- The problem was not the transformation but the record of it: the agile process and the risk controls behind it were not visible in one place, and the written description could not be shown to be complete or unambiguous.
- Adjusting only what genuinely had to be adjusted kept the reuse rate high and the number of new roles low, which is what made a common taxonomy possible across lines of business and outsourced partners.
- Compliance was designed in from the start, so the regulator could be convinced of the model early and full compliance proven in later versions.
The challenge
The client is a diversified financial institution — banking, insurance and financial investment — with a history of being the most innovative in its industry and more than 30,000 people worldwide. Remaining the provider of choice for over eight million members meant getting innovative products to market faster, and the agile transformation started there. As it gained momentum and the organization's reliance on outsourced IT development became the constraint, the bank's President concluded they needed help scaling it.
What the organization actually needed was assurance: its agile process and its risk controls documented and visible in a single source of record, under a taxonomy and a language shared by every line of business and every enabling partner. The discussion about what a concrete SAFe® implementation looked like went back and forth without settling. The description in use was no basis on which to prove correctness — it could not be shown complete or unambiguous, it had grown large, and it had become redundant and in places contradictory. Nothing further could be built on it, and compliance certainly could not be proven from it.
- Grown too large to prove anything with
- Redundant in places, contradictory in others
- Not demonstrably complete or unambiguous
- Process and risk controls in separate places
- One taxonomy
- One shared language
- Every line of business
- Every enabling partner
What was done
A pilot was started with Applied SAFe® as the Lean QMS — an interactive, tool-agnostic framework for achieving business agility in a regulatory compliant way — and the internal LACE team was trained to lead the customization from there.
The governing idea was to adjust as little as absolutely necessary, which produced a reuse rate of almost 90%. Defined roles, their interactions and the artifacts supporting them gave every participant the same picture. Roles were used as they come in Applied SAFe® and extended with specialized responsibilities, keeping the number of additional roles as low as possible.
Existing process assets — standard operating procedures for testing, among others — were integrated rather than replaced, and with Applied SAFe®'s organizational process assets the agility and compliance of an activity could be established as self-proving evidence. Because many solutions had histories longer than fifteen years, considerable attention went to how existing documentation would be handled and maintained: specific deliverables such as the solution architecture document and use-case requirements had to be kept, with the practices for handling them written down. A standardized set of Definitions of Done was part of the same effort.
What changed
New and long-standing team members ended up on the same page about the taxonomy of SAFe® and about their own processes, which is the quiet precondition for everything below.
- Commitment to continuous improvement: keeping teams together let them inspect and adapt after each Program Increment, and the direct feedback exchanged through comments in Applied SAFe® covered not only practices and activities but the product and its delivery.
- Scaling the enterprise: the agile enterprise grew to eight portfolios and eighteen trains in the bank, and five portfolios and fourteen trains in property and casualty, with investment banking ramping up behind them.
- Automating processes to decrease time to market: iterative delivery to production, automated test harnesses and a lean set of processes and controls allowing release on demand reduced time to market in many instances by 60%.
- No more treasure hunt: giving employees everything they need in one platform improved the clarity of SAFe® with 67% less discussion time, and new hires ramped up faster.
- Compliance issues solved: with the new QMS in place and mappings from Applied SAFe® to regulatory requirements, compliance was established — while remaining agile.