Overview

• Apply Agile to a large organization
• Keep the hierarchical structure, and connect it to the new Agile structure, SAFe is the network to connect them
• Big picture: https://v5.scaledagileframework.com/

Core competencies: a set of related knowledge, skills, events, and behaviors, which together enable organizations to achieve business agility

• Lean Agile Leadership
• Team And Technical Agility
• Agile Product Delivery
• Enterprise Solution Delivery
• Lean Portfolio Management
• Organizational Agility
• Continuous Learning Culture

Principals

1 Take an economic view

• Budget, cost/value trade-off, WSJF, leverage vendors

2 Apply systems thinking

• Improve the whole system, not just a component
• Imporve the process in the organization, full value stream

3 Assume variability; preserve options

• Don’t determine everything at first
• Leave spaces to developer, brainstorm new options

4 Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles

• Small cycle, iteration

5 Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems

• Set milestones, and regular demo

6 Visualize and limit WIP, reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths

• Spot bottleneck, improve efficency

7Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning

• Cross teams, should align with a demo involving all teams

8 Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers

Workers are knowledge workers if they know more about the work they perform than their bosses. —Peter Drucker

• Knowledge workers must manage themselves. They need autonomy

9 Decentralize decision-making

• infrequently made, long-lasting, or provide significant economies of scale. These decisions should remain centralized.
• Decentralize everything else.

10 Organize around value

Align the value across all the teams: Business, IT

Anti-patterns

• Underperforming in the Product Owner

Key responsibilities of the Product Owner:

• Facilitate Team Backlog refinement
• Prepare for and participate in Iteration Planning
• Elaborate Stories and Enablers just-in-time
• Address team questions; be the voice of the customer
• Accept Stories
• Participate in the Iteration Review and Retrospective
• Coordinate with other Product Owners to manage dependencies

• Stories and Tasks

Big Stories, can be split by business rules/use cases and simple/complex

• context-specific anti-patterns PO and backlog, planning, commitment, execution, demos, retrospectives

Facilitating Program Execution

An ART(Agile Release Trains) is a long-lived, self-organizing team of Agile Teams Roles on the Agile Release Train

• Release Train Engineer (RTE) acts as the chief Scrum Master for the train.
• System Architect/Engineering provides architectural guidance and technical enablement to the teams on the train.
• Product Management owns, defines, and prioritizes the Program Backlog.
• System Team provides processes and tools to integrate and evaluate assets early and often.
• Business Owners are key stakeholders on the Agile Release Train.
• Product Owner owns Team Backlog
• 1 product manager to 2-4 product owner, 1 product owner to 1-2 agile team

PI Planning

• Two days every 8 – 12 weeks
• Everyone plans together
• Product Management owns Feature priorities
• Development teams own Story planning and high-level estimates

Improving Flow with Kanban and XP

Kanban:

• KPIs (key performance indicators)
• PI burn-down chart
• Cumulative flow diagram (CFD)
• Service
  • Standard - Operate normally. Adhere to WIP limits.
  • Fixed Date - Adhere to WIP limits. Must be pulled from the backlog early enough.
  • Expedite - Can violate WIP limits. No more than one item at a time.

Build quality in: Includes Continuous Integration, testfirst, refactoring, pair work, collective ownership, and more (for software quality practices mostly inspired by XP)

Foster engineering craftsmanship: create an environment for continuous learning: SM being facilitator

• Inside-Outs: Short presentations

• Book and Coffee Breaks

• Coding Dojo

• Communities of Practice

• Agile Software Engineering

• System Architects: Provide architectural guidance to teams, collaborate on new technical research, address technical questions from team members

• System Team: Assist the ART with frequent system integration and testing and development of infrastructure support

• Operations: Enable the Continuous Delivery Pipeline through infrastructure and process support

Building High-Performing Teams

• Foster collabration of the team, being facilitator
• Cross team collabration
• Build trust with stakeholders
• Develop technical skills of the team
• Communities of Practice(CoP)

Improving Program Performance

Inspect and Adapt(I&A):

• System demo at the end of PI
• Give business value to the PI Objectives

Problem solving workshop:

• Problem description: What, When, Where, Impact
• Finding the root cause: 5 why
• Root cause analysis: Fishbone Diagram
• Identify the biggest root cause： Pareto analysis

Communities of Practice

3 distinct traits:

• Domain
• Practice
• Community

Life cycle:

• Commiting
• Starting up
• Operating
• Winding down
• Shutting down

Levels:

• Core team
• Active
• Occasional
• Peripheral
• Transactional

Inspect and Adapt

Time: at the end of each PI People: all in the Agile Train Output: improvement backlog items for next PI

3 parts:

• PI system demo
• quantitive and qualitative mesurement
  • Plan business value - actual business value
• retrospective
• problem-solving workshop
  • Agree on the problem
  • Root cause analysis and 5 whys
  • Identity the biggest root cause using Pareto analysis
  • Restate the problem using the biggest root cause
  • Brainstorm solutions
  • Identify improvement backlog items

Release on Demand

Continuous exploration —> continuous integration —> continuous deployment

Four activies

• Release
  • Dark lunch: technical launch
  • Feature toggle
  • Cannary release, AB test
  • Decoupled release elements
• Stablize and Operate
  • Cross team collaboration
  • Failover/disaster recovery
  • Continuous security monitoring
  • Architect for operations
  • Monitor for NFRs
• Measure
• Learn

CALMR to DevOps:

• Culture
• Automation
• Lean Flow
  • Visualize and limit WIP
  • Small batches
  • Reduce queue lengths
• Measurement
  • Pipeline flow
  • Solution quality
  • Solution value
• Recovery
  • Stop-the-line: stop the works on hand and focus on production issue
  • Plan for and rehearse failures
  • Fast fix forward and roll back

Core values

• Aligment
• Build-in quality
• Transparency
• Program execution

Lean Agile Mindset

• Respect for people and culture
• Flow
• Innovation
• Relentless improvement

Solution Trains provide the constructs businesses need to build large solutions—including cyber-physical systems—in a Lean-Agile manner. They align multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and Suppliers to a shared mission

Lean Agile Center of Excellence(LACE) is a small Agile team dedicated to implementing Lean-Agile way of working.