- Making SAFe® the primary product development process was a management decision with a condition attached: it had to integrate with the existing process asset library rather than sit beside it.
- Integration came first and compliance mapping second — the process landscape was mapped to ASPICE 3.1 and ISO 26262 only once it described what the organization actually does.
- A five-person internal team did the work, after which the QM department's process owners, the LACE and the process engineering team were trained to carry the customization themselves.
The challenge
SAFe® had proven itself in selected initiatives, which is the point at which an organization has to decide whether it is running a set of pilots or changing how product development works. The OEM chose the second — and immediately met the gap between the two. The implementation was not integrated with the existing process assets: systems engineering practices, tools and roles all described the same work in their own terms, and none of it could demonstrate that the safety measures and control mechanisms required by ISO 26262 and ASPICE 3.1 were being met.
The rest was the familiar cost of that gap. Day-to-day inefficiency, limited ability to scale agile across the organization, recurring debates about how to execute the “new way of working”, inconsistent tool usage, and no consistent way to document a solution that was both proper and agile.
What was done
After a thorough evaluation, Applied SAFe® was selected as the Lean QMS and connected to the process assets already in place. PEDCO trained the process owners in the QM department along with the internal LACE and process engineering teams, so the ongoing customization would be led from inside rather than bought in each time.
The development landscape was integrated with Applied SAFe® first, with other life cycles left running in parallel. A team of five completed that work independently, and the first Agile Release Train was launched afterwards. As with every integration of this kind, the exercise found overlap: certain tools and deliverables were doing the same job, and the number of work products came down.
Instantiation was then used to create automotive and subsystem processes and refine them with built-in tailoring to fit specific needs, which is what made it possible to monitor process execution across different tools and work products in line with each product's ASIL level. Only in a second phase was the defined process landscape mapped to ASPICE 3.1 and ISO 26262, to establish that the definitions were complete.
- Integrate the development landscapeFive internal people. Other life cycles left running in parallel.Applied SAFe® as Lean QMSone account of the work
- Map the landscape to the standardsOnly once it described what the organization actually does.Defined process landscapea completeness check, not an aspiration
- < 4 mo
- to uniform processes across business units
- 6 mo
- to customization integrated and compliance established
- −2/3
- ramp-up time for new role assignments
- 33%
- faster process improvement
In the automotive industry, sustaining an agile transformation over the long term is challenging. With Applied SAFe®, we were able to define the required processes for our organization very quickly. We combined the new way of working with our established system-engineering expertise — ensuring both compliance and efficiency.
What changed
The new process flows were optimized and harmonized through a series of workshops with practitioners, and the existing process assets that were useful were reused. Uniform processes now run across business units and specialist disciplines, they are individually extensible where a discipline needs something specific, and moving an employee between units no longer means learning a different account of the same work. The response time to a change in the agile processes themselves is markedly shorter, and the skeleton approach resolved the older problem of handling extensive documentation in an agile way while still meeting mandated documentation requirements.
- Uniform processes across business units and specialist disciplines in under four months.
- Cooperation between business units optimized, and ramp-up time for new role assignments reduced by two thirds.
- SAFe® instances configurable at different levels.
- Customization of SAFe® with existing system engineering implemented and integrated within six 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.