I was invited to the SAFe Meetup in Stockholm to share my experiences from applying SAFe at Med Tech provider Elekta. I described challenges on timeline predictability when having around 300 people and 30 teams collaborating on same solution (HW&SW in regulatory environment). Specifically I explained how several unfortunate behaviours reinforced each other into a large invisible “Vicious Circle”. Several examples of actions on how to break it and improve the situation were also given.
2. BOOSTING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
BY AGILE LEADERSHIP
Mikael Broomé
20 years
Leading and Improving Product Development
Improvement driver/Coach
Scrum Master
Team Manager
What Elekta does
What I discovered
How I approached it
What results I’ve seen so far
This is just beginning
20 years
14 organizations
Leading and improving product development, mostly SW
Improvement driver/Coach
Scrum Master
Team Manager
SPC
Now Elekta since august as RTE in a large multi-site program
Big machines, sold to hospitals
Sick person in
Healthy person out
Treating cancerous tumour in brain or in rest of body
Product Development including SW, mechanical engineering, electronics, material, …
Within regulatory boundaries
My program:
Several hundred people on 5 sites
Several years
SAFe is used widely across Elekta for several years, see case study on Scaled Agile.
In this large program it is needed to syncronize so many teams to get the product out predictably.
I am RTE for a sub-train covering a few sub-systems and consisting of 7 teams in Stockholm and London.
Main challenges
The size and geographical distribution makes it hard
Lower-right corner: help offered by Management is under pressure sometimes unintentionally flavoured by traditonal leadership
Putting more pressure on teams to do status updates outside meeting
Created space in meeting to focus on what issues teams wanted to raise
AND
Created space for RTE outside meeting to escalate issues
Main challenges
The size and geographical distribution makes it hard
Lower-right corner: help offered by Management is under pressure sometimes unintentionally flavoured by traditonal leadership
Influencers are needed for harder changes
BUT they have 1000 meetings and 5000 emails per year
To catch their attention,
A simple message helps
A different form helps: material, seating, room
Top management presence helps
I announced it as a monologue, followed by discussion of their views