What do you love most about the SAFe Quickstart ART Launch Program and why?
Nader Talai – CEO of Value Glide and SAFe expert – walks us through the SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program and why this is a firm favourite when helping organizations adopt or implement the SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) effectively.
There are 4 primary reasons why I love the program,
- It provides us with a valuable checklist to follow
- It empowers us to ask hard but valuable questions
- It allows us to design and track valuable metrics and measures
- It allows us to decide what we are attempting to achieve and why that matters
A SAFe Adoption Checklist
I love the SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program is because it acts very much like a checklist.
Even if you’ve done this multiple times, there is a lot of value in having a valuable checklist that empowers you to walk through the process with an effective guide. Something that keeps you focused on what matters and ensures that you are moving through the process effectively.
In essence, a checklist of what we need to do and why we need to do them.
It isn’t just useful for me as a SAFe practitioner, coach, and consultant, it is also useful to clients so that they understand what we are doing, why we are doing it, and what the process looks like.
Asking hard questions
The second reason why I love the program is because it allows us to ask the customer all the hard questions upfront.
In many cases, when an organization adopt Agile, they are focused on delivery and simply getting going with the agile framework of choice.
The SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program forces us to ask why the organization have decided to adopt Agile and what primary problems they are attempting to solve through the adoption of SAFe.
Agile in and of itself has no intrinsic value.
Adopting agile is often simply adopting a lightweight agile framework, governed by agile values and principles, that acts as a scaffolding to help you build valuable products and solve compelling problems, but it doesn’t do anything in and of itself.
So, at the start of the SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program, we ask:
- What are you trying to achieve?
- What is the goal you are aiming for?
- What are the business objectives you are aiming for?
- What are the problems you are trying to solve?
- Who are you solving those problems for and why does it matter?
- What challenges are you experiencing that are preventing you from delivering great products, features, and services to clients?
- Which dials do we need to move for you and why is that important?
- Where are the team failing and how can we help them succeed?
- How do business objectives currently align with customer objectives?
And so forth.
A series of questions that empower us to understand the environment, what the organization want’s the future to look like, and how we can delight customers with products and features that they truly value.
At the start of the engagement, we aren’t necessarily focused on fixing every problem or creating radical change throughout the organization, we are focused on making things better and aligning efforts with continuous improvement at each iteration and program increment delivered.
Defining Measures
Once we’ve captured the answers to the tough questions, the SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program shifts our attention and focus to identifying measures and metrics that inform whether we are achieving our goals or improving with each iteration.
We don’t want to invest 6 or 9 months in an adoption and implementation only to find out that what we have implemented isn’t working, or at worst, making things worse for the organization.
So, the value in the previous step of asking hard questions allows us to design the metrics and measurements that will act as leading and lagging indicators of progress. They allow us to quickly and easily identify whether we are moving the needle in all the right directions or whether we need to go back to the drawing board and reinvent what we are doing.
I love this step because it brings transparency, openness, and honesty into the relationship.
The temptation can be to hide all the areas that an organization is failing and attempt to sweep the problems under the rug but because we are there to help, and our focus lies in improving things rather than assigning blame or consequences to others, we just bring it all to the surface and identify an opening benchmark along with measures that will show progress in the coming days, weeks and months.
Because we aren’t dwelling in the past or assigning blame, morale lifts quickly when the team start to achieve goals and the metrics indicate that we are improving rapidly and consistently.
The worse the initial data is, the quicker we can make improvements and show real progress to the executive and leadership teams. It’s a great scenario for everyone involved and it’s great to be a part of that as a consultant and coach.
If we only start measuring 6 months into the engagement, we’re starting from a false base and lose out on the momentum we initially gain when the team crush targets and goals in the initial 6-month period of the engagement.
Identifying what it is we are attempting to achieve
The SAFe Quickstart ART Launch Program allows us to have the conversation about where we currently are, how that doesn’t currently serve us, and what we would like to become in future.
What we would like to attempt and achieve.
It allows us to define who we are serving – the customer segments and markets we engage with – and what problems we are trying to solve for them.
- What are we attempting to build and why will that contribute value and delight our customers?
- How will that create competitive advantage for the organization and potentially even disrupt our competitors?
- What are the leading and lagging indicators that will tell us whether we are succeeding in serving our customers and creating an impact in the marketplace?
The program allows us to identify and define all of these elements, upfront, and ensure that each person in the team and the leaders/executives we work with understand these elements.
A shared understanding of what specific terms mean, what specific goals and objectives mean, and what our vision and purpose means exactly, is a foundation of agile.
It provides clarity, insight and empowers teams to lead with inspiration, passion and creativity.
When you’re stuck waist deep in quicksand, it can be very hard to inspire a team or achieve great results consistently. When you have clarity around what we are attempting, why that is important, and provide a clear roadmap to success, the team gain momentum very quickly and rapidly move the needle on all the dials that matter.
So, in closing, these would be the 4 primary reasons why I love the SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program and actively recommend it to clients.
About Value Glide
Value Glide are a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) consultancy, coaching practice, and training specialist who work with organizations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.
As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team are invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and use the data and evidence we gather from each implementation to inform our training, coaching, and consulting services.
In a nutshell, empirical process control or empiricism.
If you are thinking of adopting agile within your organization and have identified SAFe as a great agile framework to adopt, implement and improve your business agility, visit our SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program page or view our SAFe Consulting Services page.
If you have identified a need for an agile coach and SAFe coach to help your organization adopt and implement SAFe, visit our SAFe Coaching Services page.
If you want to know more about SAFe and how to lead SAFe, visit our SAFE Training page for a host of options, from Leading SAFe to a SAFe Release Train Engineer course.
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