Part III
Implementing SAFe, Measure and Grow
“Many leaders pride themselves on setting the high-level direction and staying out of the details. It’s true that a compelling vision is critical. But it’s not enough. Big picture, hands-off leadership isn’t likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of change—the paralyzing part—is in the details.
“Any successful change requires a translation of ambiguous goals into concrete behaviors. In short, to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.”
—Chip and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Chapter 12, The Guiding Coalition
Chapter 13, Designing the Implementation
Chapter 14, Implementing Agile Release Trains
Chapter 15, Launching More ARTs and Value Streams; Extending to the Portfolio
Chapter 16, Measure, Grow, and Accelerate
Introduction to the Implementation Roadmap
Throughout this book, we’ve described the values, principles, and practices of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Our goal was to show how a SAFe enterprise operates and achieves the business benefits that only Lean-Agile development at scale can provide. However, what we haven’t done yet is describe how an enterprise implements SAFe to achieve business agility. That’s where the real journey starts, and Part III— which comprises the final five chapters of this book—is dedicated to this purpose.
Recognizing that a SAFe implementation is a significant organizational change effort, we turned to Dr. John Kotter, Harvard professor of leadership, change leadership guru, and author of many books on this subject, for guidance on proven change practices to integrate into the roadmap. In his book Leading Change, Kotter discusses eight steps for guiding organizational transformation and what it takes to make it stick.1
Establishing a sense of urgency
Creating the guiding coalition
Developing a vision and strategy
Communicating the change vision
Empowering employees for broad-based action
Generating short-term wins
Consolidating gains and producing more change
Anchoring new approaches in the culture
1. John P. Kotter, Leading Change, Kindle edition (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012).
Each of these steps provide the underpinnings for the SAFe implementation road-map. But leaders need to do more than just understand the steps in implementing organizational change.
In the book Switch, How To Change Things When Change Is Hard, authors Heath and Heath note that leaders must be involved in a hands-on manner. Indeed, they note that leaders must “script the critical moves.”2
2. Chip Heath and Dan Health, Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown Business, 2010).
Fortunately, hundreds of the world’s largest enterprises have already gone down this path (see case studies3 on the Scaled Agile website), revealing successful adoption patterns. While every transformation journey is unique and there is rarely a perfectly sequential step-by-step implementation, we know that enterprises get the best results by following a path similar to the SAFe implementation roadmap.
3. https://www.scaledagile.com/customer-stories/
It consists of 12 main steps, which are described in the following five chapters:
The Guiding Coalition
Reach the tipping point. 10. Train Lean-Agile change agents.
Train executives, managers, and leaders.
Create a Lean-Agile center of excellence.
Designing the Implementation
Identify value streams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs).
Create the implementation plan.
Implementing Agile Release Trains
Prepare for ART launch.
Train teams and launch the ART.
Coach ART execution.
Launching More Agile Release Trains and Value Streams; Extending to the Portfolio
Launch more ARTs and value streams.
Extend to the portfolio.
Measure, Grow, and Accelerate
Accelerate.