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Online Masterclass – SAFe Simulation

20 October, 2022, 9:30 am - 4:00 pm

Free

Many organisations adopt SAFe principles to scale up and scale out their agile transformation to support faster deployment and time to market challenges. The principles offer sound guidance but many organisations are struggling to adopt them. Some organisations see the benefits of applying SAFe but want to know more about what it is and what it requires from their organisation before starting this journey. This simulation will help to understand the challenges of scaling up new agile ways of working, what SAFe is and how your organisation can use it to support and enable your agile transformation.

About SAFe

SAFe is the World’s leading framework for scaling Agile across the enterprise. Used by hundreds of the world’s largest organisations, SAFe sustains and drives faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in productivity and quality, and improvement in employee engagement. SAFe is designed to help businesses continuously and more efficiently deliver value on a regular and predictable schedule. It provides a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles and practices to support enterprise agility. However as we have seen in the past with the adoption of other Industry best practices and frameworks. There are challenges associated with resistance to change, changing the culture to embrace new mindsets and behaviours, translating theory into practice with end-to-end stakeholders. Gaining the promised benefits of SAFe requires these challenges to be part of the adoption roadmap.

Who is this simulation for?

This simulation is for managers and team leads to learn what SAFe is all about and how to use it and for employees who work in teams and want to learn how to apply SAFe principles in their own work.  Before starting a SAFe program or training, this simulation can be used to create a basic overview of what SAFe is all about. This will increase the success rate of the program or training.  When finished a SAFe training this simulation can support transferring knowledge from training to day to day work. Attendees can apply the theory into a realistic and safe learning environment to bring the knowledge to the level of understanding and applying.

What are the key benefits of attending?

  • Translate strategy into execution and shifting from output to outcome
  • Aligning end-to-end teams and creating buy-in from business and technical stakeholders
  • Creating an agile organisation with supporting practices and cultural values
  • Dealing with changing and sometimes conflicting business priorities

What will it involve?

Designed and delivered by GamingWorks, in this simulation the attendees will work in different roles within Fly4You. Their job is to translate the business goals and milestones into working products to achieve the business goals set by the CEO.

However, just like reality, there are conflicting business demands and goals from the various business line managers. Too many demands for available resources. The IT organisation also needs to make investments to scale up and enable business agility using new technologies.

At the same time as realising the business goals the team has to adopt these new ‘scaled agile ways of working’ causing even more demands on scarce resources. Fly4You is a young airline company. Promoting and selling flights to young travellers.

Recently they have released their new website with booking functionalities but this was not a huge success. Some features did not work and some were too late. This is putting the company at risk. To enable them to be ‘fit-for-the-future’ the management team had a meeting and came up with a transformational roadmap. A series of new services were planned for the coming months. The CEO also decided to mitigate the risks of the past and scale up the IT capabilities.

To do this he has asked a SAFe expert to start implementing SAFe principles into the organisation.

The goals of this initiative are:

  • Faster deployment of new services
  • Less errors and rework
  • More happy employees
  • More business and customer value

How does it work?

In this 4-round simulation the attendees will work in different roles within Fly4You. Their job is to translate the business goals and milestones into working products to achieve the business goals set by the CEO.  In order to achieve these goals the team will follow a step-by-step plan based on the principles of SAFe.

Round 1

The business has formulated a fairly traditional plan-board containing the ‘projects’ that they want to run in the upcoming months.  Since the organisation wants to deliver value as quickly as possible, this is not going to work. Therefore, the team will start exploring the business goals, milestones and other information available from the team and translate this into two Strategic Themes. These Strategic Themes will give guidance and structure to the upcoming months of work.

Round 2

In this round the team will receive a Program Kanban filled with new Features and Enablers.  This board was the result of a meeting with the Business Owners, Product Manager and the Architect. They all brought in great new ideas and demands for IT solutions, but the question we have is “Are they all relevant at this moment?”. “Which Features and Enablers are nice to have, but are not related to our Strategic Themes? Therefore, in this round, the team will take the following actions:

  • Analyse the Features and Enablers.
  • Prioritise them based on the Strategic Themes

This will result in a clear picture of the most relevant work that needs to be done in the coming 8 weeks.

Round 3

Now it is time to start the PI Planning. The teams will be confronted with many new terms, just like in reality when we adopt new ways of working. ‘PI Planning’, ‘Systems or platform teams’, ‘Features and enablers’, ‘program board’, but what are they and HOW do you effectively use them?

Now it is time to start. The whole team works together as one team to prepare the work for the next 8 weeks (4 sprints) by performing the following steps:

  • Analyse the lessons learned from the previous period and use them to improve the process. Inspect and Adapt board
  • Organise the PI Planning
  • Discuss and decide how to deal with the System Team
  • Analyse the Features and Enablers and define Stories (User, Business, Enabler, System) that are needed to fulfil the Features and Enablers
  • Plan the Stories on the Team Boards of all stakeholders involved
  • Plan the Features and Enablers on the Program Board
  • Link all the Features and Enablers to show the relations between them

On a regular basis the team will synchronise to make sure all teams are aligned to deliver optimal value at the end of each sprint. During this round the team not only plans the new work, but also has to deal with rework from the previous 8 weeks. They must work with the business to align the new activities with the daily work of the business. After the teams have planned all the work for the next 4 sprints, the team will define the PI Objectives and the business will share the Business Value for each of these objectives. They also define the Risks and risk status. At the end of this Round 3, the team will use the Inspect and Adapt Board to support the reflection of this PI Planning to explore and define lessons learned.

Round 4

After the 3 rounds the work is planned and ready to be built and deployed. In this simulation we will not build any stories. In round 4 we will run 4 Sprints. In each sprint the facilitator will bring in some Events, Feedback, Issues, Challenges to the team.

The team will have 20 minutes to discuss how to deal with them. In this exercise the team will learn how SAFE principles can help to be fast, flexible and error free and deliver value to business and employees.

Reflections

Between each game round the team will reflect on key challenges adopting new ways of working such as leadership commitment, prioritisation of scarce resources, resistance to new roles and responsibilities and ways of working, translating principles into behaviours.

At the end of the day we will reflect back and capture key lessons learned at an individual level (what can I take away in my role) and at a team or organisational level (what do we need to take away and apply)

Learning Objectives:

General outcomes

  • How can we organise digital transformation programs?
  • What are the key elements of a SAFe approach?
  • How can SAFe principles benefit the organisation?
  • What is the impact of this way of working for an organisation and how can we deal with this?
  • How to involve all stakeholders when ‘implementing’ this way of working?

Specific outcomes

  • How to define a Strategic Theme?
  • How to prioritise Features and Enablers on a Program Backlog?
  • How to prepare for a successful PI Planning?
  • How to execute a PI Planning?
  • How to involve Business roles in this process?
  • How to prepare a Program Board?
  • How to work with multiple teams focussing on the same outcomes?
  • How to be flexible and scalable when building new systems and services?
  • How to implement a SAFe ‘culture’ in an organisation?

Delivery Platform

This online Masterclass will be delivered using Google Meet and MURAL platforms.

How much does it cost?

This event is FREE for all itSMF UK members but please be aware that the maximum capacity is limited to 10 attendees due to the interactive delivery format.

Important Note: As places are limited, and roles need to be allocated on the day, please ensure that you are 100% able to attend this event before you register – as last minute cancellations will significantly impact the experience for other attendees.

Not yet a member? You’ll be shown a price of £165 + VAT which includes an ‘Individual’ level annual membership.  To find out about other membership levels, benefits and costs please click here.

REGISTER YOUR INTEREST 

Please contact the office on 0118 918 6500 to discuss an on-site running of this event.
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® Scaled Agile Framework and SAFe are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc

Details

Date:
20 October, 2022
Time:
9:30 am - 4:00 pm
Cost:
Free
Event Categories:
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Event Tags:
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Venue

Online Delivery

Organiser

itSMF Events Team
Phone
+44 (0)118 918 6500
Email
events@itsmf.co.uk
View Organiser Website