About the talk
The nature of collaboration has changed. Agile project management is becoming increasingly critical, but when scaling, you should rely on proven frameworks like SAFe.
However, implementing SAFe with all its features, such as providing reports, visualizing dependencies, and automated documentation, is not always easy in reality.
In this session, we'll show you the benefits of SAFe and how easy it is to implement it in Jira using tools like Agile Hive.
About the author
Peter Weingärtner (SPC) joined Seibert Media in 2018, working as a Sales Consultant ever since. Previously in marketing and publishing, Peter brings a diverse skillset to the table.
He supports agile work with software, especially the Scaled Agile Framework for Lean Enterprises with Atlassian Tools - Agile Hive.
Peter is equipped to provide his expertise in Software Communication and Collaboration.
Watch the talk 👇
"In this session, we'll show you the benefits of SAFe and how easy it is to implement it in Jira using tools like Agile Hive.
Transcript
This is a transcript of the original talk by Peter Weingärtnera at PM72 Summit organized by Jexo. 👉 Learn more about PM72 Summit: 72-hour Project Management Conference.
Hi, my name is Peter. I'm agile at scale portfolio guy at Seibert Media
with almost 250 great people based in Germany, we're one of the larger Atlassian
partners in the world, I'm very grateful to be able to speak here today and support
fundraising for Malala Fund, thanks Jexo, and thank you for joining, and don't
forget to donate.
So project management itself has significantly changed over the last few
years and become more difficult to grasp, shifting focus from project to product
I wonder if there is even any definition of pm that everyone who is actually
involved in managing projects would agree on no wonder in an ever-changing
a world that's getting faster and faster traditional pm approaches have been
supplemented more often even replaced by lean and agile ways of working
especially when it comes to multi-project management new challenges come up.
While agile has become quite common for teams even in otherwise more
traditional companies, the growing complexity of products and solutions brings
dependencies into the game that need to be tackled and resolved above scrum and
kanban team level.
But, how can we reliably plan and manage large initiatives on one hand and stay
swift and effective on the other the mere idea of being able to define today what
our customers might actually need tomorrow proves to be outdated coming up
with detailed plans of which steps need to be taken when and which resources
might be necessary in each of the phases more and more often turns out to be not
just a waste of time but dangerous and costly if you end up running in the wrong
direction and keep doing so with great manpower but the wrong outcome working
lean and agile at scale reduces that risk and valuable time to market it means
delivering value quickly in small increments allowing for smaller learning cycles
and involving the power of the people by decentralizing decision making
even for large development initiatives proven solutions are at hand the most
famous and successful methodology today is safe the scaled agile framework for
lean enterprises now let's take a look at their website now what it's all about
it wants to align strategy and execution helping large organizations bring
together the need for planning and predictability with iterative and incremental
value delivery in a continuous learning culture safe can adapt to pretty much any
size of the organization as long as there is a need of at least one team of teams on a
the program level, you can benefit from the smallest safe configuration is called
essential save it covers exactly these two levels of programs being executed by so-
called agile release trains consisting of multiple agile teams working together on
the delivery of value based on features if these programs are being managed in a
the portfolio you can add this layer of strategy investment fundings portfolio
operations and lean governance now if your organization does actually build really
large solutions making it necessary for multiple release trains and maybe
suppliers to plan and work together to fulfill the requirements of a value stream
the large solution level helps you scale even further now saves heartbeat is the pi
the program increment it usually is a cadence of the team's prints that spans over
the course of let's say three months or so the pi planning is the major agile event
as everyone involved in a value stream comes together for joint coordination and
the commitment of what value can be delivered in the next increment devs
management and key stakeholders together of course there is loads more to save
that makes the framework so successful and obviously, the companies that really
adopt it the implementation of safe itself is also an incremental process in which
each step builds up on lessons learned from the previous a well-established
implementation roadmap guides organization organizations through this
transition process now when it comes to tooling lots of companies are using Jira to
organize their processes at least in software development right so it seems to be a
no-brainer to keep leveraging Jira's flexibility to implement safe but as Jira was
built as a team tool there is some significant limitations we've seen that save
has a hierarchy that it's based on and that's just not represented in plain
Jira artifacts are missing the nomenclature turns out to be a bit different
while we have sprints on the team level we don't have the same representation on
the program level as program increments whatever you do it's always extensive
configuration is always in Jira which is so cool but you never know how my
scripts update compatible how much work is it to add a new team or even a new
art and there are a few obvious things from the safe framework like way to shortest
job first dependencies safe boards such as the program board that are just not
right there and also Jira is a process management tool and since we're talking
about agile it's all about collaboration and of course collaborating on content
so at last you might have the idea to involve confluence at least we do
well you see with these challenges to really do save in Jira you need
something on top to add to its functionality the most famous tool in the Atlassian
realm right now is Jira align let's take a look at that website
Jira align is a great solution for enterprise agile planning even a leader
Jira align is a standalone software that connects Jira or even multiple team tools if
necessary. Jira align is taking a top-down approach so it's really the perfect
solution for larger, more complex environments with requirements, especially
from strategy including investment funding and tracking multi-tier road mapping
resource allocation and reporting variety it is definitely a very rich and thorough
solution mainly for management whereas the teams can keep working in
their well-known Jira environment since today we're talking more about an
introduction of safe I would like to focus on agile hive our app that simplifies the
implementation of SaFe right in Jira.
It's quite straightforward, takes a bottom-up approach focusing on the agile
planning of programs and the ease of work for the majority of the
people right in the teams now let's take a look at Agile hive
you see, this is the administration just to give you an idea of what Agile hive is
about it's made up of project hierarchies that means that you can remodel the safe
the configuration that you find in your organization right in agile hive
configuration with project hierarchies, you can add the layers that you need in this
case it's a full safe configuration consisting of team program large solution and
portfolio level it depends on what your organization looks like
what which levels you need and you map them to the corresponding safe
level now the elements that you see back here each team each address train in this
case the case this large solution tray in the portfolio they're all individual Jira
projects bringing the entire flexibility of a jira project to each of the levels making
it really flexible as far as uh wording workflows and so on and so forth
the projects can be created quite easily with predefined templates which can be
adjusted to your needs or you can migrate them from existing projects of course
into this hierarchy this is pretty much all that needs to be configured there's a few
more little helpers but this is the base once you've done this all the rest comes
automatic the most obvious thing is the agile hive navigation so you see that it
represents exactly what we've built underneath everyone in the safe context finds
their work a way to work quite easily with that navigation and if there's a new
team or a new art added no problem it will be right there now
let's look at the program level first since i said this is where actually the
power of safe is because usually that's where the features are that are being
delivered if you are let's say a product manager
this might be your playground it's a roadmap where you can plan your
features or enablers as they're called so anything that you might need to plan
on a program level you can put into a timeline
and see how they work together you can drag and drop these items from a
backlog that hides behind this little icon here and you can drag and drop them just
right into your timeline and play around with them as you need
now what's also shown is dependencies between items in this
view and you see if there is for example in this case here features that is that are
really already being worked on you see their progress with this little colored
progress bar also if you need to take milestones into account you can set them up
right here in line and have them visualized by the way they're just an issue type so
we're always talking just plain jira technology when we talk agile hive with
new cool views that help you organize everything now
when you do program or product management you of course need a kandan
in the safe context uh anyways so um there is a workflow that safe introduces
that is being set right in agile hive which you can adjust to your needs
anything that is ready to be worked on and could be planned for the next pi in
the next in the pi planning should be here in the program backlog
now let's move to a pi planning situation and say there is a team
called animation see there's all the views and the teams in the sub menu
and this team animation does a breakout session which is the
team's planning within the pi planning and first off they would
plan their capacity or ask them that they compet their capacity
in story points which can just be put into uh inline here as any number
iteration by iteration save calls sprints iterations by the way
so it's pretty much the same thing once the capacity has been planned by the
team they would usually plan the features so they would pull the
features that have been introduced by product management before from again a
backlog view so they can just open up this tab of that art and see any
unplanned issues and use quick filters to make it easy to really plan the right
things and now they can just drag and drop any feature from this backlog into
their timeline and they will appear as these bluish swim lanes next thing they
would break the features down into stories either right in the pi planning and
create new stories you see there's this little add button that when i hover over the
iterations so i can create new stories right here and let me do that
now this story for one is being created then it's being planned into iteration
three automatically and it's being linked to the correct feature with the
correct link type automatically as well and now i can re-plan and do all this
stuff by just mere dragging and dragging and dropping if there is more than just
one or my team working on a feature which is quite common in a scaled
environment um there's this little icon here that indicates that there's
more teams working on the same feature in this case when i hover over that icon
you see that there's other teams involved at the moment one and it's
called 2d artists so i know that we might want to address any
dependencies inter team dependencies with that team later on
if you have a backlog already set up for your team and you have pretty fine work
you can also use quick filters off that board to organize your backlog view here
and plan your existing stories right into the uh this view here by dragging and
dropping just like we've seen before now dependencies team dependencies
within one team it's a no-brainer you might not even want to visualize them
but you can so whenever you use that link the correct link
dependencies will be visualized as lines there's a green line that indicates that
everything should be in order this story needs that story to be worked on since
the order is correct the line is green if the two dependent stories are in the
the same iteration, the line becomes yellow telling you well, that might work out
but you better take a closer look at it and you can imagine if I drag this over
the line becomes red letting you know this will not work out you need to
replan of course, within one team that's not really might not be necessary
but it's really cool between teams so let's say I scroll down from my team's
breakout board all the way down I see all the other team's breakout boards
collapsed that are in the same art and do the pi planning together with me
I can open these up I have no writing permissions down here
but I can see any dependencies that have been identified, and now we can
collaborate the two teams can collaborate to get things in order so we can get rid
of any red line towards the end of the pi planning so we can commit on
our draft plans once we have our draft plans ready all the teams come together
with management business owners stakeholders whoever is there during pi
planning on the so-called program board the program board kind of looks the
same one swimlane per team that's involved in the pi planning but now
we're not looking at team issues anymore but features or anything that happens on
program level, and we see each feature that has been planned once, so we have an
the idea of how much we get and we see each feature in the iteration when it
should be delivered based on the current team's planning statuses
if there is any issues that have been linked to a feature but not planned
there is this little exclamation mark telling you there are open child
issues that are not in their current pi now what's also very important here is
so-called significant dependencies that indicate everything that might
risk the uh the delivery of any feature that we have planned they can be
visualized it should be visualized on the program board so for example there is one
bug that obviously needs to be fixed before this feature can be released
it will be shown right in this board but also there could be dependencies between
two features or quite common you might have dependencies that do not just take
place within your art, but you have someone else from the
outside who you depend on for example, there might be this supplier here needing
to deliver some something in order for us to be able to
be able to deliver this feature or a shared service such as marketing
might be involved if you link a feature to any of outside issue with the correct link
type agile hive notices that and adds these Swim lanes with the marker external
and the dependent issues now let's say the pi planning is over, during the course of
the pi planning we want to keep track of if everything is in order
and if we get the stuff in time so we need to report what you see here is the team
report, we have the team members so we can go ahead and talk to them easily we
have an overall team pi progress as five metrics and we have in the middle section
is print by sprint view that shows me each team issue that has been
planned and their parent issue so we have context on the left hand corner down
here we have the tp objectives they're really important because this is where
business value is being managed in the safe context the pi objectives are an own
issue type they're created by the teams and business owners come by and
put in the planned business value during pi planning and the actual business value
achieved once a system demo is over whether the objective has been met team
risks are also managed right here again an own issue type following a
workflow that follows the idea which is being used in the safe context
standing for resolved, owned, accepted, and mitigated the probably more
an important report is the art report because, again this is where delivery usually
takes place now this is an art report. It kind of looks the same again the
important people up here the same metrics as on team level but aggregated
from all the teams of that art and in the middle section now we're looking at the
features as that's the deliverables and we see each features progress in
percent and story points and we see the involvement of each of the teams of my
art so in this case let's see there is a team called level design and obviously
they have planned 63 story points towards the delivery of that feature but
they have done zero up until today so we might check whether there's a whether
there's anything we need to do then we have rp objectives formulated by
the release train engineer which is the kind of the scrum master
for the entire program out of the tpi objectives and we have risks on this level up
on the program level that can be um managed here treated and um
yeah we can see what their initial exposure was and what the residual exposure
might be after we treat them now let's go up two levels and skip the large solution
level and look at the portfolio level the portfolio report is really straightforward
because we do not even look at pis anymore because portfolio epics that's the
really large initiatives that might span over multiple pis and maybe even multiple
years but we have a basic understanding of what's going on
and again, we have a kanban for the lean portfolio management to work with
now portfolio epics usually cost a lot of time cost a lot of money we really want
to make sure we want to do them so there needs to be a lot of collaboration
to take place to understand whether it's worthwhile to work on an epic or not
and this is where I would like to show you an interaction between jira and
confluence brought to you by agile hive let's say you created a new portfolio
epic you give it an epic owner we could put it in the description and
now we see how the weight is choice job first comes into play in agile hive
there's the Fibonacci numbers that you can use here to put
in any of the parameters of the weightless shortest job first such as
job size user business value and so on and so forth if you have any idea when
creating the the portfolio optic you can put in the numbers already here
and create that now you see this has been created and it ends up in the funnel
status which is found in the backlog now i open this in a new tab and you see it's
just a plain issue with a few custom fields and automatically calculated weighted
shorter strip first including the cost of delay and you see this link there's a
link that appears here now when i follow this in a new tab you see that it takes me
to a conference page with which has been created automatically by me creating the
Jira issue for the portfolio epic in jira in confluence there has been um
this page been created based on the documentation are for a portfolio topic of safe
including the epic hypothesis statement the way the storage shop first lean
business case and so on and so forth but this is just a template you can know
have it look like whatever you need, and this is just an example of how the auto
page, which is the functionality creating this page automatically is called how that
works there's a few things that can even stay in sync such as dates or
statuses or people and other things that can be taken over into confluence uh
once by creation so it's really handy and now this page can follow the jira
epic or not the portfolio epic in jira along throughout its entire life cycle
and you can use you know all the great stuff from confluence such as uh
comments inline comments sharing options watching options and the
perfect page history yeah i think this is enough for tooling today
I would be happy if you have any questions or need help that you
come up to me and contact me there's the possibility to
schedule a meeting with me we have quite some experience and grant
partners to address safe methodology and tooling with the agile hive and Jira line
and whatever you do and who you will work within your scaled agile
transformation make sure you look at the methodology and tooling as two sides of
the same coin because after all you need to closely involve a lot of people and they
alone are the real key to success so thank you very much thanks Jexo and
stay safe