WORKSHOP TRAINING
Inspect and Adapt Workshop
The importance of the Inspect and Adapt (I&A) workshop cannot be understated. It enables every Agile Release Train (ART) to improve every Program Increment (PI).
Since each PI represents a significant economic investment from the organization, it’s critical to assess the current state of the solution, which is demonstrated and evaluated by the ART teams during the I&A. During this one-day workshop you will be guided through the planning, preparation and execution of the Inspect and Adapt workshop.
Three main elements of the Inspect and Adapt workshop In this hands-on workshop, your ART teams will be guided through a rigorous approach to problem–solving that will result in improvement actions for the next PI. This includes:
- PI System Demo
- PI Quantitative Assessment
- Problem Solving Workshop
Who will benefit?
- All members of the Agile Release Train (ART) including Agile teams, business Owners and stakeholders
- Release Train Engineers (RTEs) and Scrum Masters
- Certified SAFe® Program Consultants (SPCs) and other change agents
Prerequisites
Participated in an Agile Release Train (ART) and finished a Program Increment (PI).
What you’ll learn and accomplish
- A clear and aligned understanding of the state of the solution being developed, and the priorities for improvement going into the next PI Planning
- How to use Lean problem-solving tools, such as Root-Cause Analysis, Pareto Analysis, and the ‘5 Whys’
- Release Train Engineers (RTEs) and Scrum Masters will learn how to conduct a Program-Level retrospective to identify the issues for the problem-solving workshop.
- How to prepare for and conduct the PI System Demo and measure performance of the teams and ART
ART Quickstart Workshop
There are many ways to successfully launch an Agile Release Train (ART) to begin realizing the benefits of SAFe. However, experience has shown that the easiest and fastest way to do this is through the SAFe ART Quickstart approach.
During this five-day workshop, using this approach, all teams on the ART are trained together, and the first Program Increment (PI) planning session is completed in just one week. While this may seem daunting, hundreds of rollouts have proven that this is the easiest and most pragmatic way to help 100-plus people transition to the new way of working.
Benefits of the Quickstart approach
- The Agile teams will be fully formed
- Teams engage in collective learning that starts forming the social network that the ART depends upon
- The features for the PI will be ready
- Teams form their own identities
- Executives, Business Owners, and other key stakeholders will be trained and aligned with the new ways of thinking and doing
- Specialty roles, such as Product Owners and Scrum Masters will be prepared for their new responsibilities Who will benefit?
- Executive sponsors and Business Owners
- Change agents and Certified SAFe® Program Consultants (SPCs)
- Product Managers and Product Owners
- System Architects and Development Managers
- Release Train Engineers and Scrum Masters
- Agile team members
Highly Recommended Prerequisites
- The Value Stream Workshop should be held prior to the SAFe ART Quickstart to identify the first value stream and ART to launch
- Leading SAFe training for Executives, Business Owners, and other key ART stakeholders
- SAFe Scrum Master training for all Scrum Masters on the ART
- SAFe Product Management/Product Owner training for these roles on the ART
- A well-defined vision, roadmap, and program backlog What You’ll Learn and Accomplish
- How to plan, execute, and learn together as an Agile team with an ART
- How to conduct a Program Increment (PI) planning event
- How to prepare for the SAFe ART Quickstart and launch your first ART
Three main elements of the SAFe ART Quickstart
- Preparation
In order to advise and assist with the preparation tasks, the Quickstart typically includes one or more days of consultation (delivered remotely).
- SAFe for Teams training
In the first two days of the Quickstart we will train your Agile teams in SAFe principles, practices, and how to execute as a Scrum/ Kanban team working within a SAFe context.
- Program Increment (PI) Planning
In the final two days of your Quickstart, we will partner with ART leadership to facilitate the first PI Planning event for the new ART.
Lean Agile Center of Excellence Workshop
During this one-day workshop, you will explore proven SAFe adoption patterns (as well as common pitfalls) and how they apply to your context, in order to:
- Create the mission statement and charter for the LACE
- Understand and learn how to carry out the responsibilities of the LACE
- Determine the organizational model for the LACE (centralized, decentralized or hub-and-spoke)
- Set up the LACE as an Agile team
- Build your initial SAFe Implementation Roadmap
- Learn how to prepare to launch your first Agile Release Train (ART)
Prerequisites
- All participants must have attended an Implementing SAFe or Leading SAFe class
- Completion and socialization of a Value Stream Workshop What you’ll learn and accomplish
- Proven SAFe adoption patterns described in the SAFe Implementation Roadmap
- Which LACE organizational model is best for your organization
- LACE roles and responsibilities, and the key practices the LACE can leverage to drive enterprise adoption
- An action plan for generating the short-term wins critical to organizational change
- A roadmap and Kanban system to sustain and expand on early successes
- Fostering Release Train Engineer (RTE) and Scrum Master Communities of Practice (CoPs)
- Extending SAFe to Lean Portfolio Management, Human Resources, and Finance
Who will benefit?
- Executive sponsors
- Change agents
- Certified SAFe® Program Consultants (SPCs)
- Agile coaches
What you’ll learn and accomplish
The LACE is a small, dedicated team of leaders and change agents who are responsible for driving real and lasting organizational change.
An effective Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) is a critical success factor differentiating organizations fully committed to adopting Lean-Agile practices and achieving significant business results from those practicing Agile in name only.
The challenge is that most of the people qualified to drive change have full-time responsibilities in their current roles. While a significant portion of their time can perhaps be devoted to supporting the change, a smaller, more dedicated group of people is needed to drive SAFe® adoption throughout the organization.
Lean Portfolio Management Workshop
Speed, quality, and productivity are worthy goals for any organization
Yet it’s only when applied with strategic focus and alignment that transformative results can be achieved. SAFe® helps align portfolio execution to the enterprise strategy, by organizing Agile development around the flow of value through one or more value streams. It enables business agility by applying the principles and practices of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM).
In order to maintain alignment, while preserving empowerment and decentralized decision making, three key collaborations must be enabled across the portfolio:
- Strategy and investment funding
- Lean governance
- Agile portfolio operations
Together these three collaborations provide a leaner, and more Agile, governance model that helps each portfolio in the enterprise achieve its larger business objectives.
Who will benefit?
- Executive sponsors and Business Owners
- Finance and Accounting leaders
- Agile Program Management Office (PMO) and Lean–Agile Center of Excellence (LACE)
- Change agents and Certified SAFe® Program Consultants (SPCs)
Prerequisites
- All participants have attended Implementing SAFe or Leading SAFe
- Completion of a Value Stream Workshop for the target portfolio
What you’ll learn and accomplish
- Identifying strategic themes that provide the differentiation needed by the portfolio to achieve the desired future state
- Forecasting, and dynamically funding value streams to adjust for changing priorities
- Identifying portfolio epics and managing their flow using the portfolio Kanban system
- Coordinating epic delivery across value streams
- Supporting an Agile PMO, LACE, and Communities of Practice (CoP) to facilitate sustaining and improving the SAFe transformation
- Measuring portfolio performance using Lean approaches
- Coordinating continuous compliance
Measure and Grow Workshop
During this one-day workshop, you will
- journey towards business agility,
- explore the SAFe assessments,
- facilitate effective assessments,
- analyze the results,
- identify improvement opportunities.
Who will benefit?
- Executives and Leaders, Managers, Directors, CIOs, and VPs
- Development, QA, and Infrastructure Management
- Program and Project Managers
- Product and Product Line Management
- Portfolio Managers, PMO, and Process Leads
- Enterprise, System, and Solution Architects
Prerequisites
All are welcome to attend the course, regardless of experience.
What you’ll learn and accomplish
Competing and thriving in the digital age means quickly responding to threats and opportunities with innovative solutions, something SAFe calls Business Agility. But change of any kind is never a linear path—it requires constant reflection on the steps taken previously and an ability to adapt plans based on the results achieved. “Measure and grow” is the term SAFe uses to describe how a Portfolio of SAFe value streams evaluates its progress towards Business Agility and identifies opportunities for improvement.
Value Stream Workshop
The SAFe® Implementation Roadmap provides a proven approach for adopting the Scaled Agile Framework®
One of the most important steps on this roadmap is to identify the Value Streams within the enterprise.
Value streams are the primary construct in SAFe for understanding, organizing, and delivering value to the customer and to the enterprise itself. Attempting to shortcut or breeze through this crucial step can derail your transformation before it begins. Getting value streams right, however, enables the organization to accelerate the flow of value across functional silos, activities, and boundaries.
During this one-to-three day workshop, you will learn how to identify your organization’s value streams and then explore and test different potential Agile Release Train (ART) designs that are optimized for the flow of value.
With this understanding, we will help you pick one value stream and one ART to serve as the starting vehicle for the journey. Next, you will learn how to create a plan to launch the ART and develop a roadmap for launching more ARTs and value streams.
Who will benefit?
- Executive sponsors and Program Management Officer (PMO)
- Certified SAFe® Program Consultants (SPCs) and change agents
- Release Train Engineers and Agile coaches
Prerequisites
Leading SAFe or Implementing SAFe (recommended for dedicated members of the transformation team).
What you’ll learn and accomplish
- Gain an overview of the SAFe Implementation Roadmap
- Learn how to identify value streams and ARTs
- Select the first value stream and ART to get your first ‘short-term win’
- Understand the considerations in designing ARTs to realize the value stream
- Begin planning for the launch of the initial ART(s)
- Understand how to successfully repeat the launching of more ARTs and value streams.
PI Planning Workshop
Program Increment (PI) Planning is a cadence-based, face-to-face event that serves as the heartbeat of the Agile Release Train (ART),
aligning all the teams on the ART to a shared mission and Vision. PI planning is a significant event that requires preparation, coordination, and communication. For the event to be successful, preparation is required in three major areas:
• Organizational readiness – Strategic alignment and teams and trains setup
• Content readiness – Management and development preparedness
Facility readiness – The actual space and logistics for the event
The SAFe PI Planning Toolkit
provides resources curated and distilled from hundreds of realworld implementations. It includes all the presentation slides, workbooks, and templates needed to guide an ART through these preparation activities and facilitate a successful PI planning event
Community of Practice Workshop
Communities of Practice (CoPs) are organized groups of people who have a common interest in a specific technical or business domain.
They collaborate regularly to share information, improve their skills, and actively work on advancing the general knowledge of the domain.
Healthy CoPs have a culture built on professional networking, personal relationships, shared knowledge, and common skills. Combined with voluntary participation, CoPs provide knowledge workers with opportunities to experience autonomy, mastery, and purpose beyond their daily tasks on an Agile Release Train (ART) .
CoPs enable practitioners to exchange knowledge and skills with people across the entire organization. This open membership offers access to a wide range of expertise to help with technical challenges, fuel continuous improvement and allows more meaningful contributions to the larger goals of the Enterprise.
The result is that organizations benefit from rapid problem-solving, improved quality, cooperation across multiple domains, and increased retention of top talent.
Business Agility Workshop
The SAFe 5.0 introduces the seven core competencies required for business agility.
Each competency has three dimensions and is a set of related knowledge, skills, and behaviors. By mastering SAFe’s competencies, enterprises can achieve business agility to quickly respond to volatile market conditions, changing customer needs, and emerging technologies:
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Team and Technical Agility. Build strong, crossfunctional Agile teams with technical and nontechnical members to release high-caliber solutions.
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Agile Product Delivery. Shift product strategy— allow teams to continually engage with customers to explore, integrate, and deploy to identify what the market needs next.
Enterprise Solution Delivery. Coordinate and align across multiple teams of Agile teams and suppliers to build and release really big systems.
Lean Portfolio Management. Align enterprise strategy and portfolio execution to ensure you’re investing your money in the right projects that deliver value.
Organizational Agility. Create Lean business operations and commit to value-stream thinking to refine processes, so teams can quickly organize and reorganize as customer and market demands shift.
Continuous Learning Culture. Infuse relentless improvement into your DNA to create a culture where individuals, teams, and the entire organization learns—and innovates—together.
Lean-Agile Leadership. Develop a culture where leaders own the change—aligning their words and actions to support the Lean-Agile mindset and guide others in the new way of working.
Executive Workshop
Aligning executive stakeholders to reach the SAFe tipping point
To reach the tipping point in an enterprise, SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs) may need to align executive stakeholders on the problems to be solved, developing their understanding of what it means to be a Lean Enterprise, help them assess where they are on that journey, and guide them on the next steps to better understanding SAFe.
During this one-day workshop, you will (a) Discuss current challenges with executives, (b) Introduce the 7 core competencies of a Lean Enterprise, (c) Self- assessment in terms of the current symptoms being experienced, and (d) define next steps.
Who will benefit?
- Executives and Leaders, Managers, Directors, CIOs, and VPs
- Development, QA, and Infrastructure Management
- Program and Project Managers
- Product and Product Line Management
- Portfolio Managers, PMO, and Process Leads
- Enterprise, System, and Solution Architects
Prerequisites
All are welcome to attend the course, regardless of experience.
What you’ll learn and accomplish
Globalization, fast-moving markets, disruption, the unprecedented pace of technological innovation. Organizations know that they need to transform—now—to survive. But their existing business models, organizational hierarchy, and technology infrastructure simply can’t keep up with how quickly the company needs to adapt.
Agile product delivery isn’t enough. You need business agility. Which happens when the entire organization—business and tech leaders, compliance, development, finance, legal, marketing, operations, sales, security, support—uses Lean and Agile practices to continually and proactively deliver innovative business solutions faster than the competition. Business agility lets you capitalize on emerging opportunities by empowering you to make quick decisions, allocate money, and align the right people to do the work. SAFe® 5.0 has the guidance to help you get there.
Systems Thinking Workshop
Systems thinking takes a holistic approach to solution development, incorporating all aspects of a system and its environment into the design, development, deployment, and maintenance of the system itself.
SAFe guides the development and deployment of complex technology-based systems. They are represented by the SAFe Solution object, the tangible object that delivers the end user’s value and is the subject of each Value Stream—the application, satellite, medical device, or website. When it comes to such tangible systems, Deming’s comment that “a system must be managed” leads to some critical insights:
Team members must understand clearly the boundaries of the system, what it is, and how it interacts with the environment and the systems around it.
Optimizing a component does not optimize the system. Components can become selfish and hog the resources—computing power, memory, electrical power, whatever—that other elements need.
For the system to behave well as a system, intended behavior and some higher-level understanding of its architecture (how the components work together to accomplish the aim of the system) must be understood. Intentional design is fundamental to systems thinking.
The value of a system passes through its interconnections. Those interfaces—and the dependencies they create—are critical to providing ultimate value. Continuous attention to those interfaces and interactions is vital.
A system can evolve no faster than its slowest integration point. The faster the full system can be integrated and evaluated, the faster the system knowledge grows.