Introduction of SAFe® at SMA - Agility in the energy sector

On the one hand, SMA had only had one previous experience of introducing an ART. On the other hand, most of the team members represented in the ART had never worked in an agile way before. As a result, agile working methods were a completely new way of working for many people in the ART, which they first had to familiarize themselves with. This gave us Scrum Masters the task of promoting and consolidating the team structures in the newly formed teams. At the same time, we had to explain the agile way of working and give the team members increasing confidence. This was a very exciting and motivating task for me. In one-to-one meetings, I identified the individual needs of the team members in order to be able to support both the individual and the entire team as required.

One major challenge was the availability of some team members to work in the ART. At the beginning of the SAFe transformation, there were some people who were only given 30% availability by their managers to work in the ART. This availability made it almost impossible to work with the agile methodology in a meaningful way, as the people concerned were only able to attend the regular meetings. In addition, there was hardly any time to work on tasks in the team. 
Another typical challenge is to reconcile the existing organizational structures with the agile organizational structures of the ART. At SMA, there were already existing value stream organizations (e.g. project management, operational value stream) in addition to the classic hierarchical structures. The ART and the existing organization contained defined roles and responsibilities with overlapping responsibilities. This inevitably led to conflicts of action. Renegotiating tasks between new and existing roles is always difficult, as both giving and taking responsibility means a change in empowerment. This was a challenge that I addressed in the course of my work, both at team level and at the level of the traditional hierarchy. On the one hand, this involved managers leading the change with specific management tools and, on the other, renegotiating the responsibilities of ART roles and existing roles in workshops.

Change accelerator

In addition to the challenges described above, there were several change accelerators that created an important basis for the introduction of SAFe. A LACE team was already in place before the ART launch. This team supported and drove forward the preparations and considerations for setting up the ART. For example, SMA held an important ART identification workshop in advance, the team structure of the individual teams was thought through and the product owners and other important key people were trained.

I also noticed a predominantly very positive energy throughout ART. Despite the challenges described, both the "leaders" - consisting of Business Owners (BO), Product Management and RTE - and the teams were willing to embrace the new way of working and continue to develop together with their company. This positive attitude enabled me as a Scrum Master to effectively tackle obstacles and develop constructive solutions together with my teams and the other Scrum Masters.

Especially in the initial phase of a transformation, I think close collaboration between the Scrum Master, Product Owner and the entire team is very important.
Before the first PI planning, the ART and the team workflow were implemented in Jira. This enabled the teams to enter their stories and tasks in the tool during PI planning. To promote understanding of the methodology, training sessions were held in advance for selected key members of the ART. 

Shortly before the start of PI Planning, all team members took part in the SAFe for Teams training. This training was the starting point of my assignment. In the subsequent PI Planning, I supported my teams in working with the new SAFe methodology. This included communicating obstacles and dependencies with the Scrum Masters of the other teams and promoting communication between the RTE, the PMs and my teams. Over the course of my assignment, I supported my teams with individual mini training sessions to help them familiarize themselves with the new way of working. In regular one-to-one meetings, I inquired about the needs and concerns of the individual team members in order to derive individual support offers. I also coached my PO so that he could grow in his role. In our weekly Community of Practice (CoP) meetings, all ART Scrum Masters worked together to solve obstacles at ART level, enabling our teams to work in the best possible way. 

The entire SAFe implementation was iterative and incremental - adjustments and changes were made on the basis of new findings. For example, in one of my teams, it turned out that the team composition was not as optimal in reality as assumed in advance. In order to change this, I first held a workshop with my team in which we clarified the team's purpose and worked out how the team should be composed in order to work optimally. It turned out that merging two teams could be a profitable solution. I first shared this insight with the RTE and then worked with the POs of the two teams in question, the PMS, the RTE and people from the LACE team to identify the opportunities and risks of merging the teams in question. As a result, the two teams were merged, which subsequently enabled the new team to work better together.
Another successive improvement was the changeover of PI planning from haptic to tool-supported planning. This change resulted from the desire to carry out planning directly in digital tools instead of initially planning haptically.

During the third PI in particular, I also took care of training an internal Scrum Master in his role so that he could take over my team in the future. Because my primary goal as a consultant is to make myself superfluous. I achieve this by enabling the customer or the people in the organization to work independently. The induction began with the new internal Scrum Master initially accompanying me in my work. In weekly coaching sessions, I strengthened the internal colleague in his role as Scrum Master, answered his questions and prepared various agile team events together with him. In the end, I just looked over his shoulder and was available for questions and support.