Streamlined end-to-end Agile integration for seamless methodology transition
Spearheaded Agile transformation for over 400 teams, enhancing efficiency and collaboration.
Expertly educated a large workforce in Agile methodologies
Benzne is an award winning SAFe consulting company, our team of agile and SAFe practitioners keep organizational dynamics and objectives in focus while designing and implementing SAFe based scaling agile transformations.
We have a collective experience of 100+ years in agile and SAFe consulting and led multiple business outcome oriented, timebound, contextual SAFe transformation across multiple clients spread globally.
We bring an outside in perspective to our client transformation journeys, partnering with leadership and teams to drive a tailor made, business need driven, time bound SAFe transformation journey.
We help our clients to inculcate organizational agility using SAFe as a scaling framework in a sustainable way, this helps them thrive in the digital age by delivering innovative products and services faster, more predictably and with higher quality.
Benzne is a leader in Agile excellence. We take time to understand our customers and design and implement contextual SAFe transformation journeys. We work with all the levels of the organization and create buy-in across all – which is most important for any transformation to succeed.
Getting external SAFe consulting helps organizations adopt a quick, time-bound, outcome-driven Agile transformation journey marrying culture, mindset, process, tools, and hands-on implementation expertise. Consultants with varied experience at different organizations know where to begin and how to quickly onboard and show results.
SAFe consultants will bring in an objective and neutral perspective on the table
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with recommendations derived from their observation.
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External Agile consultant brings a wealth of experience and expertise to the table
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having worked with a variety of organizations and helped them successfully adopt an Agile approach.
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External SAFe consultants give leadership flexibility to explore various models
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of engagement with a key focus on business metrics.
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External Agile consultant can tailor their services to the specific needs of an
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organization, helping them to design and implement a customized Agile solution that meets their unique needs and goals.
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Organizations save time and resources that would otherwise be spent on training and
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developing internal Agile expertise by working with agile consulting companies bringing in a sense of urgency.
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A good Agile consultant is mostly milestone driven. That is, in an implementation
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roadmap, they focus on the milestones achieved and quickly inspect and pivot.
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Start your Agile Transformation journey with an Agility Health Assessment, schedule a discussion with us now.
Any agile transformation requires careful consideration of the organization’s current state and a clear understanding of the desired outcomes. A good SAFe consulting company always starts with the business context and then designs a solution which is suited to the particular client situation. Here are the steps to consider implementing in your SAFe transformation journey
Conduct an assessment of your current development processes, culture, and organization structure to identify areas for improvement and determine if SAFe is a good fit. Define the vision for the SAFe implementation, including the goals, benefits, and desired outcomes.
Engage stakeholders, including executives, development teams, and customers, to build support and buy-in for SAFe.
Select a launch team of key stakeholders who will lead the SAFe implementation and act as change agents within the organization. Create a launch plan that outlines the steps involved in the SAFe implementation, including training, coaching, and mentoring.
Establish a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence to provide guidance and support for the SAFe implementation, and to drive continuous improvement.
Implement SAFe by following the framework and guidance provided by the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence. This may include training and coaching for development teams, and the establishment of Agile release trains and other SAFe structures.
Monitor and adjust the SAFe implementation over time, and continuously improve processes and practices to ensure that the organization is getting the desired benefits from SAFe.
When we scale agile in organizations, it is important to keep in mind certain aspects which otherwise may lead to bottlenecks in the SAFe transformation journey. Following are the key points to keep in mind –
To ensure we are relevant. profitable and continuously evolving, leadership should
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understand that the change is for all and not just at the engineering level.
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Many SAFe led transformations fail due to lack of focus on value streams
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(both operational and development value streams). Value stream mapping helps us in understanding the product and services that we are providing to customers which they consider as value
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As soon as organizations decide to kickstart their SAFe transformation journey,
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it is important that they should launch their first Agile Release Train (ART) so that we start reaping the benefits of SAFe by using the cadence, synchronization and focused program increment backlog which helps teams in aligning the business needs.
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SAFe defines several roles and responsibilities, including Product Owners,Scrum
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Masters/Team coaches, and Solution Train Engineers, so it is important to ensure that these roles are clearly defined and that the individuals in these roles are trained and equipped to perform their responsibilities effectively.
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Establish a governance model for SAFe that includes clear policies, procedures,
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and metrics to measure the success of the implementation and to support continuous improvement.
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SAFe is a continuously evolving framework, so it is important to encourage continuous
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learning, improvement, and experimentation, and to be open to change and adaptation.
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Schedule a call with our consulting team to discuss scaling agile using SAFe
SAFe, or Scaled Agile Framework, is a set of principles and practices for Lean-Agile development and software engineering. It provides a framework for coordinating and aligning the efforts of multiple Agile teams, and helps organizations to scale Agile development to meet the needs of large, complex software development projects.
SAFe is designed to help organizations to balance the need for speed, quality, and predictability, and provides a flexible, at the same time it is structured and scalable approach to Agile development. It’s used by organizations of all sizes, across a variety of industries, to help them develop high-quality software products more quickly and efficiently.
As SAFe recognises itself as a framework, it is important for all of us to understand that it shouldn’t be treated as a prescription approach to bring agility. We need to model it according to our needs and constraints. Like, there are many organizations who initially do not feel comfortable to get themselves certified, and expect consultants to show the results first by launching the first few ARTs successfully. Likewise, there are certain other metrics which are important for organization which may not be mentioned or recommended by SAFe. Hence, we need to be mindful of ‘why’ we started with the transformation so that we do not get carried away and use it for achieving our goals.
Benzne has worked with various industries as their trusted partners to achieve their business goals by driving turnkey transformation. From typical IT Services companies to segments like Banking, Financial, Insurance, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Electronics, Consulting firms, Proptech, Oil & Natural Gas, Cryptocurrency to name a few.
Along with a dedicated team of SAFe Agile consultants and practitioners, Benzne also has a network of 100+ agile consultants who provide on-demand support and are trusted by us to deliver excellence to customers.
The results are often based on the level of complexities that we have in the system. It may surely take a couple of years to reap the actual benefit while the mechanics of the SAFe at the level of an ART could take 3-4 PIs to settle within the ART members.
SAFe stands for scaled agile framework and is primarily suitable for organizations that are bigger in size. Although, SAFe provides 4 configurations where the basic one is called Essential SAFe, which is suitable for an environment where the agility could be pursued by bringing harmony at the level of program ie. ART of a couple of teams (50-125 people). If the organization is smaller in size then it is assumed that it can be benefited by approaches like Scrum, Kanban or others. SAFe is meant to address the situations where the complexity could arise due to bigger structure.
Implementing SAFe includes onboarding, training, establishing ART, launching other ARTs and then further rolling up to Solution SAFe & also to Portfolio SAFe. Assuming all this is achieved and there is a well-established LACE/VMO then we could still provide basic advisory support and at times could conduct agility health assessments and facilitations of critical events which involve specialist practitioner knowledge by seasoned consultants.
SAFe implementation brings new ways of thinking. If the existing processes and systems are not hindrance in the path of goal fulfilment then they will surely be complementing with SAFe. In case, they act as a blocker and for better of the system they require to be upgraded, decommissioned or revised then whatever is right, we need to do that.
Cost structure of SAFe consulting services will depend on the nature, scope and breadth of the requirement. We will do a thorough due-diagnostics and share a detailed SAFe transformation roadmap with associated effort, number of consultants and price structure upfront with you before starting the implementation. We are a small company in a niche space and it is important for us to deliver maximum value at the best possible price relentlessly.
Software development is not an industry but it is a necessary activity that is required to digitalise the business. In today’s world, almost all industries are revolutionised by digitalisation henceforth the applicability of SAFe could be an essential part in any of the organization. For example, for a business to run, there is a demand which gets fulfilled by a sequence of activities (called value stream). These sequences of activities can be time-consuming if done manually, hence there are systems in place which help in faster hand-over of value to customers. These systems could be either managed by dozens of people or might by hundreds and thousands. The overall pursuit of SAFe is to bring business agility and that is agnostic of any industry, in our view.
Step 1 is to contact us and let us know about your demand. Our SAFe Agile consultants willl soon arrange for a discussion to deeply understand your problem statement and come up with a high-impact lightweight proposal, since we believe in building relationships by delivering quicker value over creating complicated proposals which don’t show value even after the months of transformation kick-start. Once we come up to an agreement, we deploy our team who partners with the client and get started with implementation.
SAFe is a framework built on lean agile practices. It focuses on flow of incoming requirements and continuous delivery of value. The heart beat of SAFe is the planning interval. PI is a cadence where the entire ART comes to plan the increment for next 2-4 months, execute it with SAFe scrum / Kanban, and then inspect & adapt. This cycle is iterative and incremental and repeats in a loop. The entire metric system is around reducing waste around the process / flow, everyone collaborating together to plan and execute, and increasing efficiency. The flow of strategic themes at the business level, epics and enablers at portfolio level, features at a program level till the stories at a team level, emphasises on collaborating together to plan just enough, reducing the feedback loop, continuous value delivery and inspecting and adapting which all roll up the core Agile Principles.
Leadership Buy-In and vision plays a vital role in SAFe transformation. Transformations without Leadership buy-in become chaotic. Leadership should pave the way for the transformation by bringing in the awareness of why we need a transformation, setting up clear direction of which group to pilot with, what is the urgency, setting expectations with the teams on the need, removing resistance for the transformation, onboarding the consultants, having a milestone driven transformation to cross pollinate success stories. These are a few ways in which leadership can play an important role in a SAFe transformation.
Agile Release Trains are a group of people structured to plan, develop and deliver product increments to a Development Value Streams or solutions. An Ideal ART consists of 50 to 125 people with all skill sets required to deliver product increment to meet the business objectives. It consists of business owners who prioritise the objectives for a PI, Product Managers and System Architects who decide the backlog items to meet the objectives, RTE to coach and manage Agility within the train and a set of Agile teams working on a shared goal. An ART caters to a single Development Value stream, or a single solution or even multiple solutions within Operational Value Stream.
One of core competencies of SAFe is continuous learning culture where everyone is expected to continuously inspect and adapt and identify the opportunities to change as we evolve. The consultants are responsible to understand the organisation needs, challenges they are facing and curate the SAFe implementation accordingly. Cultural changes are an integral part of it and it needs onboarding stakeholders from all level, starting with leadership to the levels of the teams.
SAFe recommends 3 measurement domains – Outcomes, Flow & Competency. Follow are the areas to measure-
Start your SAFe Transformation journey with an Agility Health Assessment, schedule a discussion with us now.
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