- Seventeen PI cycles of SAFe® sat beside an existing process asset library rather than inside it, so the organization had two descriptions of the same work and could evidence neither.
- Management's condition was integration rather than replacement: every SAFe® process had to meet the system engineering practices, tools, work products and roles already in use.
- Skyguide's own quality management team was trained to lead the integration, and has done the process engineering itself since.
The challenge
Skyguide provides air navigation services for civil and military aviation, and had been working in SAFe® for seventeen Program Increments by the time the question that mattered was asked. The framework was working. The evidence was not: the implementation had never been integrated with the existing process assets, and there was no way to demonstrate that the safety measures and control mechanisms required by the state were fulfilled.
Underneath that sat the ordinary friction of a transformation that has run long enough to settle. Daily work was less efficient than expected, agile was not scaling across the organization, and the same discussions about how to perform the “new way of working” kept coming back — how to use the tools consistently, and how to document a solution properly and still work in an agile way.
- Delivery running in the framework
- An Agile Release Train in motion
- A process asset library already in use
- SAFe® sat beside the process assets, not inside them
- Two descriptions of the same work
- No control mechanisms an auditor could follow
- Daily work less efficient than expected
- Agile not scaling across the organization
- The same “new way of working” debates recurring
- Inconsistent tool usage
- < 4 mo
- to consistent, auditable processes across units
- 100%
- compliance to federal and European regulation
- −2/3
- ramp-up time for new role assignments
- 5 days
- training, then the QM team runs it itself
What was done
Management decided that scaling SAFe® for the long run meant integrating it with what was already there — the process asset library, with its practices, tools, work products and roles — while proving compliance with Swiss federal law and the European regulatory framework at the same time. After an evaluation, Applied SAFe® was adopted as the Lean QMS, and PEDCO trained the internal quality management team to lead the integration and adoption themselves.
Skyguide integrated its development landscape with Applied SAFe® first, leaving other life cycles running in parallel while it did. A small team completed that on its own, and the running Agile Release Train was formalized afterwards.
Because flight control services run 7×24, four areas got processes developed or enhanced specifically for them: architecture, deployment and release, safety assessment, and compliance management. Working through those surfaced overlap — several tools and deliverables were doing the same job — and the number of work products came down as a result. Clear roles and responsibilities, plus the built-in tailoring, took out more.
In Aerospace you can imagine that it's difficult to establish an agile transformation process in the long run. With Applied SAFe®, we have been able to define the needed processes for our organization in a very short time. We combined the ‘new way of working’ with our existing knowledge on how to do system deployment; in a compliant and efficient manner.
What changed
Process flows were optimized and harmonized in workshops with the practitioners who work to them, and the existing process assets that were good were reused rather than rewritten. The departments now collaborate on a common model of deliverables regardless of the life cycle they work in, SAFe® processes are individually customizable per team, and explicit role responsibilities made it easier to move employees between business units. The reaction time for a change to the agile processes themselves came down sharply.
- Consistent, auditable and compliant processes across business units and specialist disciplines in less than four months.
- Cooperation between business units optimized, and ramp-up time for new role assignments reduced by two thirds.
- 100% compliance to federal laws and European regulations reached with scaled agile processes and instance-based variation of configurations and needs.
- A common domain model, so information is created and shared when it is needed rather than assembled afterwards.
- The organization executes lean-agile process engineering by itself after five days of training.