Key Reflections from 2023 SPCT Masterclass

It was a honor to be invited to the 1st?#Masterclass?with 100+?#SPCT?from 19 countries at SAI headquarter?#Boulder?(Colorado) since beginning of pandemic. We came together, inspired by a common vision of

“WORK DIFFERENTLY, BUILD THE FUTURE”.

In this article I will share some learning and reflection from this class.

• What is SPCT / iSPCT (internal SPCT)?

They are change agents, global trusted advisors, transformation architects and trainers who can guide large organization achieving Business Agility with proven results, by bringing agile product development, lean thinking, DevOps evolution, change management and system thinking expertise, recognized by Gartner Global Research.

• What do they do?

Core deliverables of SPCT is to co-create and implement large scale lean-agile transformation through systematic improvement of organizational capabilities, in order to build resilience and adaptivity in rapid changing environment, in the form of coaching, training, consulting and advisory, services, can be at any level of an organization.

• Data and facts about this group by Jan 2023

Every candidate must have at least 10-15 years' experience in transformation space to be nominated and go through 53+ requirements with 200+ acceptance criteria. As Adam Mattis, SAFe Fellow used to say:

"It takes an entire village's effort to get to the finish line, but even you get there, it's just another pitstop of live long-learning".

According to the latest statistic:

• there're 133 SPCTs, 10 iSPCTs and 56 SPCT Candidates;
• In German speaking region, incl. Germany, Austria and Switzerland, there're 11 people in total, at least 2 candidates;
• 3 from insurance industry;
• Cprime, recently acquired by Goldman Sachs, is the flagship of large scale agile transformation with nearly half a billion revenue globally, has the most SPCT of 19
• they are coming from 19 countries

What are some of key takeaways?

• stick to "Agile Manifesto" as part of your DNA, don't ignore it

SPCT Masterclass has been running as early as 2013 if I am not mistaken, when scaling agile is not a thing yet on the market. Since then, it has grown rapidly, as a result, the framework itself has adapted rapidly by learning from industries.

Apart from fascinating stories and insightful expertise, what impressed me the most, is the very well-organized learning experience, highly professional framework team and remarkable people in this community, who are willing to share knowledge with their peers, and learn from each other.

Dean Leffingwell, the Chief Methodologist of Scaled Agile Framework, has repetitively reminded everyone of No.1 Agile principle:

"Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software."

We will become soon irrelevant, if this community can't help organization delivering working software early and continuously. Any impediments that prevent us from doing this, we need to work hard to remove those to help organizations become successful.

• Flow enables Business Agility, reduce time to market, improve quality and employee engagement, but before we take actions, we need to first understand the 8 properties of any flow systems.

According to the following article: Flow is characterized by a smooth transition of work through the entire value stream with a minimum of handoffs, delays, and rework. In SAFe, we consider flow to be present when teams, trains, and the portfolio can quickly, continuously, and efficiently deliver quality products and services from trigger to value.

This requires systematic improvements from value stream management, accelerate each everyone of those properties with appropriate actions, make value flow without interruptions, also improve the design and execution of Kanban, ultimately the goal is to help teams and the enterprise make significant improvements in the velocity of their value delivery and in their ability to adapt quickly in these turbulent times.

• Conversations are gold when it comes to implement Lean Portfolio Management to connect strategy with execution on the ground

During the Masterclass week, I got the opportunity to explore and listen to many experts sharing their ideas, challenges and solutions while helping their organizations or customers.

Especially Lean Portfolio Management, how to apply participatory budgeting, how to fund value streams over projects, how to make sure that the investment goes to the right product, make sure people are working on the right thing? All those questions require some deep thinking and take the heat, because they are risky moves and new for traditional non-agile organization, take people by the hand and conduct experiments to learn fast and adapt fast, so that academical languages are turned into actionable, contextualized practices that work.

When conducting those crucial conversations, we must seek best interest of organization, and drive fact-based discussions, for which we need to develop our own competence and ability when there're opposing opinions, high stakes with people who have strong emotions.

• Top 2 Frameworks: SAFe & Scrum@Scale are growing rapidly, while SoS and DIY are dropping, one thing we learnt from 2000 years history is that religious fight (incl. agile frameworks) doesn't have winner, instead focus on problem to solve or what outcome are we looking for

Ever since 2015, there is a noticeable development of internally created methods, aka DIY, which has dropped shapely since 2015 from 30% to almost not visible anymore by 2022, for several reasons:

1. lack of compatibility and not able to catchup with the market development
2. high maintenance cost and lack of multi-language role enablement based on personas
3. employees are looking for growth opportunities with similar roles on the market
4. executives want to see results, aka. early return on investment, they don't really care about frameworks and start to pull the plugs for DIY by leveraging market know-how

During my interviews, it is found out that Internationally, US and Nordic countries are clearly leading the way by adopting practiced based frameworks, both in private sector and governments, while other European region is still catching up, some are around 3-4 years behind the curve. For example, German governments is starting to apply scaling frameworks in some states while Spain doesn't yet have a local community specialized in Agile@Scale practices, but things can change quickly.

• Transformation work is about people, there's a giant skill gap between expectation and reality

According to "Leadership Global Executive Study", conducted by MIT, the need for change is urgent, and time is running out for leaders who are holding on to old ways of working and leading.

The research group has surveyed 4,394 global leaders from more than 120 countries, conducted 27 executive interviews, and facilitated focus-group exchanges with next-gen emerging leaders worldwide.?

While 82% believe that leaders in the new economy will need to be digitally savvy, less than 10% of respondents strongly agree that their organizations have leaders with the right skills to thrive in the digital economy.

Last but not least...

• Relentless improvement requires us to accept uncertainty over wishful thinking, seeking truth whatever it takes

I was amazed by early SPCTs, how they are relentless improving the way how to engage with learners, leaders and organisation, constantly challenge the status quo. The rabbit hole is infinite, but it is not a given, we must fight against our own Egos and Ignorance, understand that there're 3 gaps, according to the brilliant work of Stephen Bungay on "the ART of ACTION":

1. Difference between what we expect our actions to achieve and what they actually achieve
2. Difference between what we would like to know and what we actually know
3. Difference between what (we want) people to do and what they actually do

Instead, we need to

1. We are finite beings with limited knowledge and independent wills
2. The business environment is unpredictable and uncertain, so we should expect the unexpected and should not plan beyond the circumstances we can foresee
3. Within the constraints of our limited knowledge we should strive to identify the essentials of a situation and make choices about what it is most important to achieve
4. To allow people to take effective action, we must make sure they understand what they are to achieve and why
5. They should then explain what they are going to do as a result, define the implied tasks, and check back
6. They should then assign the tasks they have defined to individuals who are accountable for achieving them, and specify boundaries within which they are free to act
7. Everyone must have the skills and resources to do what is needed and the space to take independent decisions and actions when the unexpected occurs, as it will.
8. As the situation changes, everyone should be expected to adapt their actions according to their best judgment in order to achieve the intended outcomes.
9. People will only show the level of initiative required if they believe that the organization will support them
10. It is too easy to miss them and get back to our old ways of getting by. We must not

It has been an unforgettable experience, if there's one thing that I learnt, is never stop learning and practicing, it's always day 1, looking forward to an exciting yet challenging 2023 ahead!

May the FLOW be with you.

Source: MIT, Gartner, Scaled Agile Framework, Book "crucial conversations", "the ART of action"