Agile SAFe Framework - Agile Release Train Planning (ART) number 2. Largest in the UK (again)

Today was the end of the second Release Train Planning event to mark the start of the next 3 months worth of development within the Business.  This time we had two hundred and seventy people on the go, so seventy up on last time. still the biggest in the UK from all we are told.

This time round it was a bit slicker in the execution, with some truly excellent contributions at the start to give some context and to re-cap on the success and challenges of the last 3 months plus a bit of humour and a surprise or two along the way to keep spirits up.

I was again facilitating for the two days, this time working with one of the teams on a Supply Chain initiative.  The afternoon of Day 1 saw us reviewing a draft story set with our new product owner which sadly descended into a debate as to whether the story set was actually viable at all.  In the spirit of agile, we broke off and put the developers back into the "heartbeat" processes of the Safe ART and then four of us spent two hours with a whiteboard doing some rough and ready business analysis to get to the bottom of the actual requirement.

Day 2 had the four of us meeting up at 7.30am to write up a new set of stories from the work the afternoon before, and then we were able to re-engage the development team properly in the planning breakout session and get the whole thing planned out properly into the next six iterations (I know Dean Leffingwell suggests 4 iterations, but we're doing 6 per release train here).  Not the most perfect of ART planning days for us, but actually we got the right result and a good team confidence score in to the mix also, so all is well that ends well.

Now we just have to deliver what we committed to !

Agile SAFe Training - the Facilitation bit.

Well I have been a bit busy of late being further trained up in the Scaled Agile Framework and also helping facilitate at the first UK SAFe Release Train Planning.  This event was also the largest SAFe Release Train planning event to be held in the World as of March 2013 with about 200 participants, and we are doing it all again in June.

We are being helped along the journey by Rally Software who have flown in consultants and trainers to help us up the SAFe "mountain" and the uptake and commitment by the teams inside the company has been impressive.

One such bit of help that Rally gave last week was a two day course in facilitation.  Now I don't think I'm too bad at facilitating but equally I know there are better people than me at it so an opportunity to pick up some new tips and techniques was a bonus so I enrolled.

I have to say that having done the course I now realise there is a bit of an Art to good facilitation and I learned a lot about the way to structure a productive workshop, how to prep, how to open it and more importantly how to close it.  There were practical exercises across both days and we all took away new skills that we put into practice immediately in the workplace.

Laura Burke - one of the Rally trainers on the Course

Ironically I had facilitated a retrospective a week earlier and been given a "Thank You" card for a "Brilliant retrospective" - now with hindsight and what I learned on the course I realise I could have done better, but that's all part of life learning.

What was clear from the course was that the larger you scale any Agile framework in any company, the more "value" you need to get from your meetings and workshops. There isn't the time to get groups of people together to go over the same points yet reach no conclusion, and ultimately if you are leaving a meeting without a decent set of actionable items or decisions, why did you have the meeting in the first place?

More on the Scaled Agile Framework to follow.

The Benefit Delivery Model circa 2007

So in a fit of nostalgia I was going through some work I created back in 2007 and one slide within a pack on   a formal Quality Gate Process stuck in my mind.  Whilst a lot of the world has moved away from the formalised and regimented QMS / Gate structures and approval boards with endless paperwork having a stranglehold on project delivery, the underlying principal still stands:

Benefit comes from Process Improvement, not from IT.

I realise this is stating the obvious to some, but for me it was worth just mentally re-visiting that statement.  We can build the most technically elegant and "bleeding-edge" platforms, the most wonderful UI's and the fastest responding architecture in the land, however unless it is improving something tangible for the business, there is no real point in investing in it.

Whilst my slide above was for an audience in a Government organisation who liked Prince2 and SSADM type processes, it still stands up just as well in the Agile world.  Every single user story can be considered to be its own little business case (if written correctly) with the benefits clearly stated, and the acceptance criteria clearly defined - Benefit really does come from Process Improvement, not from IT.