We must break down silos to achieve Business Agility within the Lean Enterprise together. The business plays a key role in this journey. Although the role of the Business Owner is a first-class citizen and an essential part of the framework, many times they are an afterthought. 

In this talk, you will to learn more about how to engage and integrate the business from the outset based-on successful, real world implementations.

In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins studies what differentiates great companies from good companies. The answer? Great leadership.

I’m not surprised. Not only did I spend 15 years in the world’s greatest leadership laboratory (the U.S. military), but I have also worked for some fantastic people whose leadership had obvious positive impacts on their organizations. So what did I learn over the course of 30-odd years while working with some amazing leaders? It’s simple—leadership matters, especially servant leadership. Servant leaders put the needs of others first to meet the collective goals of the company. Without great (or at least good) servant leadership, organizations fail.

In this short, interactive Lean Coffee with Dean Leffingwell, the creator and co-founder of the Scaled Agile Framework^® (SAFe), Dean presents his excellent musings and chalk-talk answers on the following topics:

• Critical Success Factors for a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence and Roadmap for Organizational Agility
• Roadmap for SAFe 6.0
• The Do's and Don'ts when implementing Lean Portfolio Management
  

Agile is disciplined, not reckless.

When a company invests in DevOps, it’s investing in speed: speed to market, speed to new ideas, speed to respond, and speed to recover. DevOps is a lot like roller coasters, sports cars, or anything else that goes zoom — if you don’t first build in safety, nobody will be comfortable going fast. The consequences of disregarding this could be disastrous, and it is up to leadership to provide that support and vision to ensure a successful transformation.

Business agility is an increasingly important focal point for companies across all industries. It’s a necessity for survival, and this was true long before 2020. But now, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, business agility is more important than it ever has been. If you want to stay ahead of your competition, then your entire organization must know how to adapt and innovate quickly when producing solutions at scale.

Before we discuss what you need to know about business agility in the time of COVID-19, this is the most important thing for you to keep in mind:

How can Shared Services team members––such as security, infrastructure, and end user training––effectively participate in Program Increment (PI) Planning? I’ve developed the following tips over the past 7 years of helping people adopt the The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe). I usually share them online and with colorful handouts.

This is the final installment in a 3-Part Series on applying empiricism in the time of COVID-19 and using hypothesis-driven approaches to adapting to SAFe^® and agile practices in the remote world.

The Process

We planned (Part 1), we executed (Part 2) , and now we learn and adapt!

For the conclusion of this series, I will apply lessons learned and use the proven After-Action Review method. Developed by the military and widely adopted by many industries, an After-Action Review is a structured review process for evaluating:

• What we intended to accomplish
• What happened
• Why it happened and what was learned
• How to improve moving forward

The following is a 3-part series on supporting Scaled Agile Release Trains and Agile Teams in the new 100% remote environment we live in.

Introduction

In my first post, I outlined 4 Enablement Actions that prepared the organization I am supporting to be successful in a 100% remote set of ceremonies associated with the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe). I also outlined the decision-making background and provided some details around my Agile Release Train (ART) and my Release Train Engineer (RTE). In Part 2, I provide some additional preparation details, as well as what went well and where there were challenges. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone of our hypothesis:

By having fun and enabling critical tooling so that our teams can conduct themselves as if they were ‘in the room/face to face,’ we can achieve a successful outcome from our Inspect & Adapt ceremony and maintain the 2.5 day cadence. By embracing empiricism, we could run a series of small, fun experiments, reinforce core Agile and Lean Principles, and prepare our teams to excel!

About a year ago, Marty Cagan, founder of svpg.com, posted an article saying that companies using the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe) and other scaling frameworks were just utilizing these frameworks as another attempt to command and control. Although Cagan admitted to not knowing much about SAFe, he claimed that it was just a metaphor for doing it wrong.

At the time, I was upset that a leading thinker in the areas of product development and customer focus had called out SAFe. I have used SAFe successfully at multiple Silicon Valley product companies to improve customer focus and connections to teams. However, I also had a deeper, quiet agreement with what he said. A lot of people were doing SAFe wrong, and Cagan had likely seen or heard of one of these “Cargo Cult” implementations.