- Successful endeavors are not an operating model. Promoting SAFe® to the primary product development process meant connecting it to the process asset library the rest of the company already worked to.
- Instantiation and tailoring let automotive and subsystem processes differ where the ASIL level demands it, without the baseline being copied per endeavor.
- The LACE and the process engineering team were trained to lead the customization, and the organization has run it since with minimal support.
The challenge
The supplier had used SAFe® successfully in some endeavors and wanted it as the established product development process across the company. The implementation, though, had grown up alongside the existing process assets rather than within them — system engineering, tools, roles — and it was not ready to prove that the safety measures and control mechanisms of ASPICE 3.1 or ISO 26262 were fulfilled.
Around that were the symptoms an unintegrated process produces: work that was less efficient than it should be, agile that would not scale across the organization, constant re-discussion of how to perform the “new way of working”, difficulty using the tools in a constant manner, and no agreed way to document a developed solution properly and agilely at the same time.
What was done
Management set the condition that all SAFe® processes had to integrate with the existing process asset library while proving compliance with ASPICE 3.1 and ISO 26262. Applied SAFe® was chosen as the Lean QMS after an evaluation and connected to the existing assets, and PEDCO trained the internal LACE and process engineering team to lead the customization from there.
A team of three to four people integrated the development landscape with Applied SAFe® by themselves, with other life cycles continuing in parallel, and the first Agile Release Train started afterwards. Overlapping tools and deliverables turned up in the process and the number of work products was reduced.
The customer then instantiated automotive and subsystem processes and adjusted them with built-in tailoring to their specific needs — which is what allowed waste to come out and process execution to be monitored across different tools and work products in accordance with the product's ASIL level. In a second phase, the defined process landscape was mapped to the requirements of ASPICE 3.1 and ISO 26262 to ensure the definitions were complete.
- Automotive processfull safety scopeASIL D
- Subsystem processreduced scopeASIL B
- Subsystem processlean scopeASIL A
- Discipline variantextended where neededQM
- < 4 mo
- consistent processes across units and disciplines
- 33%
- faster process improvement
- −2/3
- ramp-up time for new role assignments
- 5 days
- training, then run internally
In Automotive 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 engineering; in a compliant and efficient manner.
What changed
The process flows were optimized and harmonized in a series of workshops with practitioners, and good existing process assets were reused rather than replaced. Consistent processes now run across business units and specialist disciplines, they remain individually expandable where a discipline needs it, and the departments work far more closely than they did. Cross-department process understanding is the result the customer names first; the significantly simplified workflows are what it produced.
- Consistent 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.
- Processes tailorable to specific instances.
- Existing system engineering used within SAFe®, implemented and integrated within four months.
- Compliance to ASPICE and ISO 26262 established with scaled agile processes and instance-based variation of configurations and needs.
- 33% faster process improvement.
- The organization executes lean-agile process engineering by itself after five days of training and minimal support.