Summary of Spring DACH Meetup at PwC

On 1st March 2023, the 4th Scaled Agile Meetup of DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) was held at PwC Tower 185 (4th highest building in Germany) at Frankfurt, where practitioners from Allianz Consulting, BOSCH, Gematik, Deutsche Telekom, SBB, PwC, R+V, Microfocus (Opentext), Continental, Deutsche Post, Kegon Schweiz, Airbus, ETAS, SAI, SIEMENS etc. have come together to share insights and expertise.

Despite the attendees come across many industries, such as manufacturing, financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, airspace, technology, transportation, public services, consulting, we do have a similar challenge:

“how to practically scale/descale agile to accelerate time-to-market with customer delight, by elevating organizational capabilities”.

As Deming used to say:

Winning today’s race while running tomorrow’s

Director of Enterprise Agility Oliver Bergius has opened and welcomed the guest by revealing the findings from 26th CEO Survey, published in Jan shortly before the Davos Economic Forum.

Forty percent of global CEOs think their organisation will no longer be economically viable in ten years’ time, if it continues on its current course.?

Organizations have realized that they must be able to strike a balance between Agility and Ambidexterity.

Agility: Organizational capability of dealing with uncertainty and adapting a company’s core business to (rapid) changes in the market environment.

Ambidexterity: Organizational capability of developing new business (Exploration) running existing business (Exploitation) in parallel.

According to Oliver in some further studies:

1. only 27% of leadership are really supporting and engaged in agile transformation;
2. 80% of the agile processes and tools are not harmonized
3. only 38% are tracking transformational progress using empirical data

SAFe is popular than ever, but we must be mindful on its pros and cons

SAFe is considered as the most comprehensive lean-agile scaling framework worldwide, its guidance on how to organize large scale agile teams, in-depth integration with DevOps, cloud and guidance for leadership and highly regulated industries such as health care, financial services are well accepted.

However, for new joiners, it can be perceived as too complicated, to much process driven, sometimes the bureaucracy overruns the value, and people think it can only be used for large enterprise, the worst enemy is bad SPCs and bad implementation, if the values and principles are not properly followed.

This happens to be my talk on "9 common anti-patterns of large scale agile", we need to keep in mind that the Rule No. 1 of SAFe is don't scale, in other words, "take an economic view" and "apply minimum viable bureaucracy":

• too little bureaucracy and you don't know what is going on
• too much bureaucracy and people don't have the autonomy to succeed

It's a delicate balance that we are trying to get.

Explore Dynamic Agility to improve creative solution generation and cross ART collaboration

Stable team doesn’t mean that they are part of an agile release train (ART) forever: strategic themes, development value stream, organizational capabilities evolve. Between 3-6 PIs, you might want to revisit the ART configuration. Help teams grow their knowledge and capabilities, yet cautiously minimize impact from “forming, storming, norming & performance” through consistent “Team APIs” and clear policies.

Just like a classification yard at Munich central station, where train cabins are reorganize, attached, switched to deliver value towards destination with stable cadence & loosely coupled interfaces.

Thanks to Wolfgang Brandhuber and Cindy VanEpps for their simple, framework neutral, innovative & systematic summary on “Dynamic Agility”. Highly recommend this training. Link here

"Show me"

SPCT, Peter Vollmer from Opentext (Microfocus), has given an impressive talk about their 10 years successful journey by applying SAFe, the part what I like the most, is the phrase:

"show me"

When he engages with teams or leaders, everyone seems to understand what agile is about and what're the right things to do. He often respond with:

"show me your backlog, show me your dashboard, show me your data", then people suddenly become quiet and try to find executes why they didn't have those.

He reminded us that agile is not about frameworks or processes, it must contribute to product, every role needs to be in the machine and capability needs to be cultivated, when something sounds too good to be true, he encourages us, as agile practitioners, to be empirical.

Big Elephant(s) in the room

During Slido survey, the question was asked on what are the biggest challenges to scale agile in your organization?

Most of responded with the following and we had some discussions:

a. Agile Leadership - lack of leadership behavior that encourages agile, statistically the more leadership engages, the better outcome organization can achieve, at the same time, anytime when leadership changes or wants to go back to the old way of management, the predictability drops immediately

b. Budgeting - the old way of funding project (content) over capacity (structure), is still hindering the agility, where tensions between projects or initiatives arise, fighting over the same resource, instead of focusing on continuously delivering value

c. Lack of Modular IT and Digital Architecture - monolithic application has served organization well, until the speed of change has outweighed its benefit. Micro-service, Server-less first, Low-code to no-code, Event driven architecture are possible solutions on how to develop modular architecture, reality is however, organization is lacking this critical capabilities and competence

d. Availability of roles and capability - because agile roles are emerging, the competence, capability and workforce planning is not always aligned, SME or highly skilled workforce is in high demand, there's a big urgency to resell existing workforce

Some interesting side note:

PwC colleague Daniel have invited participants to explore PI Planning in metaverse, which helped me to reimagine PI Planning in remote setup. It was a quite immersive experience, at the beginning it took a while to get familiarize with the buttons and functionalities, but soon after, I can leave post-it notes, chat with others in the same virtual location and draw whiteboard for collaboration.

Thanks again for the invite and excellent organization from PwC, looking forward for more in-depth exchange in the future with my peers across DACH region.