SAFe™ Training is great, but not enough.

For organizations seeking to utilize the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to enhance their business agility, my SAFe Agility Strategy Management/Leadership Workshop offers an interactive, in-depth approach to developing or re-aligning a strategy for scaling agility, leveraging SAFe within your organization. Going beyond training, this workshop begins with the organization’s specific pains, context, and improvement goals, and focuses on how to implement the learning and drive the change. 

This workshop has been used in dozens of enterprises to help guide 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 suits organizations in different stages of their SAFe journey:

• Considering scaling with SAFe
• Practicing some aspects of SAFe with mixed results
• Looking to take their SAFe implementation to the next level by identifying and addressing challenges.
• Trying to address some issues and revive a struggling SAFe implementation.

The shared goal relevant to all starting points is to focus on the fundamental understanding and application of agility principles and practices at scale, and to align on a concrete blueprint for moving forward. 

The workshop can be designed to include appropriate SAFe training or to complement formal SAFe training, such as Leading SAFe or Lean Portfolio Management. 

Key Objectives/Deliverables

• Establish needs and goals for Enterprise Agility through the exploration of pains/opportunities in the current way of working. 
• Establish what SAFe means within the organization –
  • What will be our Portfolios? Value Streams? Trains?
  • Who will fill which roles? 
  • Do we need a 3-level or 4-level SAFe? 
  • What will be our Epics? Capabilities? Features? Stories? 
  • What should be our Release Cadence? 
  • How do we integrate SAFe into our existing governance framework? The bigger organization? Partners? Customers? (Dealing with waterfall/phase gate/CMMI/etc.)
• Review and learn from relevant case studies for SAFe/Scaled Agile.
• Explore complementary practices required to implement SAFe in the specific organizational context, e.g. successfully:
  • Technical Safety
  • Sustainable Pace
  • Lean/Agile Requirements in a world of uncertainty – Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), Minimum Marketable Features (MMFs), Requirement slicing techniques, Lean Startup thinking. 
  • Combining Scrum and Kanban into ScrumBan 
  • Agile Testing Approaches
• Is SAFe SAFE here? Create and review a draft blueprint, explore and deal with risks until a high-confidence plan surfaces. 

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.

The main workshop is typically held for 2-3 days, depending on the organization’s size and complexity, and is preferably held in an offsite location. 

Delivery

Yuval Yeret, a SAFe Fellow, SPCT, and Scrum.org PST with over 15 years of experience applying agility at scale with dozens of world-class companies, will facilitate the workshop. 

Let's discuss how the Agility Strategy Workshop can work for you