Organizational Agility in a Global Medical Simulation & Clinical Education Equipment Leader using SAFe Agile Adoption

Problem

How to implement agile for healthcare clients?

Our client develops products and programs for healthcare providers, voluntary organizations, educational institutions, hospitals, and the military worldwide.

It is a world leader in healthcare education and resuscitation training, the client empowers lifesavers and healthcare workers, to help them save more lives by using immersive technologies and data-centric insights that can help to increase survival rates and improve healthcare quality.

The company is on a hybrid office operation model post-pandemic and the team is located across the globe. Even though the company is a world leader in healthcare education, they wanted to bring in transparency, visibility and strengthen their development pipeline to achieve continuous delivery and agility in practices to respond to change to stakeholders, customers and consumer’s demand to provide them with the best healthcare products and training to impact more lives. They want a streamline release plan with new features and better learning experiences or most relevant and better knowledge experiences to end customers.

Key Business Demands –

An existing ART was in place with cadence set, there was a challenge of onboarding another ART which was heavily working in a waterfall model
Streamline process – One common framework across multiple teams
Incremental delivery – Continuous value realization
Execution Certainty – Prioritized backlog, transparency, predictability, continuous monitoring and improvements through metrics and reporting
Improved collaboration in hybrid teams and overall quality of delivery through best engineering practices aligned with the core business model.

Journey

Started the new ART with a small sized team
Education and awareness creation with SAFe Agile adoption
Stabilizing the ART by implementing best practices for cadence and synchronization with agile teams
Role-based coaching at ART and Team levels
Onboarded additional agile teams within the ART in a span of a few months
25+ product and engineering members were coached on agile ways of working.
Implemented Scrum in the team along with SAFe essential PI experience
Teams were coached on multiple collaboration tools & techniques.
Revisited project management tools and board to leverage maximum impact to experience team and program-level interventions
Coached on requirements gathering, breakdown, and estimation for PI planning and facilitated pre & post PI best practices to ensure the success of the SAFe Program Increment event.
Implemented metrics and dashboards and coached the team on translating and retrospection for continuous improvement.
Periodic incremental outcome-based improvement and executive summary updates to leaders on value delivered and PI objective goals

Outcomes

Uniform & consistent SAFe agile adoption within the organization
Creation and sustenance of self-managed, mature Agile teams
Improved understanding of client centric requirements and estimation of work which impacted the overall clarity, ownership, predictability and release cycles
Teams started demonstrating incremental delivery in the iteration that accelerated the releases, followed by system demo before scheduled release to all stakeholders
Introduction, implementation and maturity in engineering practices like pair programming, automation etc. to improve the productivity and overall product quality
Streamlined and simplified business requirement documentation using functional & technical mindmap, UX wireframe & Mockup, brainstorming and async collaboration
Jira dashboards, ROAM board, Program level roadmap & many more metrics designed to visualize PI progress, quality, risks, dependencies, impediments and others.
Data driven decision making using Jira reports to track work progress, capacity allocation, scope creep, estimation variance and other parameters that helped to successor PI planning in better way
Improved collaboration & work visibility across the team through SAFe PI