Storytelling in SAFe

Let me start with a bit of theory: There is an Agile framework called SAFe ® that allows enterprises to scale and deliver value faster by optimizing how it flows through different systems and sub-systems, using the principles of Lean-Agile.

One of the primary artifacts of that framework is something called a Big Room planning where all of the teams working on one program get together for a while and discuss open items, groom stories, and plan the objectives for the next 5 sprints.

PI planning

I will not get into the details explaining what a sprint is or what grooming is, I assume, if you clicked on my boring title, you should know that already. If not, well, feel free to DuckDuckGo it and find out.

Let me get back to the topic. During that planning event, I, as a Release Train Engineer or say as a facilitator, am responsible for explaining some of the metrics so anyone can understand it. One of those metrics is the PPM.

Define: PPM

I have a piece of good news for you, I don’t expect you to know what that is, because is SAFe specific and I’ll try to explain you in by copy and pasting something from the SAFe website (yes I want to make a point here)

“Each team’s planned vs. actual business value is rolled up to create the program predictability measure”. 

SAFe Website
Author: Collab

To decode that. I’ll share with you that each team defines their own objectives during the PI planning, and the Business Owners are assigning the value to each one of them, based on the assumption of the amount of value that the team will deliver in the next few sprints.

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What does it mean to be predictable in this case? (as in Program Predictability Measure)

I will not talk about how to change the ways you define and measure your PPM now, but I would definitely write another article about that. 

  • Reduced time-to-market that can be elevated to faster value delivery.
  • Increased flexibility for changes in scope with minimal cost.
  • Value delivered in the way the customer expects it.

If we drill down to the specifics, this could go all the way to how much time yous pend on a defect and how efficient is your CI/CD pipeline or how well defined are your Acceptance Criteria.

Per “Blogagility”. The effectiveness of the business outcome of our collaboration and alignment either builds Trust, or it destroys it. 

Blogagility website

I totally agree with that statement. That’s why I focused my story on how trustable we are in the eyes of our Business Owners.

Why Trust matters.

I used a storytelling approach to explain why it matters and tried to connect it to our own software development world.

Here comes the story:

It was one Friday night, and after a hard day at the office, I went home and met some Balkan friends. We did some things that Balkan people do, drinking some liquids that Balkans people drink and when we started seeing Balkan dictators at some point there was this voice behind me:

My son: Dad, where is the pizza.

Me: grabbed my phone, opened the app I used for home delivery and clicked on my order. 

The app: Time for delivery: 18:45; Status: Preparing

Me: looks at my Ikea clock on the wall: It was 20:00.

Me: clicks on the contact us icon and enters my order id.

The app: Order not Found

Me: uses my so-amazing Czech language and checks the status on the phone

The app support: Oh, we apologize, the supplier forgot about your order, here’s your money back.

The time: You lost 40 min of your life.

The app: Your order has arrived.

Me: ?!?

So we ended up with pizza (not so warm) and money in my pocket. You could way that this is a win-win situation, but I mostly care about the experience, not about the money.

Let’s go back to the Trust.

This happened twice, so my Trust with the process of that company went down. 

I really don’t care about who’s fault it is.

  • is it the cooks (developers) that were too slow?
  • or it’s the delivery guy (the CICD pipeline)?
  • or it’s the misalignment (program manager) between different departments?
  • or something completely different?

At the end of the day, the Trust in your product matters, and your product is a complex system that should work well together.

I can imagine that this problem doesn’t happen just to me, and it happens to other people, and they complain differently. Then the company receives that feedback, and they can say what their trust score as we can say as a team of teams (a Program) what our PPM is.

I saw some people nodding their heads in agreement with me this time, so I believe that it was one small step forward to explaining some of the terms in a way that makes sense.

I consider that a success.

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