Accelerate your SAFe Implementation Workshop

Designed for organizations who are leveraging Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe™) to improve their business agility, our Accelerating your SAFe™ Implementation Workshop focuses on re-aligning your SAFe implementation approach and identifying opportunities to accelerate flow and improve outcomes created by your SAFe ARTs, Value Streams and Portfolios. Going beyond training, this workshop starts with your context, gaps, and unrealized benefits of agility. It then continues with context-specific improvement patterns, both in theory as well as a potential application blueprint. It concludes with concrete a concrete improvement goal and a blueprint for an improvement roadmap/backlog.

This workshop has been used in dozens of enterprises to help realign a SAFe journey. It combines field-proven best practices, applied in an interactive and expertly facilitated manner, to provide the organization’s leadership with a context-specific road map to improvement.

When to use this workshop

The workshop is designed for organizations practicing some aspects of SAFe who are looking to take their SAFe implementation to the next level by identifying and addressing challenges.

Key Objectives/Deliverables

Establish the current state of our agile operating system – strengths, weaknesses, satisfaction gaps, ability to innovate, time to market / speed
Align on desired improvement areas to focus on
Review our SAFe approach
- What are our ARTs? Value Streams? Portfolios? Are they organized around Value? How dependent are they?
- How are we mapping SAFe’s roles and accountabilities to our organization? Which of these are working well? Where do we see issues and opportunities?
- Which SAFe configuration are we using? Which elements are working well for us? Which aren’t working that well?
- What are our Epics? Capabilities? Features? Stories? Are we leveraging them effectively to focus on outcomes?
- What does our continuous delivery pipeline / value stream look like? What’s our release cadence? Where are our flow bottlenecks and big batches?
- How are we fitting SAFe into our current governance context? The bigger organization? Partners? Customers? (Dealing with waterfall/phase gate/CMMI/etc.)
Explore complementary practices required to successfully implement SAFe in the specific organizational context, e.g.:
- Leveraging SAFe Flow properties and Accelerators at all levels of SAFe
- Team/Value Stream topologies to support descaling
- Integrating OKRs and SAFe
- Leveraging Evidence-based Management (EBM) to connect your SAFe implementation on outcomes/value.
- Moving From Project to Product in a SAFe
- SAFe’s Lean approach to Compliance / Quality Assurance

Workshop Approach

The workshop is highly interactive. We insist on a small, intimate forum where everyone participates and affects the outcome. Innovation Games, Gamestorming, and other techniques are used, and as an important side effect, the participants also learn how to effectively think and collaborate to solve tough system-level problems in the future.

As the purpose of the workshop is to outline high-level improvement strategies together, the bulk of the thinking is done together in real-time, with us helping you apply relevant thinking approaches and tools. To get the most out of the workshop, we typically spend some time getting acquainted with your context and expectations, using a few focused empathy interviews.

In true agile fashion, we aim to deliver value rather than follow a predefined plan/syllabus. While a backlog is prepared based on initial preparation/interviews to learn the general context and aims, we continuously seek feedback and adjust direction driving at maximum impact and return on the time of participants based on the discussions and directions that emerge.

Audience

Leadership Teams, Change Agents, Lean Agile Centers of Excellence (LACE) / Communities of Practice.

Duration

1-2 days of interviews and preparation.

Main Workshop is typically 2-3 days, depending on the organization’s size and complexity, preferably held in an offsite location.

Delivery

The workshop is facilitated by Yuval Yeret – a SAFe Fellow/SPCT/Scrum.org PST with more than 15 years of experience applying agility at scale with dozens of world-class companies.

Let’s discuss Accelerating your SAFe Implementation

Workshop Agenda Sample (Will be customized per context)

Opening (30min)	Intro+Purpose Working Agreements Expectations Setting/Collection
Why we’re here (1-2h)	Establish the current state of our agile operating system – strengths, weaknesses, satisfaction gaps, ability to innovate, time to market / speed Align on desired improvement areas to focus on
Review / Re-align key elements of our SAFe model (3-5h)	What are our ARTs? Value Streams? Portfolios? Are they organized around Value? How dependent are they? How are we mapping SAFe’s roles and accountabilities to our organization? Which of these are working well? Where do we see issues and opportunities? Which SAFe configuration are we using? Which elements are working well for us? Which aren’t working that well? What are our Epics? Capabilities? Features? Stories? Are we leveraging them effectively to focus on outcomes? What does our continuous delivery pipeline / value stream look like? What’s our release cadence? Where are our flow bottlenecks and big batches? How are we fitting SAFe into our current governance context? The bigger organization? Partners? Customers? (Dealing with waterfall/phase gate/CMMI/etc.)
Follow-up Context-specific Education/Learning (3-5h including exercises) e.g.	Leveraging SAFe Flow properties and Accelerators at all levels of SAFe Team/Value Stream topologies to support descaling Integrating OKRs and SAFe Leveraging Evidence-based Management (EBM) to connect your SAFe implementation on outcomes/value. Moving From Project to Product in a SAFe context SAFe’s Lean approach to Compliance / Quality Assurance
From ideas to an improvement roadmap (2-3h)	Align on an improvement objective and desired key results Create and review a draft improvement blueprint Risks, Confidence Vote and rework
Closing (30min-1h)	Takeaways, Epiphanies, Feedback, commitment to next steps