"Scaling Agile from the trenches managing 100+ Million Lines of Code"
22nd June 2023 was a special day, after 14 years, I came back to HP location at B?blingen, near Stuttgart, to join the 5th Scaling Agile Meetup of German Speaking region, aka SAFe DACH Treffen, with the purpose to explore learning and experiences of scaling agile in real world solving real problems, with practitioners of Allianz Consulting,?VW,?Porsche,?Deutsche Telekom,?RV,?Metafinanz,?adidas,?Zurich Group,?SIEMENS,?PwC,?Lufthansa,? amadeus,?Kegonschweiz. Here is a summary of some snapshots at the event.
The timeless value of "THE HP WAY"
The office building didn't change a bit, almost the same layout like 14 years ago, maintained amazingly well, incl. the canteen, apart from the logo that is changed from the white HP to "Hewlett Packard Enterprise" , after the split with HP's consumer products back in 2015. Inside the building, there're Micro Focus and Opentext, a Canadian company which hosted the event.
Even HP has been reorganized, with many spin-offs, M&A deals, it remains, as the creator of Silicon Valley, the source of garage Innovation culture, a vivid community, despite of the economic downturn and countless challenges since its inception, shortly after the great depression, almost a "living fossile" if you think about HP's history, considering how fast IT industry iterates.
Bill Hewlett and David Packard defined the ‘HP Way’ in the following 5 principles:
Packard noted that
profit is a measure of the company’s contribution to society and source of the company’s strength
Profit and growth allows the company to serve their customers, finance research, reward employees, and contribute to the community. It is the source of future opportunity and security for employees.
The management style at HP was "Manage by walking around", literately "Gemba Walk" of Lean Manufacturing. At HP all employees including senior managers were seated in an open concept layout.?HP was one of the very early site which the hotdesk was introduced. I was fortunate to be part of their 50 years anniversary back then.
If you think about those values and principles, they are integral part of Lean-Agile Values and Principles. In fact, Micro Focus, used to be part of HP, now Micro Focus, has started implementing Scaling Agile 10 years ago.
"Wall of Commitment" from Leadership
Adoption of framework might determine the quality of agile transformation, but it is the leadership, who will determine the fate of success or failure.
LACE representatives from Volkswagen, Porsche and Porsche Consulting, have jointed presented their story of the agile transformation, the launch of the "New Product Organization", according to their lessons learnt and how they've decided to come together among top management, to jointly commit and sign the "wall of commitment", that they are on this journey, and committed to implementing agile at scale with SAFe, after piloting 5 Agile Release Trains successfully.
Sophie from Porsche Consulting mentioned that if you think an operating system with 50 millions lines of codes is big, the car is built on 100 millions lines of codes. Cars are very much rolling computers today.?They contain a network of electronic control units (ECUs), with between 70 and 100 being installed in every modern vehicle.
How to coordinate, The SAFe implementation roadmap, remains as the corner stone as most effective ways of scaling, first by training change agents, managers and leaders, before deciding on what to do and how to do it.
领英推荐
It's not enough to tell what practice to apply, rather truly understand what Lean-Agile values and principles mean, in order to provide a common understanding and vocabulary of collaboration, across business, IT and functional areas, to foster close collaboration.
For more information check out the Porsche Case Study below, featured by Mattias Ulbrich, VP CIO at Porsche AG and CEO of Porsche Digital GmbH, and Oliver Seifert, VP Electrics/Electronics Development.
Breaking Point of Collaboration at Scale
Case 1: how to split the agile release trains or agile teams?
As we known, Agile Release Train is not the only configuration of how to set a collaboration model between teams, what about Service Hubs? What about temporary solutions that require close collaboration across ART boundaries?
Dependencies are supposed to be either managed or decoupled, according to Domain Driven Design and DevOps practices.
SPCT, Dr. Wolfgang Brandhuber has shown his latest development of the dynamic scaling approach, how to find the right framework for different type of engagement model, following the principle of simplicity, taking an economic view, organize around value, accelerating decision making in complex adaptive systems. Deutsche Telekom has presented their holistic analysis to identify where it is not effective to build ARTs, and how to mitigate while ensuring the Lean-Agile values and principles are followed.
Case 2: Integrated cross-company Agile Release Trains
Gülüm has demonstrated her experience as Product Owner of cross-company collaboration between Amadeus and Lufthansa Group, consists of multiple locations, she has been part of the SAFe transformation since 2018.
How to effectively organize solution demos for large solutions with more than 100 millions lines of code
Volker from Micro Focus / Opentext, has presented their best practices of large solution, with 13 Agile Release Trains.
Operations Bridge?(OpsBridge) provides monitoring services for networks, services, and applications.
Micro Focus?Operations Bridge provides the ability to sense, analyze and adapt to manage IT services that support digital business, by supervising the performance of virtualizations, containers, databases and other services, with advanced event correlation, log intelligence, predictive analytics and automation you can remediate issues across all your technologies to prioritize business targets. Micro Focus Operations Bridge consolidates events, metrics, and topology from Micro Focus?and 3rd party data collectors, applies correlation across these using a dynamically updated IT service model to accelerate root cause determination and will trigger automatic remediation.
6 Solution ARTs with 47 Teams, 7 Supplier ARTs with 33 teams, providing services used by multiple solutions, SAFe creates a common language across industries and partners that ease the collaboration and integration points, there's a variety of stakeholders and products to be presented to customers, so how to drive effectiveness and efficiency of such demo, requires diligent and discipline in execution. Even they use Team PI Objectives for communication purposes, however stick to the SAFe Principle #5 – Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems.
A side note, according to Dantar P. Oosterwal, author of "the Lean Machine", "there was in fact no correlation between exiting phase gates on time and project success … the data suggested the inverse might be true."
The feedback has been quite positive with a NPS above 4.5, it has been a day full of valuable knowledge and exchange from day-to-day practice. I am really looking forward to host for the first time, the next gathering in October with my colleagues & Metafinanz, together.