So, based on my post a while ago about revamping the path to SAFe, I thought I’d toss up some sketches of what I’m thinking.
So I haven’t done ‘launch teams’ or ‘launch trains’ or ‘implement DevOps’ yet, but I’ve got a high-level model that has survived DAYS of my picking at it so far. Let’s take a look:
So, what’s we’re doing here is mapping a path from kickoff to improving a train - which is about where there should be clear internal self-sufficiency - whether from a vendor or internal support group.
There’s a branch here, because there are two independent outcomes we need to drive toward success - we need to stand up self-improving, self-sufficient teams of teams and trains plus we need to stand up an effective LACE to drive internal ownership of the change work and culture change. It might be that in early iterations, you’d put capacity against both of these, and in later iterations, we’d put less or no capacity into the LACE because earlier iterations had taken care of it.
Now let’s dig into a little bit of detail. Here’s how we might structure launch:
First, we have to define the playing field - what part of a given organization are we talking about changing (or if all of it, explicitly decide all of it) and are the people who make decisions for that part aligned on what we’re doing and why?
Then we want to decide what problems we’re here to solve. Because - again - we have to tie the transformation to solving the problems and gaining wins for the organization.
Then we’ve got two decisions - is this the right part of the organization to change and are the key stakeholders aligned on that? - and do we believe that the change we’re proposing - implementing SAFe - will make the improvements needed to deal with the issues we’ve identified as important?
If either of those is a no, we pivot. If they are both yes, we proceed.
And if we proceed, we proceed on two paths - one is to launch a LACE (or whatever we call the organization of internal change agents), and the other is to define the portfolio (or portfolios) in the chunk of organization we’re changing and stand up a portfolio management process there.
Here’s a path to a LACE:
We are chasing three outcomes:
Staffing the LACE;
Beginning outreach to build a Community of Practice;
Aligning the stakeholders on a roadmap the LACE will execute.
This brings us to a point where we have a sense that - we’ve wrongly scaled the LACE (too big/expensive; too small/can’t meet goals), or we’re not seeing an audience (poor reaction to outreach); and the attainable roadmap for the LACE doesn’t meet the requirements of the stakeholders, in which case we pivot.
Next, we’ll talk about Portfolio and DevOps.