate teams. 

By 2023, Agile practices had spread throughout B3. They had formed 32 value streams, with 121 Agile teams and more than 1,400 people working in those value streams. They had also begun expanding Agile values beyond development teams and into the operations side of the business.

“At B3, we’re working toward business agility, not just Agile … there are many initiatives in other areas like Human Resources, infrastructure, finance, and others,” said Tambelini.

He said the creation of value streams was particularly important to leaders because before, the various parts of B3 had functioned with different challenges and objectives, making it hard to track progress and align efforts. Value streams enabled them to see how each part of the organization played a critical role in delivering a product or service to the market.

Another way B3 brought teams together was by adopting shared metrics like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs). They also shifted their mindset from “projects” to “products” to help teams better visualize the customer and focus on the end value delivered. 

“This has given us the opportunity to enhance our customer-centric approach, delivering products and services that align more closely with their needs,” said Tambelini.

Leaders at B3 formulate the Brazilian company's multi-year SAFe initiative.
Leaders at B3 gather in person to prioritize and align work for the PI as part of the Brazilian company’s multi-year SAFe initiative.

B3 Results

Tambelini said the results have been overwhelmingly positive, helping to secure B3’s position as the leading stock exchange in Latin America. 

“All the portfolios that we started in the last two or three years had many kinds of good results, especially when we’re talking about the clients,” he said. 

One of the biggest benefits has been the ability to deliver value to clients in a much shorter time cycle. Before, delivering a new product or feature could take up to a year. Now, B3 developers can roll out new features for clients throughout the year, much faster than was previously possible.

Within B3’s largest portfolio, which represented 70 percent of their revenue, the challenge had become managing layers of complexity among clients, markets, and regulators. So before proposing any drastic changes, leaders started by mapping out the interdependencies among platforms and teams. 

Their initial priority with this portfolio was to bring alignment and transparency to the work. They chose to adopt Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) because they believed that starting at the top and focusing on the financial aspect among leaders and stakeholders would bring much-needed clarity and direction to the rest of the process.

“Our understanding grew, and we identified points of contact and bottlenecks,” said Tambelini. “We proposed value streams that could bring productivity gains and increase deliveries to the clients.”

Instead of budgeting for projects, they began budgeting for products, enabling B3 to increase speed and become more responsive as an organization.

“This action has been instrumental in our evolution, leading to significant gains with both customers and regulators,” he said. “We’re able to respond to new challenges, become more efficient, increase customer experience, and capture new markets.”

Juan Saldivar, Latin America business development director at Scaled Agile, Inc., said B3’s journey is one of many inspiring examples of how SAFe is helping businesses in the LATAM region transform, compete, and become more customer-centric.

“On the development side, they’ve seen shorter cycles, and, in one product release that I know of, they were able to get ten times the expected number of customers,” said Saldivar. “I think they realized the power of SAFe when building new solutions and new products and getting an attractive solution to market.”

B3 Conclusion

B3’s adoption of SAFe has proven highly successful, enabling leaders to overcome merger challenges and dynamic market pressures and begin to operate as one organization. Starting with one portfolio in 2019 and then expanding in the following years, they’ve been able to reduce delivery times and increase the value created. Their story proves the importance of approaching change intentionally, holistically, and with the customer at the center. 

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Check out these additional resources to learn more:

How to Prepare Your Lean-Agile Center of Excellence for Success

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Wouldn’t it be great if transformations could go on autopilot? 

Unfortunately, despite what we wish for, they can’t. They need strong and resilient teams driving transformations to success. 

In this blog, you’ll learn how to set up your Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) for success. Everything in this blog is from our experiences in the field. 

Our story begins at the very first LACE Summit, where we met for the first time. Heads of LACE teams from across the globe were brought together, where we were able to collaborate, exchange ideas, and benefit from each other’s experiences. This took place on October 6, 2022, when Amadeus welcomed Orange, Renault, Vodafone, and Scaled Agile, Inc. to the Amadeus headquarters in Sophia-Antipolis, France. 

We left the LACE summit with practical examples of

  • LACE team setups
  • Challenges
  • Pitfalls
  • Best practices
  • Recommendations 

The event was not only fun but a real eye-opener.

What to Consider When Setting up Your Lean-Agile Center of Excellence

We identified four focus areas when creating a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence:

  • Setup
  • Reporting line 
  • Diversity of capabilities
  • Prioritization process

LACE setup

You have many options for LACE setup.

It’s important to consider your progress in the transformation journey and transformation ambition.

Most LACE teams have a Hub-and-Spoke setup. This includes relays in the organizations they support (SAFe® champions). Most LACE teams include HR and Finance in their decision process and roadmap. 

Based on input from other LACE teams, it’s not easy to map a LACE organization. The organization has plenty of connections and direct or dotted links with other groups. 

You usually start with a small team of change agents representing different areas. They’re willing to drive the change, experiment, and learn fast. These team members may only dedicate a limited part of their capacity to the transformation at the beginning. But they’re willing to go the extra mile. 

Skills in the LACE are global and include R&D, HR, Finance, Product Management, Design Thinking, and Communication. Use external consultants as you develop the skills of your internal change agents at the start of the journey. The goal of these external partners should be to enable your LACE team to drive transformation on their own. 

As the scale of your transformation increases, you will also need to scale your team. You may need to create new transformation teams to support simultaneous transformations in different areas (portfolios). 

At Amadeus and Vodafone, we use the Hub and Spoke model. This enables decentralized decision-making and concurrent transformation initiatives in different areas. It also brings alignment on important transformation topics with a strong Hub. 

At Amadeus, we also have SAFe champions. We nominate these champions and train them on SAFe SPC curriculum. Once trained, they become strong change agents in the organization. They sustain the change in alignment with the LACE support. 

The most critical success factor when you start is nominating a strong authentic leader. This leader understands the business and the challenges the company is facing. It should be someone eager to drive the change and with energy and resilience to resolve impediments and roadblocks along the way. Pairing two leaders—one from Business and one from IT—will increase alignment of the transformation from the get-go.

Reporting lines

Since most transformations start in IT, organizations create a Head of LACE position in IT. The role usually reports to the Chief Information Officer (CIO) or Chief Technology Officer (CTO). This underpins the importance of the transformation. It also creates a direct line of communication with executives within the organization. 

But, in this case, the Business Executive Sponsor is crucial to the transformation. They enable acceptance of the transformation team in the Business organization. Otherwise, there is a risk that business engagement will lack. People will perceive the transformation as IT only. 

At Amadeus, there is a double reporting line of Head of LACE both to the CTO and a dotted line reporting into HR. This double reporting enables the LACE to dig into engineering perspectives. It also gives them a transversal mandate to guide the people and culture evolution. 

Agile Coaches usually report to one line organization led by the Head of LACE. This ensures

  • Alignment
  • Consistency of implementation approach
  • Fast upskilling
  • Knowledge-sharing 

It’s important to note that a successful LACE is a collaboration, not a line organization. The LACE needs more cross-functional and cross-departmental capabilities. These capabilities anchor the change in the organization.

Diversity of capabilities

Depending on your transformation goals and environment, you’ll need different skills and capabilities. Your transformation will evolve. This means your required skills and capabilities will also evolve. New challenges and impediments will come up. 

A typical LACE team can include the following skills and capabilities:

  • Agile Coaching and Training
  • Agile Methods and Tooling
  • Change Management and Communication
  • Design Thinking
  • DevOps
  • Representation of Finance, HR, line managers, and change agents 

In a regulatory and compliance environment, include the following experts in your LACE team:

  • Tooling
  • Compliance
  • Process

Prioritization process

Transformation requires focus. Change agents and change champions have jobs that keep them busy. Other priorities get in the way. Transformations can feel like you’re changing tires on a highway at full speed. 

To counterbalance conflicting priorities, try the following:

  • Upfront investment in alignment
  • Involving line managers of your change agents
  • Negotiating transformation goals as part of yearly performance goals

A small team of dedicated SPCs can speed up your transformation. When you start to scale on an enterprise level, the impediments will get bigger and harder to address. 

At Amadeus, the LACE runs the transformation. They use SAFe Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) for prioritization. They use an Agile Release Train for the execution. 

A Strategic Portfolio Review (SPR) drives the transformation LPM. The SPR includes executives from all business units. These executives share:

  • Priorities
  • Roadmap
  • Major achievements
  • Impediments where the LACE needs top management support 

Amadeus holds the SPR quarterly. 

They also organize bi-weekly Portfolio Sync meetings. These meetings include executive representatives. They address Epics and operational progress of the transformation train. 

Some of the SPR members are also Business Owners of the transformation train. This generates better alignment and valuable discussions with the team members.

Prioritization at Amadeus
Prioritization at Amadeus

Lean-Agile Center of Excellence Challenges and Tips

The Lean-Agile Center of Excellence will face challenges throughout the transformation journey. The following two challenges are particularly critical to overcome.

  • Executive engagement
  • Transformation ownership

Challenge 1: Executive engagement

Transformation is not a sprint but a marathon. It’s not enough for executives to give their buy-in at the beginning of the transformation. They shouldn’t expect business results with minimal effort. 

Many transformation teams struggle to get continuous executive engagement needed for sustainable change. 

To keep executives engaged, always start with the WHY. Define the clear business outcomes you want to achieve. You don’t need to get engagement from all executives at once from the very beginning. Start with one. Build trust. Show quick incremental improvements, and let them become your biggest advocate.

Challenge 2: Transformation ownership

As the LACE team, avoid becoming a ‘Doctor’s office’. People should not come to you for quick pain relief and fast results with the least effort. With this method, if something is not working, it immediately becomes your fault. 

Ownership of the transformation and business results should stay in the delivery organization. The LACE team is an enablement team. They partner with different business areas to

  • Become a catalyst of change
  • Drive continuous improvement culture
  • Help address roadblocks on the way to success

Tips for solving these challenges

Here are some tips for solving the two challenges mentioned in the previous section. 

Engage your executives in your roadmap 

Train executives. Coach them. Involve them in the planning through retrospectives, system demos, and other formats. 

Why is this important? 

You’ll need their support to get everyone on board. Then you’ll need their approval (and even more so, their sponsorship) to implement changes in the organization. 

Don’t get out of breath

You are of no use if you run out of energy. Take time with your work. Make sure your teams have the right workload to avoid feeling like they’re gasping for air. Don’t be too wrapped up in meeting your own goals and forget to engage your team.

Changing for the sake of change won’t be enough for your teams

People need a compelling reason to change. Engage colleagues by building a vision and defining a burning platform. We’ve seen this work in many transformation journeys.

Change agents should work as a team and support each other

Organizational transformation is tedious work, and it is not a one-person job. Use PI (Planning Interval) planning to align priorities. Ensure the team works toward the same objectives. 

Celebrate success together as a team and boost motivation 

Short-term wins encourage team members to be more engaged and positive about the work. 

Some people believe SAFe and agility are for technical people, like engineers. But this is not always true. Practicing Agile ways of working means planning work and delivering value based on the customer’s wishes. By this, all aspects of a company should be Agile. 

So, your transformation team needs representation from everywhere. This includes business, HR, Finance, Procurement, and more. They will be your change agents in different areas of the business.

A Checklist to Keep Your LACE on Track

Setting up a LACE team can be overwhelming. Oftentimes, as an internal team, you may only have one chance to get it right. 

Here’s a checklist based on experience from the trenches to help your LACE team get it right on the first try. 

1. Design a purpose-driven transformation that ensures continuous executive engagement.

  • Secure a transformation sponsor at the executive level
  • Define common objectives (OKRs) with your sponsor
  • Connect to strategy and define transformation narrative
  • Involve executive leaders in prioritizing the LACE backlog of  transformation initiatives

2. Define and evolve your LACE vision/mission, transformation scope, capabilities needed, and your operating model.

  • Host a LACE Kickoff to define your vision, mission, ways of working, initial scope, and metrics
  • Ensure nomination of HR and Finance representatives and establish a good mix of Business and Technology representatives in your LACE team
  • Co-create transparent rules of engagement between your LACE team and transformation the initiatives you’re supporting
  • Join forces and connect with the strategy team in your organization, Cultural Center of Excellence, or Digital Transformation office (when applicable) to support broader enterprise transformation and cultural change
  • Drive alignment on vision, mission, and why story when you scale across the organization and make your transformation inclusive to all transformation teams
Amadeus Lean-Agile Center of Excellence Canvas

3. Invest time in communication, focusing on different and sometimes unique needs of stakeholders. Remember, there is no successful transformation without successful communication.

  • Create an engaging communication strategy and communication plan for different target groups
  • Experiment; be bold and creative 
  • Promote transformation stories, testimonials, and learnings in different formats (e.g. regular demos, newsletters, videos, podcasts, etc.)
  • Organize regular Agile events or internal Agile conferences to bring your transformation stories to life and connect change agents and enthusiasts in the organization
  • Don’t forget that executives represent a crucial communication target group; invest time in understanding their communication needs

4. Adapt to change, scale with alignment, and measure success.

  • Evolve your transformation scope over time and adjust your LACE capabilities depending on the current focus area of transformation
  • Scale transformation with SPC Champions in different areas and connect them via Community of Practice to drive excellence, community spirit, and pride in driving transformation together
  • Measure NPS of your LACE team for different transformation initiatives you are supporting

Additional LACE Resources

If you’re interested in setting up and driving a successful LACE, we would love to invite you to the next edition of the LACE Summit. It will be planned at Amadeus Sophia-Antipolis, France in October 2023. Join us to hear and share about your favorite topic. Stay tuned! 

Here are some additional LACE resources:

Ensure LACE success with SAFe Enterprise - Learn More

About Sandra Bellong

Blog author Sandra Bellong headshot

Sandra Bellong, Head of Lean-Agile Center of Excellence at Amadeus, is a senior people manager, project manager, and Agile/SAFe specialist with a strong background in business analysis and development design. She is a dynamic, engaged, and motivated actor in Agile transformations, process and methodology improvements, and always in the scope of high customer satisfaction. 

Connect with Sandra on LinkedIn.

About Alena Keck

Blog author Alena Keck headshot

Alena Keck, Head of Lean-Agile Center of Excellence at Vodafone, is passionate about helping large global companies reach the full potential of business agility and overcome challenges of Agile transformation at scale. Her mission is to be a strong change agent who creates strong transformation teams and growing Lean-Agile leaders. Her motto is “Transformation is a Team Sport.” 

Connect with Alena on LinkedIn.

Three Key Components of Healthy Agile Transformations

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Blog banner: Ensure your transformation lives a long life

Improving your health is important so you can live a longer life. The same goes for your Agile transformation.

Certain habits improve your transformation’s health. Like eating healthy and working out do for our bodies.

I’ve seen these habits improve and sustain Agile transformations in many organizations:

  • Change leaders pave the way
  • Strategy connects directly to the work
  • People strategies activate engagement

Each of these habits signals your organization embraces real change. And embracing change is the foundation of a sustainable Agile transformation.

Restating the three bullet points

Change Leaders Pave the Way

Leadership is the most important part of a healthy Agile transformation. I’d go as far as saying leaders can make or break transformation efforts.

So leadership teams must lead the change for it to stick. They do this by leading by example at all levels of the organization (from the portfolio to Agile teams).

Change leaders also follow SAFe® Lean-Agile Principles and Core Values when making decisions.

Principles and values guide decisions

Leaders should embrace and demonstrate the principles and values in their leadership roles. And consult them when making a change to one of their transformation strategies.

Easterseals demonstrates one way to apply this thinking in this customer story. The company applied SAFe starting with Lean-Agile leadership. They placed change leaders in key roles. And then added the principles and structures to guide their decisions.

Some organizations disregard the principles and values to tailor SAFe. They make this modification to fit SAFe into their culture. But this creates an anti-pattern.

These modifications may include:

  • Changing the names of the roles identified in the Framework
  • Picking and choosing which ceremonies to hold
  • Training leaders on SAFe without proper leadership coaching and guidance

SAFe is not a prescriptive framework. Yet it’s important to maintain its foundational principles and values. This ensures a healthy Agile transformation.

Read more about how to apply the SAFe Core Values in a work setting here.

Operational excellence objectives facilitate improvements

Change leaders extend their reach through Lean-Agile Communities of Excellence (LACE). LACEs should share transformation learnings across portfolios. This aligns each portfolio to Lean-Agile practices and leadership. It also helps to create a Continuous Learning Culture.

Transformation leaders in the LACE should also spearhead improvement initiatives within the organization. Also, they should focus on cross-training initiatives. This solves bottlenecks and other flow issues.

Leadership sponsorship extends beyond sustaining to accelerating change

In a healthy Agile transformation, leadership doesn’t stop at sponsoring the change. They go as far as participating in and accelerating the change.

When this does not happen, the following pattern can occur.

A Fortune 100 large enterprise pivoted from Waterfall to Agile. (Notice Lean was not even part of the conversation).

Leadership did not choose the method for this transformation. Instead, they pushed this decision to the leaders in each business unit.

You can only imagine what happened. Some business leaders chose SAFe. Others tried a hybrid approach and pulled practices from several Agile frameworks. Others decided to ‘baby step’ it and start with small teams. None of the teams in this ‘small team’ example took into account all the dependencies on the other teams.

Six months in, one leader asked: “Where can I get a holistic view of our product delivery and how we are tracking against all our initiatives?”

With so many frameworks and practices in play, there was no easy way to answer this.

Other impacts?

Business units often worked on initiatives with other business units. But they did not have a common cadence. Or alignment on dependencies or ceremonies. It became chaotic to figure out how to execute together to deliver on business requests.

If leadership selected one framework and language, that would have united the organization. And made the transformation smoother.

This example demonstrates why leadership needs to extend beyond sponsorship to participation. It ensures a transformation’s health and, thus, long-lived success.

Strategy Connects Directly to Daily work

Leadership is in place. Now what? Everyone in a healthy Agile transformation engages in their work. To improve employee engagement, show employees how their work makes a difference.

Make this connection through transparency about your strategies. Show how they align with your enterprise’s Vision and Mission.

How do you make this a healthy habit? By sharing updates during all hands or other standing company-wide meetings.

One way Scaled Agile, Inc. shows its employees how they’re impacting enterprise strategy is through color coding. We assign each strategic theme a specific color (on brand, of course). In System Demo, the agenda is color-coded by the corresponding strategic theme.

screenshot of recent system demo with color coding by strategic theme
Agenda from a recent system demo

This transparency is important, especially when the strategy must pivot. It’s important employees understand the following before any work stops or changes:

  • Learnings from the pivot
  • The reason for the pivot

Be thoughtful about how you communicate this information with your organization. This is work that many spend the majority, if not all, of their time on. It’s important to be sensitive to this.

Porsche shared an example of strategy transparency at the 2021 SAFe Summit. Their executive leadership committed to how they wanted to work. And which KPIs they would drive with their products. Leadership did this on stage in front of the entire digital division. This commitment launched the digital sector into its first ARTs and PI Planning.

This shared strategy gave employees a reason to stay engaged with their work. They knew they were working towards a common goal across the digital department.

Once employees understand company strategy, they can connect it to their daily work. This connection is important for improving engagement too. Engagement is the final piece of maintaining a healthy Agile transformation.

People Strategies Activate Engagement

One indicator of a transformation’s health is its most important asset: people. To keep your transformation healthy, you must keep your people happy. One way to do this is through actively engaging them in their roles.

Generate future-focused learning opportunities with paths for Agile roles

If employees see growth opportunities, they will likely remain at their current company.

See these recently updated articles for career development inspiration:

Each article includes role descriptions by category. These descriptions provide opportunities for growth in each of these Agile roles.

specific responsibilities for each Agile role

Organizations can create paths and learning opportunities based on these role-specific focus areas.

Refresh engagement strategies to align with the current workforce

When employees were asked, “What’s one thing that keeps you from being engaged?” they responded with the following reasons:

  • No autonomy
  • Lack of safe space
  • No clear career direction
  • Lack of vision and inspiration
  • Missing feedback

As mentioned in the previous section, engagement creates happier, more motivated employees. Happier and more motivated employees sustain a healthy Agile transformation.

If your engagement strategies need a refresh, try these suggestions:

  • Overhaul outdated engagement strategies
  • Align intent with your organization’s social purpose
  • Facilitate a relational and emotional connection with employees
  • Generate future-focused learning opportunities
  • Transform your ceremonies into learning socials
  • Connect individual contributions to the organizational vision
  • Minimize disruptions to allow for flow
  • Look for patterns of inattentional blindness
  • Meet people where they are
  • Co-create a path to re-engage

To learn more about people engagement strategies, watch my talk from the 2022 SAFe Summit. It’s on the SAFe Community Platform: In It to Win It! People Engagement Strategies to Propel your SAFe Transformation. (Tip: Command + F search the talk title or scroll to the Leading the Change section of the page.)

Connect people to the Vision, Mission, and each other

In a remote/hybrid post-COVID environment, it can feel like you’re working on an island. It’s hard to feel connected to the people you no longer share an office space with.

This connection is important for creating a healthy Agile transformation. Connect people to the following to remind them what they’re working for:

  • The organization’s Vision
  • The organization’s Mission
  • Each other

It gives them the drive to work through the uncomfortable parts of transforming.

Ways you can connect people in your organization:

  • Schedule volunteer opportunities for teams
  • Add standing mystery 1:1s to the company calendar
  • Share rotating appreciations for individual team
  • Highlight positive customer experiences, interactions, or success milestones
  • Champion learning networks

Conclusion

It takes work to maintain your health. Maintaining the health of your transformation is no different. Incorporate these three components into your Agile transformation. It will give you a strong foundation for sustainable change. And prolong your Agile transformation life.

Other resources to incorporate into your transformation routine. You can think of them like supplements if we’re sticking to the health metaphor:

About Audrey Boydston

Audrey Boydston is a senior consultant at Scaled Agile

Audrey Boydston is a senior consultant at Scaled Agile and an experienced SPCT, Lean-Agile coach, trainer, and facilitator. Her work focuses on continuous learning, building fundamentals, re-orienting around principles, and helping clients—from senior executives to developers—build networks and communities that support their transformations.

View all posts by Audrey Boydston

SAFe Metrics at the Team Level: Sales Ops

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Contextualizing SAFe metrics: sales ops edition

SAFe® provides the strategic concepts and guidance that help steer transformations. And while the Framework metrics article focuses on high-level metrics like KPIs, OKRs, and strategic themes, some teams can struggle to contextualize SAFe metrics and measurement domains like flow, outcomes, and competency.

This is especially true for non-technical teams.

Even when metrics are captured, improvement areas might remain blurry without a shared understanding of what the metrics mean and show.

Diagram of metrics at the portfolio, Solution, ART, and team levels

How do teams with different skill sets, business objectives, and types of work all use the same measurement domains to gauge success? How do they know if they are on track to achieve PI Objectives and Iteration Goals?

We asked Scrum Masters from five different teams to answer five questions about the metrics they use to measure flow, outcomes, and competency. Their answers were illuminating, and we’re excited to share the results in a new article series titled “SAFe Metrics for Teams.” Each article will highlight one or more teams and take a close look at how they use SAFe metrics in their own domains.

TEAMS SURVEYED

  • Sales Ops
  • Communications
  • Multimedia
  • Customer Success
  • Product Development

METRICS SURVEY QUESTIONS

  • What metrics does your team use to track outcomes?
  • How do these metrics help your team define and plan work?
  • What flow metrics does your team use?
  • How has your team used metrics to drive continuous improvement?
  • How does your team self-assess competency?

Let’s get started!

Applying SAFe® Metrics for a Sales Operations Team

Sales ops teams are charged with enabling the sales team to hit their growth targets. This means sales ops should do work that creates a better, faster, and more predictable sales process, including:

  • Lead management and routing
  • Database integrity
  • Enablement training
  • Sales team onboarding
  • Continued learning and development
  • Contract management solutions
  • Sales process optimization
  • Much more  

By nature, sales ops work is often routine and process-heavy. It’s a lot of “run the business” or “business as usual” (BAU) work. Despite its sometimes repetitive nature, the pace and volume of this work will affect sales team objectives. Agile marketing teams are often in a similar position. 

Plus, enterprise-level sales are getting more complicated. There’s more technology, data, tools, and systems than ever. For sales leaders, this complexity means spending more time managing systems and less time working with teams and growing territories. As sales teams face increasing pressure to become more customer-centric and responsive, the demand for Agility also grows.

How can sales ops teams embrace the same Agile spirit and practice that drives other business areas like development and IT? More specifically, how can a sales ops department employ measurements like flow, outcomes, and competency in the same way as other SAFe teams?

For Kate Quigly, a senior Scrum Master with the sales ops team, it starts with the right mindset and clear goals focused on helping sales teams embrace Agility in their planning and operations. We asked Kate to lift the lid on her team’s process for using metrics, pursuing improvement, and applying SAFe measurement domains. Below, Kate explains how the sales ops team makes SAFe guidance work for them.

OUTCOMES

Question: What metrics does your team use to track outcomes? How do these metrics help your team define and plan work?

Answer: Outcomes are the perfect opportunity to assess which work is worth doing and what value is delivered. Here are the metrics we use to measure outcomes:

PI Objectives

The nature of our work makes it fairly simple to craft SMART PI objectives. Here’s an example of a good PI objective for a typical sales ops team:

  • Example: “To grow strategic accounts by five percent in Q1 2023, create three account plans per region, and complete five live training sessions with sales by the end of Q4 2022.”

This objective would align with our team’s mission to bolster the sales team’s performance and operations in several ways:

  1. It empowers sales to develop their account plans in the future. With this capability, sales can immediately take action to capture new opportunities in expanding regions.
  2. It’s written to help sales achieve growth targets, which could be a strategic theme and/or PI Objective for the entire ART.
  3. It enables future work that will contribute clear business value.

Team Business Value

Business value assignments are where we learn whether the right work was planned and completed correctly. We can use business value scores to understand the following:

  • Did we plan the right mix of work? For us, this could mean uncovering the wrong balance of BAU work vs. “user-facing” projects.
  • Were we able to complete our committed objectives? If not, why?
  • Were our objectives clear and measurable?
  • Are we delivering value?  

Iteration Goals

Iteration goals keep us focused on the most important work. Because iteration goals are not always reflected in a single story, we can check each iteration to see if visible work is actually contributing to our iteration goals (and PI Objectives). We want to discover if completed stories actually support the iteration goals. If there’s misalignment here, and we’re planning proper capacity, trouble could be around the corner.

Team Purpose Statement

While objective metrics are critical, qualitative assessments also matter. We often refer to our team purpose statement to check whether planned work needs to be rephrased, reexamined, or re-scoped to align with our core purpose.

FLOW

Question: What flow metrics does your team use?

Answer: Since we’re a relatively new team, we’re still honing the best set of metrics. I recommend using a variety of metrics as each one can highlight valuable insights. Right now, we use the following metrics most often:

Flow Velocity

  • Team velocity should be a stable, predictable measurement that helps the team forecast capacity for future work. Velocity metrics should never be compared across teams or used as a productivity measurement. Too much emphasis on achieving the right number can cause teams to “game” the system.  
  • I use some standard questions to spark conversations, including:
    • Is our team velocity significantly dropping? Let’s discuss why.
    • Is our team velocity significantly increasing?  What’s the cause of this increase?
  • In particular, we look at the number of rollover stories from one iteration to the next. The root cause of these rollover stories can reveal issues with prioritization, role competency, and dependencies. This analysis helped our team discover a missing toolset needed for data management work.

Flow Time

We use cycle time scatterplot charts to show lead time and cycle time. These charts capture when an item starts and finishes. Low cycle time means the team is performing well and value flows fast to customers. Items with high cycle time are easy to identify and retrospect on.

Measuring flow time helped us find a recurring delay within the legal department. The delay caused an issue with generating new contracts, which are critical for our internal customers (sales) to finalize their work within a fixed timeline. 

This data helps us talk about problems in a new way by asking the following:

  1. Why did some items take so long to complete? What could we have done differently? Are there action items we can do to improve?
  2. Our average time to finish an item is X amount of days. What improvements would lower this for even more efficiency? 

Flow Distribution

Distribution is crucial for understanding whether we’re spending time on the right mix of work types. The team believes (rightly) that BAU work should be shown and recognized. Common BAU work includes:

  • Analyze closed lost/won deals
  • Data cleanup
  • Contract updates
  • Onboarding/offboarding tasks
  • Training, onboarding, and enablement 

However, I’ve had to coach the team on how to incorporate this type of work into Scrum, and how to balance BAU with “new development” work, which we affectionately call “special projects.” For our team, special projects would include work like:

  • Salesforce automations
  • New system implementation for key account management

For us, all of these metrics roll up into two primary dashboards. We frequently use the following charts to check our progress:

screenshot of an iteration cumulative flow diagram
Iteration cumulative flow diagram
screenshot of a release flow diagram
Release cumulative flow diagram
A screenshot of a burndown chart
Burndown chart
  • Iteration and Release cumulative flow diagrams help visualize the work. These diagrams show cycle time, work in progress, and throughput.
  • This metric surfaced an interesting “stair step” pattern, which could indicate rushing at the end of the iteration. Once identified, we were able to find some key bottlenecks that are unique to the sales environment.
  • Burndown charts. These charts can predict the team’s likelihood of completing the committed work in a given time period. By visualizing the work in this way, you can see if delivery is on track, will complete early, or will be delayed.

Question: How has your team used metrics to drive continuous improvement?

Answer: These metrics help us identify mistakes, whether it’s a missed dependency, unclear acceptance criteria, or errant planning. For example, I’ve seen our team continually battle context switching, indicated by a large amount of work in progress (WIP). 

The context switching was causing us to miss more meaningful opportunities. For sales ops, this could mean putting new dashboards on hold and instead prioritizing new account research. During team retros, we can use questions like the following to identify improvement areas: 

  • Are there too many items “in progress” which can result in costly context switching?  
  • Are there too many items “in progress” which can signal a bottleneck problem in our workflow?
  • Is there a large amount of work that is “not started” that may cause us to delay or miss upcoming milestones?

Improvements tested:

  • Stop starting and start finishing by limiting WIP
  • Swarming or pairing to complete work faster 

Teams identify and embrace metrics depending on how you set the stage and approach these conversations. Again, for us, the priorities are clarified by focusing on the most valuable work instead of giving all planned work the same priority level. We must continually ask: “what’s the most value we can deliver this week, this iteration, and this PI?”

COMPETENCY

Question: How does your team self-assess competency?

Answer: As a new team, we’re focused on the team and technical agility assessment, which was just distributed to the team. I am very excited to use this as another tool to start team conversations about improvement areas.

Bonus Tips

Kate shared a few other key ways that sales ops teams can “think” Agile and adapt SAFe practices to their business domain:

  • Will the planned work allow sales team members to be more decentralized, productive, and empowered in their job?
  • Is the planned work only planned because “that’s the work we do”? 
  • What work would support cross-functional capabilities for sales teams/members?
    1. Example: A standardized sales deck with editable fields to eliminate dependence on graphic design support.
  • What processes can be automated to create economies of scale?
    1. Example: An automated, repeatable de-duplication process for faster and more accurate CRM data management.   

Overall, changing their way of thinking about work and measuring value has helped the sales ops team embrace Agile principles and improve alignment across the ART. As a result, they have better tools for visualizing, categorizing, and prioritizing BAU work with critical projects while also seeing the real value they deliver.

About Kate Quigly

Blog author Kate Quigly headshot

Kate is a Senior Scrum Master at Scaled Agile, Inc. She has many years of experience coaching Agile teams with high energy and creativity.  She is passionate about lifelong learning, experimenting with teams, and creating a collaborative culture. Connect with Kate on LinkedIn.

About Madi Fisher

Blog author Madi Fisher headshot

Madi is an Agile Coach at Scaled Agile. She has many years of experience coaching Agile teams in all phases of their journeys. She is a collaborative facilitator and trainer and leads with joy and humor to drive actionable outcomes. She is a true galvanizer! Connect with Madi on LinkedIn.

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.

Creative Tension – Implementing SAFe Properly

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How to use the gap between where you are and where you want to be

This post is part of the ongoing Practice Makes Permanent blog series. Read the first post here.

OK, so your Lean-Agile transformation is stalling. It’s not delivering the increased value and reduced delivery times you expected. Your teams are struggling and perhaps updating their resumes. You thought that implementing the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) would bring you these outcomes, but you’ve discovered you’re not using all Ten Critical Success Factors of SAFe. Perhaps you’ve discovered that you’re not actually implementing SAFe correctly as you intended, which means you’re probably not gaining the full value of what the Framework has to offer. The key to taking full advantage of this realization is to be encouraged rather than discouraged. We can’t improve until we see the improvements that are needed. The purpose of this article is to help you see that these discoveries should be cause for celebration, not concern.

One of my favorite books (and authors) is Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. In his book, Peter describes the concept of creative tension as ”the tension between vision and reality.” It’s the concept of discovering the gap between where you are and where you want to be and using that gap as energy to make improvements. Think of it as a transformational snowball effect.

SAFe guidance depicts the perfect scenario where an organization exemplifies all seven core competencies, delivering high quality and accurate value to customers, and having the kind of culture and work environment that makes it a great place to work. Then we look at the current reality and realize we have a long way to go to reach this nirvana state of business agility.

Sometimes that gap seems insurmountable, unachievable, and perhaps just unrealistic. As we identify that first improvement opportunity and implement that first improvement effort, we start to see some excitement and engagement. We’re still a long way from that nirvana view, but we’re starting to make progress. And that creates more energy for the next effort. So, we take on the next improvement effort, and there seems to be just a bit more engagement and hope that we can move forward. And that’s where we start to see the snowball effect of relentless improvement.

Implementing SAFe Properly
The snowball effect.

For each improvement we make, we gain more energy, engagement, and willingness to change. And we start to go faster. And faster. And faster. And now, that relentless improvement pillar seems to make more sense, and in fact, becomes part of our DNA. As Peter Senge stated, “The most effective people are those who can ‘hold’ their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly.”

Positive change is contagious. It brings excitement and hope to the organization. That energy must start somewhere. So, as Taichi Ohno said, “If you are going to do Kaizen continuously … you’ve got to assume that things are a mess. Too many people just assume that things are all right the way they are … If you assume that things are all right the way they are, you can’t do Kaizen. So, change something!”

My point is to change something with a huge grin on your face because you can see the snowball effect of creative tension pulling you upward.

Implementing SAFe Properly
A team celebrating its small wins.

So, when you see that gap between your current reality and where you want to be, you should view it as an opportunity, not a negative situation. In other words, you should view every improvement opportunity with excitement and anticipation of where you can go next on the journey toward business agility.

As change agents, we’ve learned that empathy along the transformation journey is vital. We know how hard it is, so we fully understand why you skipped some of the steps. But now is the time to restart or renew that journey. In subsequent posts, we will talk about specific activities and components we can use the creative tension approach to jump-start a Lean-Agile transformation. The goal of this series is to help you find the next opportunity to accelerate that snowball effect in your transformation.

Check back soon for the next post in the series.

About Dwayne Stroman

Dwayne is an Enterprise Transformation Coach and Trainer and SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer

Dwayne is an Enterprise Transformation Coach and Trainer and SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT) with more than 20 years of experience. He is ultra-passionate about helping large organizations learn how to build the right products and deliver optimal value through learning and customer validation. Dwayne uses his SPCT role to help several Fortune 100 companies, as well as many growing companies in finance, retail, healthcare, and logistics, realize the benefits of a Lean-Agile mindset. Connect with Dwayne on LinkedIn.