SAFe EU 2020 summit in quotes

Agility is like fun: no one can make it for you

Dean Leffingwell, Chief Methodologist of SAFe

In his keynote, Dean explains how they applied the SAFe agility principles on their own organization when revenue streams dropped due to Covid.They scrambled to provide training online, and re-established business revenues. Customer feedback remained high (4.3 / 5) and exam results decreased a bit, but not strongly.

It starts with a Business Agility Measurement

Andrew Sales, Erin Humbach

Diving deeper in Business Agility, Andrew and Erin present a tool to measure the agility in your organization. The tool covers 7 core competencies and 21 dimensions. Their advice is to not go too wide when doing the initial survey, focusing on key stakeholders is often sufficient.

The tool can be found here.

Red is the new Green

Pieter Reijniers, An Willaert

Pieter and An share the story of how their organization is adopting SAFe. They are now running 20 Release Trains in parallel.

Their success factors:

• Training (over 400 persons trained)
• Use ‘co-creation’ and focus on product management
• Decentralize (e.g. KPI’s provide a feedback loop to the RTE’s)
• Phased implementation (no big bang)
• Promote experiments
• Vibrant communities
• Business is in the driver seat.

As a result, the culture is changing from a ‘our dashboard needs to be green ‘ to a ‘we can be transparent on issues and focus on learning’.

Tools are important

Inbar Oren

The Agile manifesto states that we value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Tools are nevertheless important, for example when facilitating a remote PI.

Inbar shares his experience with facilitating remote PI’s:

• Define working agreements with the the team. (e.g. Put cameras’ on for meetings, introduce yourself when joining a channel, … ).
• Plan ‘fun events’ to help team collaboration (e.g. funny had day, meet the pets, meet the children, mini-concerts, … ).
• Create separate channels to make sure everyone is reachable (e.g. per team, facilitators, support, feedback, … ).
• Use a tool that provides a visualization and keeps the overview.

Be a pirate in the navy

Dr. Tendayi Viki

In his keynote, Tendayi talks about how an intrapreneur can build a repeatable innovation process in their organization:

• Intrapreneurship requires active leadership support, organizational design and practices.
• Let ideas emerge and provide funnels (discovery -> validation -> acceleration).
• Invest budget as ‘incremental bets’. For example; start with 200 ideas and filter out the best for each next stage.
• Use a scorecard and look at the evidence when evaluating innovation.

‍