Focus on what matters - Takeaways from 2022 Global SAFe summit (Part 1)

After 2+ years of waiting, in-person SAFe Summit is finally back! 1200 people around the globe gathered at Denver, Colorado, to connect, learn and explore.?It was an amazing experience to meet SAFe experts, colleagues and partners who dedicated to help organizations achieving business agility. It was truly a remarkable experience with “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.

Here’s a summary of some key takeaways.

Think big but act small, continuously

My summit experience started at breakfast time, around the table there were Scott from Mastercard, Marc, SAFe fellow from Scaled Agile, Thorsten, Founder and CEO of Kegon AG, two new SAFe community joiners from an US insurance company and Peter from Microfocus, a previous HP company. While enjoying the nice view towards Rockies, we had few great conversations about organizational journey, regardless which industry or even government,?“being practical”?is a common impression, this journey is hard but if done correctly, a win-win-win for customers, organization and employees, agile mindset is certainly a key enabler, but if everyone switches their mindset overnight, what exactly would they do the next day to achieve better time to market, higher quality and reliability, better employee engagement? Therefore we must be very practical to adapt the frameworks to our needs.

Mindset doesn’t change overnight, culture neither, even strategy doesn’t make the shift, but as long as we take an incremental approach with clear direction, inspect and adapt, to explore the right answer.

Transforming organizational DNA by shorten planning horizon

Today’s world couldn’t be more disruptive: supply chain interruption, unpredictable extreme weather events, demographic changes, geopolitical tension, ever more competitive market and social discrepancies, good companies fail to survive.?

On the other side, the ones who thrive in digital age are the ones who are able to shorten planning horizons, bridge strategy with execution and build resilience as part of DNA, to have true customer centricity.?

Jumpstart to ease entry

When I saw SAFe for the first time, it feels heavy, it was not clear how roles such as Release Train Engineer works, I didn’t know the difference compared to classical ways of working. I wished there would be someone who can help and guide me at least for few PIs, later when it was introduced to new joiners and team members, the effort was tremendous for agile coaches, explaining the (almost) same content over and over again, without spending the time on the overall improvement.

Now this will be changes, with the new?“SAFe Jump Start”, people who are not familiar with SAFe or not intend to join a SAFe training can click through the self-learning on the platform, on demand, at own pace, anytime anywhere. To get the basics.

You can’t install agile out of the box!

We see many organizations go through multiple attempts to be Agile and fail. Often, this is caused by a lack of understanding:

"we can get Agile out of a box!”.

Measure what matters: flow

How do we accelerate flow? By making value flow without interruption at all levels

All flow systems have eight properties,?As we known, the SAFe Principle 6 states:

“Visualize and limit WIP, reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths”

To achieve this, everyone’s participation is required, regardless of background, function, language or hierarchical level.

Queue. It all starts with a set of work items to be done. In addition, each value stream needs a prioritizing mechanism as to how to sequence the work for the best value.

Policies. Policies are integral to flow. They may be local policies, like team-based policies that determine how a work item moves from step to step, or global policies like those that govern how work is performed within the company.

Handoffs. Handoffs wouldn’t be necessary if one person could do all the work. But in any material flow system, different individuals and teams will have different skills and responsibilities. Each plays its part in moving a work item through the system.

Feedback. Customer and stakeholder feedback is integral to efficient and effective outcomes. Ideally, feedback happens throughout the entire process.

Bottlenecks. In every flow system, one or more bottlenecks limit the flow through the entire system.

Worker. People do the important work in moving work items from one state to another.

Work in process. There is always some work in process in the system; if there weren’t, there could be no flow of value.

Batch. As any system has a finite capacity, all the work can’t be done at once. Therefore, work through the system occurs in batches that are designed to be as efficient as possible.

Those 8 flow accelerators have been summarized in the latest framework article here.

Click here to continue reading about field reports and case studies:

Walk the talk - Takeaways from 2022 Global SAFe summit (2) | LinkedIn

Source: ? Scaled Agile, Inc.