What is the role of the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence in SAFe?
The LEAN Agile center of excellence (LACE) in SAFe is the group of people who ensure that the agile transformation or transition to agile is on track.
People who make sure that everything is working correctly and effectively. They help and support the teams to make sure that the SAFe adoption and implementation is a success.
Organizational Support.
Tools
At the base level, the LEAN Agile centre of excellence will ensure that teams or team of agile teams have the correct tools and technology necessary to thrive. They will work to ensure the team have what they need and sustain that support for as long as necessary.
Coaching
All great teams have a solid coach and SAFe is no different.
SAFe or Agile is a radical departure from traditional project management and so support is needed from SAFe consultants and agile coaches to help the team work through teething and growth problems when they arise.
Training
A SAFe Release Train Engineer is a very different responsibility to a traditional project manager. So is a SAFe Scrum Master or SAFe Product Owner, and so we need to develop those skills.
First, we need to train people to understand agile values and principles, and then to understand the SAFe framework. After that, we need to grow their capabilities in a specific role or accountability, and the LEAN Agile Centre of Excellence will ensure that the appropriate training happens.
Transformation Backlog
As part of the initial agile assessments, a great agile coach and SAFe consultant will identify what needs to happen for the organization to successfully transform from project management into agile product development.
All those elements will be incorporated into a Transformation Backlog – a list of work or changes necessary for the transformation to succeed – and the LEAN Agile Centre of Excellence will own that transformation backlog.
It will be their responsibility to work through each item and get things done.
Learning Repository
The LEAN Agile Centre of Excellence will also make sure that there is a central repository for everything that the teams, teams of agile teams, and organization learn through the process of transformation.
Agile emphasises the need to continuously learn, adapt, and respond based on the knowledge, data, feedback, and evidence we acquire, and so it is incredibly important to make that learning visible and accessible across each of the value streams.
We want people to know what is working, what isn’t working, and how the data we gather informs the decisions we make moving forward.
The LEAN Agile Centre of Excellence play a critical role in ensuring that we transition from a compliant organization to a learning, market-sensing organization.
Growing the LEAN Agile Centre of Excellence.
In the beginning, you may have two or three people in the LEAN Agile Centre of Excellence, and that is fine. As you move through the agile transformation, more people will be recruited to the LACE and contribute their knowledge, skills, and capabilities to ensure it serves a valuable purpose.
As the organization grows the number of Agile Release Trains present, you may identify that a single LEAN Agile Centre of Excellence may not be enough to serve the organization effectively. It may be necessary to grow another LEAN Agile Centre of Excellence, or several LACE’s, to effectively contribute to the success of the organization.
You may adopt a hub and spoke approach to growing your LEAN Agile Centre of Excellence or you may choose a distributed model where each value stream build and develop their own LACE.
There is no best practice for this, it is best designed and developed by the people within the organization who best understand the LACE purpose and are best positioned to make a decision about the scaling model appropriate for the organization.
Pros and Cons
There are pros and cons for each method.
You would simply follow the same empirical process control (empiricism) as the teams of agile teams to work through the data, inspect the environment, and adapt based on the knowledge and capabilities you currently have.
It may serve you to switch to a distributed model in the future or you may find the need to transition from distributed to hub and spoke down the line. Simply be open to learning and use the data, feedback and reviews to inform how you proceed from there.
What does a LACE actively do?
Each LEAN Agile Centre of Excellence will be different and unique, but they are all actively responsible for guiding the agile transformation.
Some may choose a coaching and consulting approach to deliver that guidance, whilst others will develop a template of best practices based on what they have learned in similar adoptions or pockets of agility within the organization.
Their purpose is to serve the organization and they will explore the best way to do that based on what they have, what challenges have presented themselves, and what their data and learning repositories inform them.
It truly is an agile process of developing a hypothesis, running an experiment to validate that hypothesis, and then adapting or responding based on what is learned.
Following the pull system
A great LEAN Agile Centre of Excellence will pull work from their backlog rather than receive instructions on what needs doing. They will explore the best opportunities for success and pursue the low-hanging fruit before tackling tougher applications.
They may discover that there is a great interest in Agile from one of the divisions and choose to start there, or the data may indicate that X division has the greatest number of problems to be solved and choose to start there.
The LEAN Agile Centre of Excellence team will decide where to invest their time, efforts, and expertise to ensure the most valuable outcomes for the organization. They will look to build momentum and build success case studies that encourage other parts of the organization to embrace Agile and start their own transformation journey.
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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