5. Step 1: Increase Urgency
• As leaders, how would you create a sense of urgency for your SAFe
transformation, but not panic?
Start with an Economic View
• Goal:
Create Lean Leadership for Agile/SAFe Adoption
Sustainable shortest lead time
Build a SAFe portfolio vision
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6. Step 2: Create a guiding Scrum Team!
Identify Initial
Team
Members
• Gain Executive buy-in
• Run this as an Agile team on a modified schedule
• Main goal – remove impediments to SAFe Adoption
Conduct initial
kickoff session
to
•
• Define the vision
• Determine how to make the team’s activities and progress
visible to the organization
Conduct
second kickoff
session
• Create initial backlog
• Define a release plan and roadmap
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7. Step 3: Develop a Change Vision
• Clarify how the future will be different from the past and how you can
make that future reality
“We only have IT because Delta has IT”
• The vision enabled the PMO to understand their role in the
transformational leadership and address the impediments to safe
adoption.
o Work with the PMO and the business to build a SAFe Program Vision
o Build a backlog to advance SAFe adoption
o Mitigate Impediments via Inspect and Adopt Workshops
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8. Step 4: Communicate for Buy-in
• TRAIN EVERYONE AND LAUNCH THE TRAINS
Make sure as many others as possible understand and accept the
vision and strategy
• How would you get buy in and share the vision with everyone?
Make results/Metrics “visible”
SAFe ART Launch Packs
Continuous Training for both Leader’s and Teams via the PMO
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9. Step 5: Empower Others to Act
• Train Lean Agile Leaders to remove barriers
Mitigate fear
• Change Leadership Culture to ask Powerful Questions:
How can I help?
• Decentralize appropriate decisions to the team
• Work together with PMO to remove impediments to Agile/SAFe adoption
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10. Step 6: Produce Short Term Win
• Create some visible, unambiguous successes as soon as possible
SAFe Metrics
Advertise! Create a newsletter
• Encourage transparency
Leaders were trained to understand and use Agile Tools and metrics
• Keep focus on short term goals but…
• Don’t sacrifice the long term vision!
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11. Step 7: Don’t Let Up
• Enable Change Agents: Teach and Coach
SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs) to keep
the forward momentum
• Press harder and faster after the first
successes. Be relentless with initiating
change after change until the vision is
reality
• Failure does occur and is accepted, as
long as you understand why
• Retrospectives and Inspect and Adapt
Workshops
• Teach Leaders to Welcome Change!
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12. Step 8: Make It Stick – Create a New Culture
and Keep the Train on the Tracks
• Hold on to the new ways of behaving and make sure they succeed, until
they become strong enough to replace old traditions
• Working with and Coaching RTE’s, PMO, Executives, Teams
• Value results
• Teach teams and Leaders to Hold the date sacred
• Metrics/KPIs to measure change
At every level!
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In most cases, when you attempt to do a large scale Agile transformation, you will deal with change. Very often this occurs at the behavioral and and organizational levels
As SPCs we are Change Agents and need to be prepared to deal with Organizational and Behavioral change
Three surprises about Change
What looks like a people problem is often a situational problem
What looks like laziness is often exhaustion
What looks like resistance is often lack of clarity
Who knew that Green Egg’s and Ham was an OCM treatise, I’ve often thought of it as existential work of art
Dr. Kotter is a Harvard business professor that I had the chance to meet several years ago. If you haven’t read this book, I would highly recommend it. You can finish it in a night. It is written in an allegory format. It tells the story of a penguin colony that must move because their Iceberg is melting, how they deal with the change
Hundreds of companies use this as a proven model 3M, Alcon, Humana, Net app. Proven Model
I feltit could work well to help usher in a large scale agile transformation at American Airlines. The following slides will talk about how we implemented the model and what the results are.
Notice the language. Increase a sense of Urgency, not INVENT a sense of urgency. There is a subtle but important difference. It implies that you are making the sense of urgency visible.
It could be as simple as, Delta has new cool iPhone app that could impact our revenue on routes where we compete. We need a new cool app.
American was hungry for change and needed to respond to market changes quicker
Since you can’t invent urgency, what if there is no urgency? Then you don’t have an reason for change!
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The vision also contains the transformational leadership and cultural impediments to safe adoption. They are mitigating impediments through their own Inspect and adapt workshops
“Begin with the end in mind” – Not just for the team, but how do we see Agile adoption shaping the organization
Post Scrum board, burn up/burn down, defects outside the cube or in a “war” room
This is a tough one. Especially for a centralized power base, like strong PMO.
Try to help those to help themselves.
SAFe does provide some guidance here in what decisions should be centralized and which ones should be decentralized.
We didn’t ignore the PMO, we coached them
Teams were responsible for the own processes
Celebrate successful sprints! Got everything done? Buy them lunch
Try different retrospectives to get the information that you are looking for
I’m thinking of Socrates’ other quote, which said “I drank what?”