Achieving Business Agility with SAFE: A Comprehensive Guide to Lean Enterprise (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Safe provides the operating system for organizations to achieve business agility through the seven core competencies of the lean enterprise. Team and technical agility, agile product delivery, enterprise solution delivery, lean portfolio management, organizational agility, continuous learning culture, and lean agile leadership. It all starts with team and technical agility and specifically with the agile team. An agile team is a group of five to 11 members which can define, build, test, and where applicable deploy value in short time boxes called iterations. The team uses agile methods like Scrum or Kanban or a combination thereof. The team starts each iteration by planning what they can deliver in an iteration planning event. The product owner provides guidance on what needs to be built by representing the customer on the team. Every day the team meets to discuss how they're progressing toward their iteration goals in a daily stand up. At the end of each iteration, the team demonstrates the work they've completed in an iteration review. For the next iteration, the team reflects on what to improve for the next iteration in an iteration retrospective. The Scrum Master is the coach of the team, helping it improve and facilitating the various events. In an enterprise, multiple teams need to work together as a team of agile teams to deliver value. In SAFE, these teams of agile teams are called an Agile Release Train or ART and include 50 to 125 people. ARTs are cross-functional, including all the people needed to explore customer needs and then build and deliver solutions to customers. The ART uses agile product delivery practices to deliver the right value at the right time. The ART works within a time box called a program increment or PI, which is typically five iterations long. The ART follows similar events to teams. At the beginning of the PI, all teams come together to plan their work for the PI in a PI planning event. PI planning is facilitated by the Release Train Engineer, who serves as the coach for the ART. Product Management provides the vision and backlog. The System Architect provides architectural guidance. The teams then plan the work for the PI, identifying what can be delivered. A program board is used to visualize the dependencies between the teams. Every iteration, the ART demos the integrated solution across all teams in a system demo. And at the end of the PI, all teams meet to retrospect on how to improve in an inspect and adapt event. Product Managers use customer centricity and design thinking to understand customer problems and discover solutions that are desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable. The ART builds a continuous delivery pipeline and uses DevOps practices to release on demand, delivering value when it is needed. Sometimes a single agile release train is not enough to deliver a solution, and the enterprise solution delivery competency is needed. A Solution Train is used to coordinate multiple ARTs and suppliers to deliver large, complex solutions. Solution Management has content authority on what gets built. The Solution Architect oversees the architecture across ARTs. And a Solution Train Engineer coaches and facilitates Solution Train events. In order to align strategy and execution, Lean Portfolio Management provides a way to create strategic themes and a portfolio vision to align solution development with enterprise strategy. Lean Portfolio Management helps enterprises organize around the delivery of value and value streams, as well as fund these value streams to avoid the problems that are typically associated with project cost accounting. Having strategy, however, is not enough. Agile Agility provides the tools that help portfolios achieve strategy agility and change direction quickly when needed, organizing and reorganizing around value. It builds the environment for flow of value across the entire enterprise and beyond solution development and helps grow lean-thinking people and agile teams. Continuous learning culture drives a culture of innovation and relentless improvement to help enterprises become learning organizations. Finally, a Lean Enterprise is built on Lean Agile Leadership. To achieve and sustain business agility, leaders must embody, teach, and exhibit the mindsets, values, and principles that are the basis of Lean and Agile. Lead by example and guide everyone toward this new way of working using the Implementation Roadmap as a Guide. Together, these seven competencies build the Lean Enterprise and make true business agility possible.