Tony Christensen was confident that agile practices were unavoidable for one IT team. An agile enthusiast, Tony had seen the team move to agile out of necessity. It was a move to stop the team from being known as the company’s bottleneck.

Tony, the GM/Agile Competency Lead of Telstra Corporation, shared the full story in a recent live video chat, “DevOps and the Path to Better Agile Development.” Tony was joined by other experts from Scaled Agile Inc. and IBM for a live chat to discuss the benefits of adopting the Scaled Agile Framework (or SAFe) and the IBM DevOps approach.

These experts explained how the implementation of SAFe and DevOps has allowed them to embrace lean thinking and significantly improve their business results. Here’s a summary of a few key points. Or check out the video below for a full replay.

Who are the panelists?

• Kelly Houston (moderator), Agile Transformation Lead, IBM
• Tony Christensen, GM/Agile Competency Lead, Telstra
• Alex Yakyma, SAFe Methodologist and Principle Consultant, Scaled Agile Inc.
• Amy Silberbauer, Executive IT & Solution Specialist, SAFe and DevOps, IBM

What are SAFe and DevOps and how do they work together?

SAFe is defined as a set of practices that are built on lean and agile principles. It is used by several large enterprises that depend on software development of large cyber-physical solutions for their success. Similarly, DevOps is a set of practices for unifying a software delivery team through the business development process. In particular, the IBM DevOps platform is an open standard set of tools and adoption practices that help organizations make a transformation.

During this chat, Amy explains that SAFe and DevOps are “very well synchronized.” DevOps is a set of practices similar to SAFe that is used for unifying a software delivery team through the business planning process, through development and into test and operations. Both focus on applying lean and agile thinking in order to deliver value to the customer. 

What would cause an organization to want to adopt these technologies?

Alex explains that some of the concerns that drive people to adopt SAFe are visible, and some are not. Some of the concerns he touches on include: the company can’t deliver frequently enough; there is a high variability of the processes; and there is an unpredictability of outcomes. 

Amy adds a key point that it is really important to not only be delivering quickly, but to be delivering the right things quickly. And that is a key focal point for the SAFe and DevOps approaches.

Tony continues this conversation by explaining that Telstra’s purpose for adopting DevOps and SAFe was mainly that they were discontent with the cost of delivering their business solutions. As the company tried to figure out how to plan, prioritize, scope, build, test, release, etc., they realized that DevOps and SAFe were the perfect solution. He goes on to say that SAFe helped to break down the large business initiatives into smaller moving parts so they could be planned, aligned & cascaded down to teams to build the components.

When did you start to see your first results from the implementation?

“This is an evolution, not a revolution.” Amy explains that while you can’t move from not doing SAFe to completely doing SAFe, the small wins add up. Once you can start applying lean thinking, that’s a win. Alex also adds to this that the real systemic improvement takes time and that there’s “no miracles.”

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