 Okay. So welcome. In about two minutes I think we'll be ready. So I thought I'd just start the introduction. So my name's Chris James. I'm President COO of Scaled Agile, which is the provider of SAFE. I'm going to take you through a little bit of an introduction to SAFE. And I have a colleague here. My name is Sridhar. I'm an engineering program manager in a company called Micro Focus. I'm doing an introduction about that. Yeah. I mentioned Sridhar now because he may help with some of the technical difficulties we've gone, but it is working. That's true. So we're going to also do, Sridhar is a local. He lives in Bangalore and he's been using SAFE for the past 18 months. And so he's going to, about halfway through, he's going to come up and do a case study and share that with you. So thank you for that. I think we're ready to go. So I was going to mention too that in your bag insert, there is a white paper. And a lot of the concepts and details I'm going to go through are covered in a great little detail in this white paper. And that's in your bag insert. So thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. And sorry it was a slight delay there. I couldn't look after I saw a defragment disk come up and I thought, oh no, that doesn't look good. Anyway, it's great to be here in India. The last time I was here, I was with another company, Oracle, and I was lucky enough to watch India play Ireland. That was quite exciting because for the first three overs, it looked like Ireland might win. But that was just the first three overs and it was done. So we've introduced Sarada and he'll be up shortly. I just want to thank the Agile India team. They've done a super job providing a big tent for us to come and share different approaches to Agile in a healthy and good environment. So thank you that. I love the sort of rapid badge response team there. You didn't have to wait a minute to get your badge. I don't know if you noticed that, but they're very good at that. So these are the topics I'm going to cover. A little bit about what's happening in the industry. Share that with you. I feel a lot with the analysts and I'll just share a couple of slides and just explain what's going on. We'll talk a little bit about the fundamentals and values and principles and lean concepts, which are at the heart of SAFE. Talk a little bit about what we call essential SAFE, which is the minimum elements necessary to be successful at SAFE. And when people say we're doing SAFE, I always like to check and we check to see if they're doing these 10 elements. So I'll share those with you. And then as I said, we've got a case study from Micro Focus, which is quite a big company. They acquired or merged with Hewlett Packard's software part of the business. And so it's quite an extensive set of software that they're using to safely develop. Okay, so a little bit about me. I've been in IT for about 30 years and in one of the presentations, they talked about the firms that had gone out of business through merger and other things and virtually every IT company I've ever worked with has gone out of business. Now that's no reflection on me actually, just to be clear. But I was at DEC and DEC was a great company, great culture, but didn't survive the transition from workstations to PC. Famously, Ken Olson, who's the leader of DEC, said who wants a computer on their desk? And just about everyone did and the company didn't believe it. So DEC is no more, though it was a great company. And then I was at some micro-systems. It struggled to do that transition from hardware, the software, and ended up inside Oracle. And actually that whole IP that was micro-systems is the basis for Oracle's cloud system, Slaris and the hardware, et cetera. I worked at Raleigh, which no longer exists, those of you who know Raleigh, that actually went into CA by acquisition, but went through the IP process on the New York Stock Exchange, went up there and supported Tim and Ryan during the bell. It was a great day, but that company is also gone. So there's a lot of change and business leaders need business utility. So let's have a look at what's happening in the industry. So this is a bragging slide, so forgive me for one bragging slide, but the most widely adopted scaling method, and we are talking about scaling, is safe. And it's, you know, all the servers, I could have put three or four surveys out from different companies. This one is from version one. They do an annual survey, and safe is their number one. Number two is actually scrum of scrums, and that is part of one of the practices of safe as well. And the third one is companies building their own. They developed a particular approach to agile and other additional practices, and they built their own. And we don't recommend it, because in many cases they're reinventing the wheel. They don't have a pool of people, a pool of partners that they can draw on because they have this specific way of doing their approach to agile frameworks. So anyway, those are the top three. I'd like to put this one up. We talk about waterfall, and this is a Gartner survey. And the key premise, you know, Gartner works for the primary with a lot of, with the conservative, late adopter community, is what I would say, and they say. And so when they survey, they still have a lot of waterfall activity, but they're saying right now that that waterfall activity is going down about 4% a year. And you can see there that it's still at 41% in this 2017 survey. And we'll see, clearly we're going to see waterfall gradually go down and down, and their current pastures through the Gartner survey is about 4% a year. So they say we're at a tipping point here with agile adoption. This is another one from Gartner, and they're talking about the three ways of enterprise agility. How many people were here, or were working when we were thinking about Lean Six Sigma and using that in the manufacturing? Anyone? I was at DEC at the time, and we were using that significantly and actually part of it when I was at Sun Microsystems as well. It started to come into the business side of the services side from the manufacturing. And then in 2001 obviously it was the agile manifesto, still important guidance for us. But now in this phase, we're at what we're calling CEO-led enterprise agility. And the demand is for agility at the CEO right across the organization, not the CTO, CIO, but also right across the organization. We talk about it being a strategic imperative or a strategic competency now to have agility as part of your DNA. So how does all that map to digital transformation? Digital disruption is affecting every industry across the globe. I like to talk about it is everyone is having their Uber moment. When Uber disrupted the taxi business, well that type of disruption is happening virtually in every industry. Someone mentioned today or yesterday in one of the sessions about the keyboard disappearing when Apple disappeared the keyboard. We were all used to having a keyboard and then Apple disappeared that and it became part of the phone and integrated the phone. We even have reusable rockets now. And so that's disrupting. But every company has their Uber moment. And it's not just once. Now Uber itself is having an Uber moment where they have driverless cars that's on the horizon. And so their model is going to have to change. So every company is facing this Uber issue and it's not just going to happen once. It's going to keep happening. And that's why innovation is at the heart of survival or the heart of strategy. And you put the two together having business agility, organization agility and to be able to react to these disruptions. It's hugely important that we help companies develop that strategic DNA. This is Dean Laffingwell and he talks about business imperative around this. And every business is a software business right now. And so you're in a good industry, those of you who are developers. How many developers do we have in a few? Well, you're in a great industry because the software is eating the world and I think we're also, as they say, drowning in data. But I think we have to get this right. I'm glad that Save is playing an important part in that. So it's very difficult though. How do we compete when our retrospectives look like this? Do these make a lot of sense to you? Do you see this too little visibility in what's being built? Underestimated dependencies, whole morale in the teams because they're not meeting their targets. Do you see this type of thing in your organization? Anyone see one that's missing? Anything missing that they could have put up in their retrospective? It's keeping the energy in there. There's a lot of poor morale as often because there's just too much work and it's very difficult to keep the energy going with the amount of work that's going. But this is our challenge and this is why Save was born really. So what is Save? Besides being the leading framework for it. It's freely available. You can go to ScaleAgeOFramework.com and there's masses of data. In book form it's about 600 pages. That's freely available guidance and advice around principles and practices around mean agile and dev ops. That's the big picture but it is configurable and therefore scalable for teams, programs and portfolios. It's supported, although we make it freely available, it's supported by a role-based curriculum. We believe it's important not just to raise awareness that you should be doing this but also help to train people as a start and as an approach to moving forward. That's very important. I think we've had enough advice about how to do this but how. What are the practical steps or the proven steps that we can take to do this? That's essentially what Save is. It's a set of proven practices and principles, training material that actually helps you get started, helps you establish the roles to implement agile at scale. So how does it support developing organisations, agility and digital transformation? We run the company on Save and it's never been easier for me as a business leader, business owner role to align strategy and execution and I'll show you some of the ways that we're doing that but aligning strategy and execution is key. It wasn't that we didn't know that we had to move from being a hardware company primarily to being a software company. It wasn't that we didn't know how to develop good software. We had some great software, Java, Solaris. We didn't necessarily have the whole organisation or a big percentage of the organisation attached to that strategy and executing to it and so when you get a way of doing that it's a big plus. Now, Save is built around agile teams. That's a key component of it and lean agile leadership and lean agile mindset are critical and those are the most difficult areas and I think we should be forgiving of leaders who are not quite there yet. They know they have to get there but it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to really start to understand lean agile leadership and lean agile mindset particularly if you're used to working in that waterfall context. It takes practice. One of the other key things around Save is relentless improvement. You have to have that mindset of continuous improvement and it frees you up from thinking oh my gosh we found this broken thing. If you have that mindset of of course there's going to be things that don't work as they're supposed to. Of course things are going to break but with a mindset of relentless improvement it really frees you up. So let's talk a little bit about embracing a lean agile mindset. Obviously we have two areas that we're covering in this slide. One is about value which is core to lean, delivering value with the shortest sustainable lead time and it underpins these key things. Respect for people and culture. It's all about people and it's all about the way people work. So that's a key one. Flow, flowing value continuing you through your systems. Innovation which is at the heart of survival to face those Uber moments and then relentless improvement is key. With lean agile leadership as part of that. And the agile manifesto even though it's 17 years old is still a key component. It recognizes that individuals and their interactions and talking and working together is critical. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration, putting customer first. Interesting. But agile manifesto is still something that is key to our training and our mindset and responding to change. Expecting change and responding to it appropriately is critical. So these are the lean agile values that are part of SEA. And we also have additional principles because there weren't enough just the lean and the agile manifesto. So we have these nine and they're documented in the white paper I've given you but I won't go through all of them in any detail but the nine are take an economic view at some level it has to make business sense applying systems thinking it's just about everything is a system there are inputs and there are outputs and you have to think about the systems Assuming variability preserve options and that's one of the ones that when I hire people who have not worked in this environment that's one of the biggest challenges. They don't like this change in their variability they like to understand exactly what's needed and then deliver it and this change in mindset around assuming things are going to change and preserving your options is very important. As is building incrementally with fast integrated learning cycles it's very much we've been talking here in a few sessions about fail fast but it's really about learning cycles and learning fast and us in our generation learning a living has to be a part of how we operate and learning a living and having learning cycles even though some of those things are going to fail it's hugely important to innovation and sustainability. milestones on objective evaluation of working systems it's the only way really to have milestones is to see working systems and that's why we have as part of say a two week demo every two weeks and that is key to understanding if our milestones are appropriate once you see a working system visualize and limit whip the visualization is key in any agile and particularly safe environment you're going to see a lot of visualization you know our company we have a wall as big as that which has everything from our business objectives and our whip and our backlog all visualize and the key thing is looking at where we've got too much whip going on and that's one of the big challenges because people have this habit of starting a lot of things and we talk about stop starting start finishing and make sure that you have to speed up you have to reduce the whip that's the key principle and apply cadence and synchronization synchronization across teams as you know very well and we'll talk a little bit about cross domain planning shortly the motivation purpose and engagement of teams is critical and working on that continually and supporting that through different approaches particularly this decentralized decision-making as a leader it took me a while to understand it I was distracted by servant leadership and I'm not a keen I don't really like that term I think it's more about shared leadership at any point in time we were working together we were an agile release strain we would be sharing leadership decisions at various points and as a leader it's really important to get comfortable or understand why you're uncomfortable when you're sharing leadership because at any one point in time people have to take the lead because they know more about the work and so you have to be comfortable with that so agile teams it's all about agile teams they're at the heart of safe cross-functional self-organizing doing everything from divine build test and deliver value the cross-functional and the self-organizing around a key plan to adjust check is just a critical fundamental part and nothing beats a team that's doing that applying good agile software engineering practices they're an XP scrum and Kanban embraces those and they're a key cornerstone of safe and then delivering value every two weeks you'll see I'm going to play a quick video here and you'll see that they talk about three weeks our recommendation is two weeks deliver value in two weeks and it takes a while to get used to that cadence but once you're in it it becomes natural now nothing beats an agile team except a team of agile teams in an agile release train taking those plan to adjust cycles and bringing that up all together and the agile release train is where we align 50 to 125 practitioners to a common mission bring them all together apply cadence synchronization we're planning together planning the iterations together over six to twelve weeks and then providing vision roadmap and some guide architect guidance to keep them all aligned around the architecture cadence and synchronization is this critical you know when you build that agile release train you're really bringing people from all of these siloed areas the business side of things the customer side the product management the architects the hardware, software testing and deployment bringing them all together so they form a virtual and organized agile release train it's a critical part of it it's always amazing sometimes people say we're doing safe but we haven't launched an art this is a critical component of safe that you bring people together and align people around an agile release train so I'm going to show this video in a minute but what it does at its best is bring all stakeholders face to face but typically they're in multiple locations that one there is a picture actually there's in the big screen at the back is actually a picture of people in Mumbai it was taken in Chicago and there was also a London group that was there this art of sort of bringing people together virtually is a new skill that the coaches release trains engineers are learning about the tools and techniques how you do that and bring teams together remotely but it's critical for that cadence and synchronization the business owners set mission with minimum possible constraints requirements and design emerge from the dialogue that's in the room decisions are accelerated that question in the previous session was why do we have to wait for decision making one of the things that we try and do when we're running an art is have the people in there that can make those decisions so that if you need decision on licenses or decision on hiring you can get a quicker answer to those when people see that they're a dependency and if we don't get those answers things will be delayed and teams create the plan together that cross functional team they create the plans together they take responsibility for them and they identify their dependencies to make it work I've got about a minute and a half of video I just like you've never seen this and it's in here somewhere I should have introduced Prangel Prangel is a new employee team member at Scavaggio he's running our partner program in this part of the world Welcome Prangel The first of this event is for our development teams to all get together and plan out their essentially next quarter of work This is the first time we've brought all the teams together to plan at the same time Being all in a room together creates a lot of energy for the teams it allows people to be accessible and reach over and talk to somebody else or they see something going on on another team and they can just walk over there and take care of it Basically each sheet of paper is a sprint and on that piece of paper we have items that the operators ask us for they've identified some issue and so we're sticking those on there at a high level saying hey in the next three weeks we need to knock this out So our developers get to say this is how we do things and the business gets to say this is what we need so what we need how to do it These two days that our set apart have given us the opportunity to completely focus on finding out our sprints and getting to live in more detail than we would otherwise because of our other jobs so this has been really helpful There's a great awareness of how much is going on other than just our team we're seeing other development teams we're able to all interact share ideas I think that's been great This is really more about process we want to be able to adjust as a business changes we want to be able to have a team that can be flexible and adjust to those changes what we're creating here isn't just a one and done we're going to do this every 12 to 14 weeks which is really important to have that sort of cadence so the business kind of knows what's coming they know how to get engaged developers know how to plan their work so are we coming at y'all? How many people have participated in our launch? It takes a while I think I counted up recently I think I've heard about 30 PIs that I participated in it really takes some dedication you've got to be really curious what's going on there's a hundred odd people in the room and you're responsible for a piece of it you've got to be curious about what's going on you've got to move around the room visit the different teams talk about the dependencies to get your plans right it's done and when a team that's been doing it one, two, three, four PIs it really adds a lot of difference to the flow and to the energy in the organization so I'm going to go through these but these are the ten essential safe elements that we check on some of the things we've already talked about the PIs planning system demos but I just want to talk a little bit about relentless improvement because again this is critical you have to have that mindset of continuous improvement so prior to a PI in that IP sprint we are talking about impediments what's happening and identifying them and then ranking them through the parental process and then thinking about how we can provide solutions to them and putting those into the backlog for the next PI and become part of the work we'll do in the next PI but this process of inspect and adapt is a critical part of safe it's continuous improvement that you really have to address impediments within the organization and you really cannot apply agile at scale without addressing this and incorporating it in the way you work so let's talk about some results that come up. We have a lot of case studies and it would be great if we could do one from the local team so this one is from Microfocus and Trilad is going to take us through what he's been doing at Microfocus okay so are you able to hear me? okay so my name is Trilad I'm going to introduce myself once again I'm an engineering program manager in Microfocus company Bangalore based in Bangalore okay so before we go a little bit of introduction about the company Microfocus is the 7th largest pure place software company in the world with a global scale so we have spread across 15 countries basically taking a step backwards HPE software division and Microfocus merged together in April 2017 to form a 7th biggest pure place software company in the world okay and what we build is enterprise scalable software solutions which are scalable and complex in nature okay so this case study is from one of the units in Microfocus which is known as operations management ITOM that unit this particular unit has about 2,250 employees spread world over and it accounts for about 1 billion dollars in annual revenue so some of the adoption highlights safe adoption highlights for the past 18 months so we started safe adoption in September 2016 prior to that there were some pockets of experimentation which safe but we were not doing it in a formal way but in September 2016 we took a stand as an organization as a business adoption of safe across the organization in a formal way so these are some of the highlights so what we did at the beginning in September 2016 prior to that we had 50 plus individual software products and we combined these 50 plus software individual products into 6 large integrated solutions customizable integrated solutions so that itself is a big transformation that we went through and that using safe so part of our adoption currently we have 10 agile release trains across the globe here in Bangalore we have 4 agile release trains and we are planning to start 2 more agile release trains one in March next week and another one in May here in Bangalore and as part of this exercise we have so far trained 65% of workforce in this organization and as ITOM all role based trains included in order to train our workforce we do not send people outside for training we do all of our training mostly internal so we have one SPCT basically state program consultant trainer based out of Germany and we have 16 SPCs I am an SPC as well so we have 16 SPCs on board as of today so as part of this transformation we also established a dean agile center of excellence to drive this transformation across the organization using a hub and a spoke model so that has been very successful I will share more details about that and we also established communities of practice role based communities of practice we have a community of practice for release train engineer who is basically a chief from master for that day release train and we have communities of practice for scrum masters we have communities of practice for the coaches the state program consultants and just as figure 50% of our workforce the business units workforce is here in Bangalore around 800 people in one building here and micro focuses are company about 2000 people work from so this is how we have organized 6 large solutions as the 6 large solution as you can see the top portion is the portfolio layer as per say what I would like to point out here is that we are actually very closely structured as per the safe structure safe layers we have an enterprise architect who drives the architectural guidance and the technological practices for the entire business unit and we have we are in the process of setting up the input portfolio management I would say we are in the journey we have started but it is not yet complete so as I said we have 6 large solution trains as we can see the number of agent release trains they are diverse in nature some of them we have 3 and some of them we have only one but those the solution trains which have only one we have more than what is prepared by safe we are going to structure them into multiple agent release trains going forward so I would like to share what went well during our last 18 months journey safe adoption journey and what are the challenges and what are the learning from this so what went well we set up the lean agile center of excellence basically a body to drive this rail transformation of safe adoption so that really went well so we defined the safe roadmap adoption we defined the key performance indicators and we did surveys we did art and large solution assessments where we are at a particular point in time so we do that we do those kind of surveys and assessments and then then this body days were responsible for regular communication communication through emails webcast you know face to face interactions when the leaders address huge number of employees so regular communication went well so we generally got a good support from the organization from executives, senior leadership but some pockets were moving slower as you know there will be a usual in any organizational change there will be a usual adoption curve the bell curve that you must be aware of that and another thing that went well was adoption of large solution train practices we established large solution train practices the events and the practices of the large solution train there so that really went well we piloted that in one large solution train and we are adopting that in another large solution train so here what are the challenges and how did we overcome them so the challenges are in the black colored font and the learning is in the green colored font so as I said, happy software and micro focus merger happened in April 2017 lot of portfolio consolidation is happening so products moving into one large solution from one to another one are the products coming into portfolio from other organizations so this is a constant thing which we are seeing in our organization so what this calls is we have to do value stream workshops, we have to re-evaluate or reassess our value stream so for that very good framework for SAFE what is known as value stream workshop toolkit so we use that, we use a two day workshop to identify the newer value stream and structure over trajectory strains appropriately so that really went well, so that's a learning process and we had deliverables from outside our large solution trains which the large solution trains themselves for consuming so they themselves are not SAFE aligned but we need to consume the deliverables into our solutions so they were integrated into our system suppliers at a large solution train level so that really went well and we have a high degree of reusable components within our large solution meaning a component which is within part of one large solution it will be consumed by other large solution so that is a challenge in planning and cadence so that, for that we still have that challenge we don't have the right solution, we are experimenting so hopefully we will find out a way to do that seamlessly and then establishing a uniform approach and cadence across the large solution trains since these solution trains are operating as silo solution trains having a similar cadence the PI cadence would help in consuming the reusable components across the large solution trains so that is not it in place right now so the cadence of the large solution trains are not aligned so that is what we want to accomplish going forward and the last one full of full engagement top down meaning as I mentioned our organization is global globally spread the leadership as well as the product management is spread in multiple locations even in US they spread in 10 to 12 locations so training them in a phase to phase training is a challenging thing to train the leadership and the product management group when we started off so that that became a challenge because they were not aligned to the safer option so what we are planning to do is we have internal summits often once in 6 months, once in a year we have now planned the trainings around those summits so that these leadership and product management folks come gathering those summits just before the summit or after the summit we are planning to do that those trainings to get them aligned actually we did one training in February in a summit after the summit so some of the results I would like to highlight here so I will start from top right time to market 50% faster time to market earlier our releases were at least 6 months 6 months to 9 months so that was the frequency of the releases now we have brought that down to 3 month releases so that is why 50% improvement ok and then quality we are seeing 20% reduction in defects incoming defects then predictable quarterly releases earlier the releases were not predictable every 6 months they used to get delayed by few weeks to a month or a 90 day period depending upon the situation so now every large solution we are doing quarterly releases every large solution we are doing so predictable releases and program planning and execution and cadence planning and execution on cadence ok so that is an improvement that we are seeing so all this transformation that I shared with you so this is happening in conjunction with we are doing a portfolio modernization the architectural change in the product set so we are containerizing all the products and equipment ok there are multiple transformations in play at this point in time ok so going forward I will quickly wrap it up so we have two more again release trends and the continued improvement we want to do using the Kanban flow at various levels safe training we want to reach 90% of trained workforce by mid this year focus on role based training that is another thing and other important point I would like to highlight is we have currently have traditional roles in the system we want to introduce agile roles Scrum Master, PO, RT so those roles by October this year and additional communities of practice we want to start and consistently doing problem solving workshops so we wanted to adopt a consistent way of doing this thank you for that that was great, thank you for that please right, one minute just to finish off if you are interested in getting more knowledge we do have huge amount of material that is freely available on the framework site there is training courses to get you started and the three of us will be at our booth right after this event and then tonight we are also after everything finishes we are also over at the blue bar we will have some drinks and food if you would like to come and talk we will be networking with a lot of the safe community here in Bangalore so thanks very much for your attention really appreciate it, thank you