Leading SAFe Certification, Lean Agile Development, & Hardware

 In aerospace, defence, automotive, medical devices, communities and others, we see many exciting things that were being built today. Autonomous vehicles, medical monitors that are connected to cell phones, iPhones for alerts and status, or sharing information with loved ones. These solutions that they build are all unique by their nature, but face many common challenges in terms of increasing complexity, short cycle times, risks, product variation that's being demanded by consumers, etc. Their solutions also span many organizational boundaries in terms of supply chains and systems.

Uncertainties in Large Systems

Even some of these smaller systems that get built, there's obviously supply chain involved and on top of all this complexity, we still have the contractual and regulatory compliance demands that are faced by the systems. Leading SAFe provides early feedback and the early decision-making that is needed to make these large complex systems. These systems by the nature have larger uncertainty and unknowns.

Being Innovative and Scaled Agile

System builders need to be innovative in the way they create these systems. Agile has long become a de-facto interest standard for software teams, but the case of hardware running into same brick wall over and over again is becoming more frequent.

Why they cannot apply agile to hardware development? The reason is, we cannot produce working hardware as frequently as software teams can produce working software and they're right, but what's interesting about it is when we look back into software agility we realize that there's a reason why we do want to produce frequent increments.

In case of software it's very easy to check cycles very frequently by producing working software increments. Now in case of hardware it's not possible at least not at that rate and it unfortunately prevents us from being agile.

What we should do is go back to the very foundation of being iterative and incremental and that's to be able to execute that fast learning cycle let's ask another question can we learn fast in case of hardware? - maybe without fully integrating the system every two weeks but maybe there is something else we could do and indeed one of the techniques is to control the depth of integration instead of integrating every component end to end in a large solution what we're trying to do essentially is to be selective some of the components will be real components some of them will be substituted with their cyber-physical approximations others will have software proxies and some of them will be just stops well that will allow us to minimize the cost of integration so that would be doable at a much more frequent rate without really losing much in terms of feedback that's just one of the great techniques a regular comic cadence is that vehicle we use to create those plan do check just learning cycles we're not a bunch of separate independent teams that are focused on our part of the solution in isolation instead we're an aligned team of teams or a large program value stream aligned and focused on creating nurture business value and then also learning about what will be the ultimate solution we use cadence to regulate a line all those books line everyone and have them focus on a small set of near term goals near-term objectives case also allows us to see some form of the solution regularly at each one of those cadence boundaries with perhaps some lower fidelity approximation with some of the components but we can still assess that solution for feedback we're indeed on track down not only build that right solution but also meet any compliance demands that we're gonna have at the end.

Cadence also reduced our variability by focusing on regular incremental objectives on to give us feedback we can then make adjustments we can make adjustments to ensure that we make the long-term deliveries more predictable then is that cadence is not just a time box there's a lot more to that there are certain events attached to that cadence so when we say that a program operates on the cadence it means that they plan together execute synchronously and review the results together and repeat until further notice this is really critical and when we say everyone plans together they all plan together begs the question who is everyone that's a really important question from the organizational design standpoint we often make this mistake by organizing teams and groups of teams around let's say part of the architecture or part of the engineering discipline or a function that's a big mistake because oftentimes we start seeing how tightly coupled those different groups are and it just doesn't help it slows us down well in fact sometimes would bother or gonna ask completely differently completely orthogonal to that one of the examples could be as follows look at these two teams one of them is firm or a team another one is hardware team it's not uncommon that such teams have a lot of hard dependencies on each other.

So now instead of having too many offices across these two groups of people would rather have two teams each one having some firmer and some hard work folks on board and each such proof would be organized around end to end solution capabilities instead in this case there would be hand offs across teams because much so that would be encapsulated on board, which means that each team would have a much higher velocity in the organisation as a whole would be much faster with him much higher throughput to them value related to team organization is just in general how do we organize around value delivery value streams organize people to continuously deliver value in the sort of sustainable lead time therefore we need everyone on the value stream to be able to ensure fast reliable delivery so therefore the value stream is really going to extend across the whole solution to all stakeholders involved we show a couple examples here of those participants including suppliers and customers we expect everyone on the value stream so that we can build in a great and learn together we need customers to actually participate in setting priorities and validating our eco solutions and while suppliers may not internally follow a lean agile process we do expect them to participate in those plan-do-check-act ceremonies because we need them to learn with us about what the ultimate solution will be.

 

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