Delivering value with Pega Best Practices in combination with SAFe

With a few days left, this half-year is soon coming to an end. Calendar milestones are good opportunities not only to follow up on set targets and milestones, but also to reflect on and share experienced lessons learnt. By reflecting on and sharing lessons learnt we’ll not only remind ourselves what we have experienced but we’ll possible also inspire others to do the same and contribute to a learning culture.

This has been a very exciting half-year within Pega and with our best practices we have contributed to deliver successful outcomes to clients. Clients often have their own delivery frameworks and by combining them with Pega’s Best Practices, I have experienced how we have gained trust and have delivered successful outcomes. The agile framework SAFe is one delivery framework that is used by many clients, and it do not only work to combine SAFe with Pega’s Best Practices it is an essential key to accelerate deliveries with quality to achieve client success. One of the new exciting new Pega features that has been released this half-year is Pega BluePrint. I’m looking forward to over the next months explore how we can even further accelerate deliveries with new exciting Pega BluePrint features.

Many large enterprise organizations have implemented the agile framework SAFe, as a framework to ensure business agility. SAFe has a foundation in Lean, Agile and DevOps. I am and have been an advocate for SAFe for many years and I have experienced the value it brings to complex organizations undergoing large digital transformations. The concept around value streams and agile release trains in SAFe, allows multiple products with dependencies to be planned with same cadence to deliver value adding end results, and this is one of the key benefits that I experience with SAFe.

During my time at Pega as a Project Delivery Lead, leading implementations of Pega technologies for various clients within EMEA, I have experienced considerable benefits and value that is achieved by applying Pega’s Best Practices within Pega Express also in organizations that have already implemented SAFe. At first it can appear unnecessary to add additional Best Practices for way of working to an extensive agile framework as SAFe, but Pega’s Best Practices include considerable value adding ways of working that will ensure quality and speed to delivery to achieving business value.

Solve the business problem

Pega Best Practices focus on delivering MLPs. Sometimes a Pega MLP is incorrectly compared to an MVP (Minimum Valuable product) in SAFe. But there is a major difference between a Pega MLP and MVP in SAFe. An MVP in SAFe is an early and minimal version of a new solution sufficient to prove or disprove an epic hypothesis. Minimum Viable Product (MVP) - Scaled Agile Framework . An MVP in SAFe is about proving and testing an idea, whereas an MLP in Pega Express is a delivery of real business value with defined business outcomes and measurable metrics. So, there is a major difference between validating a concept and deliver real business value to end users. The focus on delivering business value with measurable metrics within a relative short time frame and enabling the business-end-users to work with the application and give feedback is essential in ensuring that the business problems are solved with satisfied end-users.

Design Great Experiences

Both Pega Best Practices and SAFe refers to design thinking principles and lean UX to ensure a good end-user-experience. When designing for great experiences Pega Express also takes the foundation of Pega platforms as starting point with the possibility to design reusable modular components. This is an essential difference compared to SAFe that do not take design reusable components, create a roadmap of reusable components, create a library of re-useable components, and define UX design patterns in consideration to drive a consistent user experience. The focus on reusability components in the Pega platform is not only an enabler for consistent user experience but also for accelerating the time to delivery and enabling content that can be delivered in short time frame. By applying Pega’s Constellation design system, the level of reusability can be even further accelerated. The Constellation design system has built-in design components, templates, and patterns, it also has automatic updates to follow Pega’s latest design best practices and enables focus on solving larger usability and business problems.

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Collaborate Effectively

Both SAFe and Pega Best Practices empathize the importance of effective collaboration using scrum and agile methodologies. SAFe includes the dimension of Agile Release train (ARTs) to collaboratively plan, manage and deliver products with dependencies that jointly creates business value. I personally experience the concept around Agile release trains as one of the key benefits with SAFe. It’s powerful to have a methodology to plan dependencies with quarterly planning increments sessions (PI planning). I have experienced and participated in various PI plannings for clients around EMEA, both onsite as well as virtual. It is powerful to see jointly planning and risk identification with involvement from both business representatives as well as team members in the agile development teams in PI planning sessions.

As mentioned, the reusability capability in Pega platform is a great advantage and an enabler for speed to delivery.? Pega Best Practices includes the establishment of a governing body Center of Excellence to ensure governance and efficient collaboration to achieve architecture reuse, provide policies and standards, ensure proper set up of environments and deployment procedures. A Center of Excellence is a governing body that works across business and IT to provide leadership, support and governance for all initiatives building on the Pega Platform. After working with several clients with different levels of maturity with their Centers of Excellence my experience is that there are two essential success factors that needs to be fulfilled to gain benefits. Firstly, the CoE needs to have mandate and authority to steer design choices to enable reusability and faster delivery times. For organizations with several development teams, our experience is that the authority and mandate of the CoE is a fundamental success criterion to achieve reusability and possibility do deliver with speed. Development teams needs to be part of an eco-system governed by a CoE. The second success factor for efficient working CoE that I want to highlight is that the CoE has the right competence and role set-up for its responsibilities.

?If the CoE do not have the adequate competence, authority, and mandate to steer design choices this comes with is a high possibility risk of extensive delays as consequence.

A mature CoE should also encourage innovation and support with road map management to ensure recommended scope and size of MLPs to enable a continuous cadenced delivery of MLPs that delivers business value and captures user experience.

Leverage the Power of Pega

Pega Best Practices adds value to deliveries and organization that is already applying SAFe by incorporating Pega’s product capabilities in the best practices. For Case Management deliveries, Pega has different development environments connected to the same layer cake architecture. Enabling business architects to design workflows in the environment tool App Studio and allowing Senior and Lead architects to reuse these workflows while expand and detail the architecture in Development Studio.

Pega BluePrint, that was released earlier this year has already evolved and will continue to evolve and influence how teams collaboratively in an exploratory way define workflows, data and persona experiences to automate and digitalize customer journeys. Best practices how to utilize Pega BluePrint will evolve hand in hand with new BluePrint enhancements.

To leverage the power and capabilities of Pega it is key to have the right level and mix of competence in the teams as well as in the Center of Excellence. Pega has enablement paths with recommended online trainings for various roles and level of seniority, this is all described in Pega Academy. Enablement is a continuous journey that never ends. This aligns with SAFe and one of the seven competences, Continuous Learning Culture. To summarize recommendations for Pega enablement,

-??????? It is a success factor to have a balance of senior experienced resources with less experienced resources. An Experienced resource needs to have bandwidth to both coach less senior peers and to produce content.

-??????? All development resources need to be trained in Pega and understand possibilities and capabilities, to efficiently align and support the team. This also includes scrum masters, product managers and delivery leads.

-??????? Another success factor for efficient transformation programs and deliveries that I have experienced is that stakeholders in steering groups and senior management positions have a fundamental understanding of the possibilities and capabilities with Pega. This is key to support and take tactical and strategical decisions that will enable full usage of the Power of Pega to achieve the best possible business value.

-??????? Enablement is a continuous journey that never ends. Organizations recommend having a strategy and plan for how to support and encourage everyone in the enterprise to upskill and stay trained on the relevant versions. One set up that I have experienced successful is to have dedicated Pega talent manager that can support the organization with training recommendations.

-??????? Stay curious, explore, and experiment with new Pega technology enhancements.

-??????? A key to delivery success is to balance risk management, apply best practices and to ensure that the whole development team is confident with the balance of known and unknowns’ enhancements.

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Concluding reflections

·??????? To get the full potential, quality, achieve business value and accelerate time to delivery it is essential for organizations to apply Pega Best Practices. This also applies to organizations that have implemented development framework such as SAFe. Even though SAFe is an extensive framework that has grown over the years, to achieve the full potential a key to success is to apply Pega Best Practices.

·??????? All organizations and digital transformations have different context. To achieve full business value in every Pega implementation it is key to proceed from the context in every situation, align with an experienced Pega leader with knowledge and experience in applying Pega Best practices to navigate in recommended way of working to lead for success and not the least having a Governing structure including a Center of Excellence in the organization with an understanding of Pega to be able to take needed tactical and strategical decisions to steer for success.

·??????? Besides applying Pega technologies best in class, Pega Best Practices, having a fit for purpose governing structure, development team needs to work as one team. For a development leader this also includes to understand the motivation and driving forces for all participants. Just as painful it is to experience teams with different driving forces, just as powerful is it to work with a team that have overcome difficulties and/ or have become a team with trust and understanding to one another, and common desire to deliver success deliveries.

·??????? Pega’s technologies will continue to evolve and so will our best practices, by staying curious, explore and learn we’ll shape ourselves for the future.

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