Facilitating Release Train design with the ART Canvas Part 1 - Vision

“It became clear to me after I began to read the four hundred or so vision statements I received: they all read the same.  Every organisation cares about customers, values teamwork, exists for shareholders or the community, believes in excellence in all they do.  If we all threw our vision statements in a hat and then drew one out, we would think it was ours regardless of where it came from.  I finally realised that it was the act of creating a vision that matters, not so much the content of what it was.” – Peter Block, Flawless Consulting

Introduction

In January 2014, I wrote my first article on launching an ART.   It focused on the concept of a launch planning workshop that formed a cross-functional Agile Leadership team and generated a vision and a backlog they could execute on over 6-8 weeks to launch their ART.

I’ve launched over 30 ARTs since then, and whilst my core approach has remained consistent it has benefited from a great deal of iteration.  The biggest change has been adjusting the proportion of time I spend on the ART vision and design as opposed to the launch preparation backlog.    Alignment is a key component of ART success, and if the leaders aren’t aligned on the vision there is little hope for the teams.

Walking out of a brilliant launch workshop last year, I sat down to reflect on the key conversations and capture some notes to feed forward into my next launch.  As I reviewed the photos, I had an aha moment.  Why not use a Lean Canvas to anchor the key conversations?   I could print it out as a big wall poster, structure an agenda around completing it and walk out of the workshop with a “Train on a Page” diagram.

I’ve used it a number of times since then to good  effect, and when I shared it with +Dean Leffingwell  on a visit to Boulder in January he was quick to ask about including it in his new Implementation Roadmap.  While he beat me to the publish button a few weeks ago with his Prepare for Art Launch article, I felt there would be value in sharing the approach I take to facilitating it.

All of my ART launches begin with what I call the “Launch Planning Workshop”.  Generally held within a week of the Leading SAFe, this is a one-day facilitated workshop attended by the Business Owners and ART Leadership team with the objective of clarifying the vision, boundary and key success measures for the ART and generating the launch preparation backlog.

The workshop progresses through 3 phases:

• Define the vision
• Design the ART
• Generate the Launch Plan

This article will tackle opening the workshop and the most important phase: the Vision.  My next two articles will address ART design and generation of the launch plan.

Opening the Workshop

The workshop opens with a blank A0 copy of the Canvas pinned to the wall and a 2-part objective:

• Complete the ART Canvas to define the Vision, Leadership and Design strategy for our ART
• Generate a backlog detailing the activities necessary to bring it to life

The bulk of the attendees should have recently attended Leading SAFe, and key participants include:

• ART Leadership Candidates (at minimum RTE, Product Manager, System Architect)
• Key sponsors from both Business and IT
• Relevant technology Line Management (those who are likely to be contributing staff to the ART)

As a general note, I do not directly populate the Canvas.  I operate on either 2 whiteboards or a combination of flip-charts.  At the completion of each section, a scribe will transcribe the outputs onto the canvas.

Workshop Agenda

• Vision
• Which Customers will be impacted by the ART?
• Which Operational Value Stream(s) will the ART support?
• Who are the Business Owners for the ART?
• What kind of Features will the ART deliver?
• How will we measure success for the ART?
• What is the Vision statement for the ART?
• Design (Details in next article)
• Planning (Details in future article)

Vision

The first 6 topics on the agenda address the vision for the ART, culminating in the creation of a Vision Statement.  

Which Customers will be impacted by the ART?

Customer centricity is at the heart of Lean and Agile, so it is where we begin.  This should take no more than 5 minutes.  Personally, I use the “internal Customer” and “external Customer” metaphor to frame the conversation and ensure we are covering both internal users of the solution and true customers of the organisation.

Which Operational Value Stream(s) will the ART support? 

The mission for any ART involves improving business outcomes, and succeeding in that mission begins with understanding the flow of value in the areas of the business the ART is to support.  

If a Value Stream workshop has already been conducted, this is the moment to review the outputs from that workshop.  However, for most ARTs this is not the case and now is the moment to identify and map the relevant operational value stream(s).  Provided the right people are in the room, this can be generated at an appropriate level in 20-30 minutes.   Generally, we are concerned with a single value stream and we look to our business folks to generate the core flow and architects to map the underlying systems.  Note that we do not need a great deal of detail.  

Service Assurance Operational Value Stream for a Telco

For more information (and examples) on approaching this, see the excellent new guidance provided in the Identify Value Streams and ARTs article from the Implementation Roadmap.

Who are the Business Owners for the ART?

I have to confess that for a number of years, I wondered why Dean insisted on providing a new term instead of just talking about Stakeholders.  An embarrassingly short time ago, it finally hit me.  Every ART will have many stakeholders, but in general 3-5 of them will be critical.  These are your Business Owners.  SAFe calls out specific responsibilities for them, defining them as “a critical group of three to five stakeholders who have shared fiduciary, governance, efficacy and ROI responsibility for the value delivered by a specific Agile Release Train”.  

Having now lived through a number of ARTs where either the membership of this group was unclear or the identified members took little accountability, I am now very focused on identifying them early and ensuring they have been engaged and signed up for their responsibilities prior to the launch.

What kind of Features will the ART deliver (Solution)?

Over time, the ART will deliver many Features.  In general, by the time you are at launch there is a known seed.  Perhaps it is being triggered by a waterfall program with preexisting expectations “converting” to agile.  Perhaps a critical project, or an urgent set of priorities.  But we’re also looking to consider the future – if for no other reason than to assist in both communicating to the broader organisation and assist decision rules on work that should be routed to the ART.  Following is a sample from a recent workshop:

• New, digitally enabled user experience on available technology
• Process automation, improved data exchange with third parties
• Remediation of current platform

In short, by this point we know which operational value stream we're supporting, who the customers and key stakeholders are - we just want to clarify "what kind of stuff" they can expect from the ART.

How will we measure success for the ART?

Given that 9 out of 10 of my last articles have focused on metrics, it should come as no surprise that I want to talk about them as part of our vision workshop.  There are many good reasons to do this, but the most important one lies in establishing the mindset that success for the ART involves business outcomes, not “delivering features on time and budget” or “improving velocity”.  It enables validation of the vision with the Business Owners, assists Product Managers in establishing their WSJF prioritization approach for the Program Backlog and frames the kind of benefit propositions that should be appearing in Features.  Further, it enables us to capture baselines during our pre-launch phase so we are positioned to understand the impact the ART is having.

For those who have followed my Metrics series , this area seeds the Fitness Function from the Business Impact quadrant.  Whilst you many not exit the room with a full set of quantifiable measures, you can at least define qualitative ones and a follow-up activity to establish quantitative approaches to them.  Below, you’ll find a (slightly desensitized) sample set from a recent workshop:

• Staff
• Automation of simple work
• Able to add more value by focusing on complex work
• Stable and trustworthy technical platform
• Customers
• Simple, intuitive, digitally enhanced experience
• Increased accuracy and timeliness 
• Tailored service offer based on individual circumstances
• Seamless movement between channels (tell us once)
• Organisation
• Straight-through processing increased
• Authenticated digital transactions increased
• Accuracy increased in the areas of debt, outlays and fraud
• Operational Costs reduced

What is the Vision Statement for the ART?

The discussion we have facilitated to this point has been focused on identifying “non-generic” components of the vision statement by exploring the following questions:

• Who are our customers?
• How do we interact with them? (the operational value stream)
• Who are our critical stakeholders? (who have to bless the vision)
• What kind of Features are we going to deliver?
• What difference are we to make? (Success Measures)

Now we want to bring it all together.  I’m a big fan of the elevator pitch template popularized by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm and leveraged by SAFe in the Epic Value Statement.   I will generally split the room into two sub-groups (ensuring a mix of backgrounds in each), and give each 20 minutes to create their pitch.   I then help them pick a favorite, and optionally spend another 10 minutes polishing it by incorporating key ideas from the discarded pitch.

For the brave, an alternative which can really get the creative juices flowing is the Pixar Pitch.  My colleague +Em Campbell-Pretty wrote an article on it a few years ago which includes a sample used as the vision for an ART in a higher education setting.  Whilst confidentiality precludes me from sharing a specific example here, I have included one written by a leadership team describing what success with their SAFe implementation would look like:

Conclusion

Getting this far will take at least until lunch, and probably a little further.   In all likelihood, the longer it takes the more value you are getting from the discussion as assumptions are flushed and clarity emerges both on “what the mission of the ART is” and just as importantly “what it is not”! 

The alignment and sense of mission achieved here will stand you in good stead as you progress into the ART Design agenda items addressed in my next article and begin to tackle some ivory towers and entrenched silos.