Coordinating SAFe transformations with the LACE and VMO

A SAFe transformation requires new ways of working, from adopting new practices to changing how value flows through the organization. Two key roles that help coordinate this large-scale change are the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) and the Value Management Office (VMO). While their areas of focus differ, close collaboration between the LACE and VMO is critical for transformation success.

Why coordination between them is critical for SAFe transformations

The LACE and VMO must work in tandem, maintaining tight alignment on the broader transformation vision while being able to course-correct quickly. The LACE focuses on training, coaching and practice adoption at the team level while the VMO is optimizing portfolio operations and improving value delivery. By coordinating events, measuring progress in harmony, and surfaced obstacles early, they can drive rapid, sustainable change.

The LACE’s Transformation Focus

Providing training on Agile and SAFe

A core responsibility of the LACE is to conduct comprehensive training on Agile and SAFe principles and practices for all levels of the organization. This training lays the foundation for teams to successfully adopt the new ways of working.

For team members, the LACE typically delivers workshops introducing Agile concepts like delivering value to customers, the importance of collaboration over rigid roles, adapting to change, and striving for technical excellence. Hands-on sessions allow participants to experience Agile practices firsthand by mapping customer journeys, writing user stories, planning iterations, and receiving fast feedback.

At the leadership level, the LACE helps managers and executives shift their mindsets from traditional plan-driven approaches to understanding how Agile enables decentralized decision-making, empowered teams, building-in quality and managing via outcome rather than output. Leaders learn how concepts like servant leadership, pace-layered architectural design, and the lean-startup model underpin transformation.

For those directly facilitating Agile teams like Scrum Masters and Release Train Engineers (RTEs), more in-depth training occurs on applying practices within team events like retrospectives, backlog refinement, daily standups, and planning sessions. There is also education on coaching both teams and leadership for higher maturity.

A major LACE effort goes towards building a shared understanding of SAFe across the organization. They educate all levels on the Lean-Agile Mindset, values, and principles that form the foundation of the framework. LACE members actively train leaders and teams on events within SAFe like PI Planning, System Demo, and Inspect & Adapt. Onboarding occurs for new roles like Product Managers, Epic Owners, Solution Train Engineers and more.

This extensive training curriculum delivered by the LACE gives the organization the common base of knowledge they need to start working in new Agile ways. The LACE later partners with the VMO to reinforce training concepts, tackle real-world adoption issues, and continuously improve competency.

Coaching teams and leaders on new practices

Classroom training can introduce new ways of working, but practical coaching is essential for cementing change. The LACE provides continuous guidance to help teams and leaders master applying Agile and SAFe practices in context.

For Agile teams, the LACE observes rituals like iteration planning sessions and retrospectives, providing real-time feedback on how to improve effectiveness. They advise Product Owners and Scrum Masters on sharpening execution of backlog grooming, user story refinement, daily standups, and ensuring value delivery each iteration. LACE members often join team stand ups and planning meetings early on to demonstrate what strong execution looks like.

They pay attention to team dynamics issues like overcommitted capacity, unclear priorities leading to false finishes, poor estimation practices or lack of business representative involvement that can derail team outcomes. The LACE helps resolve communication problems, guides teams on sustainable pacing, and fosters continuous improvement.

At the program level, the LACE coaches Release Train Engineers on planning and facilitating critical ART events. This includes effective PI Planning to align teams on objectives, fostering collaboration between teams, and driving relentless improvement via Inspect and Adapt workshops. For those coaching teams – Scrum Masters and Product Owners, the LACE helps skill-up their own coaching craft.

For leaders, the LACE provides guidance on applying new behaviors and mindsets as enablers of change. They support executives during SAFe events like leading town halls, communicating vision, removing roadblocks for employees and visibly empowering teams. 

The LACE reinforces servant leadership, customer focus, decentralized decision-making, managing outcomes and building quality in. This helps leaders model the change they want to see and create an environment for new ways of working to thrive.

Through ongoing training and coaching, the LACE builds individual, team and leader capabilities crucial for SAFe transformation. Their hands-on guidance tackles real issues teams and programs face in applying the new practices, allowing for more rapid adoption across groups.

Accelerating adoption across the organization

The LACE plays a key role in driving Agile adoption not just within initial pilot teams and programs, but enabling a groundswell of change across the whole organization.

They support this acceleration through activities like spotting early adopter teams passionate about becoming Agile, even if not officially identified in early transformation plans. After seeding change, the LACE prompts these teams to host awareness sessions for peers about their path to success in becoming more adaptive. Such grassroots advocacy expands motivation for Agile ways of working virally across groups.

The LACE also looks out for leaders with an appetite for culture change and helps them launch new Agile initiatives like Scrum teams, new Agile Release Trains (ARTs) or establishment of Agile working spaces. They coach executives on securing funding for expanding licensing for Agile lifecycle tools.

They analyze patterns around the types of teams or programs where traction of practices is faster – is it with digital teams, groups building new solutions, areas with past innovation culture? This guides the LACE’s focus areas for spreading adoption. It also surfaces insights to leadership on change agent teams to invest in and celebrate.

The LACE maintains momentum through regular Agile transformation updates to senior leaders. These showcase quantitative progress through metrics like certified practitioners over time, numbers of teams trained, amount of Agile tooling utilized. However qualitative success stories from teams and leaders often resonate strongest in securing ongoing buy-in during the multi-year journey.

This relentless drive to accelerate adoption means identifying pockets of skeptics. The LACE analyzes their concerns, spots worrying rumors before they spread and adapts the transformation plan. Continued coaching, openness to feedback and reinforced belief in the vision remain LACE’s primary tools.

By operating with the urgency of a startup and providing air cover for teams pioneering new rituals and behaviors, the LACE enables change well beyond initial scope. It is this adoption velocity and passion that defines transformation success via SAFe.

The VMO’s Transformation Focus

Enabling Lean Portfolio Management

A core focus area for the Value Management Office (VMO) is enabling the adoption of Lean-Agile practices at the portfolio level to ensure strategy connectivity all the way from the executive suite to Agile teams.

The VMO facilitates critical events that underpin Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) within the SAFe framework. This includes planning and running LPM launch workshops to orient leadership and portfolio stakeholders on the new ways of working. They coach leaders and Epic Owners on crafting Lean business cases for proposed initiatives, a practice which replaces speculative long range financial planning.

The VMO schedules, facilitates and provides communication support for essential LPM rituals like the quarterly portfolio review and monthly portfolio sync meetings. In these forums, Agile portfolio transparency enables data-driven decisions on investing in the most promising epics aligned to strategic needs. The VMO works with Solution Train Engineers (STEs) to gather comprehensive metrics illustrating epic and value stream throughput and impediments.

They pay close attention to evolving constraints around skills, funding allocation and coordination needs across various levels of epics and solution teams. The VMO channels observations from other entities like the Lean Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) to help leadership promptly mitigate constraints.

The VMO partners with key roles like Product and Solution Management to nurture effective flow of epics from ideation to realization. As concepts progress into implementation, collaboration with Enterprise Architects and Business Owners coupled with the VMO’s intra-portfolio coordination helps drive outcomes over output.

The VMO’s portfolio perspective, business knowledge and data synthesis capability provide guardrails for Agile financial governance. They guide the switch from traditional annual budget cycles towards Lean-Agile budgeting models based on objective metrics versus assumptions. 

The VMO helps craft evolving policies balancing accountability with empowered decentralized decision-making.

By enabling this strategic to team line of sight, the VMO fosters an organizational culture that embraces change, curiosity and relentless improvement.

Improving value stream flow

A key objective of the VMO is to optimize the flow of value through the interconnected value streams that make up a SAFe portfolio. This requires taking a systems view to identify constraints and guide investments towards smoothing flow.

The VMO utilizes metrics provided by Solution Train Engineers and Release Train Engineers to assess where value stream flow is being impeded. Data gathering examines workflow both within specific Agile Release Trains (ARTs) as well as dependencies that cross ARTs. The VMO analyzes metrics like cycle time, throughput, work-in-progress limits, queue lengths, and capacity utilization. Trends are extrapolated to pinpoint upstream chokepoints vs. downstream idle points.

Armed with these data insights, the VMO facilitates root cause analysis workshops with ARTs and business leaders. Barriers like overspecialization, hand-off inefficiencies, tool gaps, mismatch of work intake to capacity, and delays from external parties are explored. Once current state bottlenecks are clear, the VMO helps simulate and evaluate future state value stream mapping scenarios.

These countermeasure identification sessions lead to addressing flow issues through initiatives like targeted hiring, adjusting team structure or roles, upgrading toolchain elements and improving the batch size of work intake. The VMO helps prioritize initiatives, secure funding allocation from portfolio leadership, and tracks the impact of interventions via defined metrics.

The VMO pays close attention to the health of Agile teams and programs contributing to value streams by monitoring metrics like team velocity, technical debt, escape defects, and regression rates. Downward movement triggers VMO-facilitated root-cause analysis and reinforcement of foundational agile development practices.

Through this data-driven and systemic approach to improving development, test, release and operations practices across integrated value streams, the VMO sustains reliable value delivery. The VMO’s portfolio view and focus on flow helps unlock greater business agility over time.

Optimizing portfolio operations

The VMO plays a key role in coordinating and optimizing the execution of decentralized Agile Release Trains (ARTs) that make up a SAFe portfolio. This enables improving portfolio operations and fostering operational excellence.

The VMO maintains a pulse on the health of ARTs and teams contributing to portfolio epics and objectives. They utilize input from Scrum Masters, Release Train Engineers (RTEs) and Solution Train Engineers (STEs) to develop a holistic view. The VMO analyzes metrics and patterns to identify opportunities like eliminating handoffs, automating manual tasks, streamlining approvals or clarifying policies.

Where there are dependencies between trains and value streams, the VMO facilitates collaboration sessions. Here ARTs synchronize on roadmaps, manage shared services and clarify boundaries of authority. The VMO coordinates planning of program increments, system demos, and inspect & adapt events for interdependent areas.

The VMO partners closely with RTEs and Business Owners on launch readiness for new ARTs and onboarding of teams with the appropriate Agile training, tools and coaching support. They collect early feedback during the forming stage to help calibrate launch plans.

Where tensions arise between teams, programs or business groups, the VMO acts as a bridge builder to resolve conflicts. With no direct authority over ARTs, the VMO relies on facilitation skills and influence to forge alignment. Their independence allows them to fairly mediate and unite disparate groups towards a shared mission.

To promote operational excellence, the VMO analyzes portfolio metrics covering quality, cycle time, productivity and flow. Insights help foster discussion during events like Value Stream, Inspect & Adapt workshops. The VMO highlights successes through internal conferences and blogs to motivate continuous improvement.

With a wide lens on business objectives, the interlocking operations of value streams and what high performance looks like, the VMO provides connective tissue enabling execution excellence.

Key Areas of Collaboration

While the LACE and VMO have distinct transformation focus areas, consistent collaboration between them in the following areas drives consistent progress:

Coordinating LPM Activities:

The VMO leverages LACE insights from launching ARTs to inform events like LPM kickoffs and portfolio reviews. The LACE depends on VMO data analysis to help teams improve value delivery outcomes. Together they evolve lean budgeting, funding, and governance policies.

Supporting Practice Adoption:

The LACE creates training content and coaches teams on new rituals while the VMO reinforces adoption by facilitating value stream inspect and adapts focused on benchmarking and improving performance. Issues faced during adoption flows between them.

Launching New Teams and Trains:

When launching Agile teams and ARTs, the LACE provides onboarding training while the VMO funds teams and trains specific roles like RTEs and Solution Train Engineers for program success.

Tracking Transformation Success:

The LACE develops assessments for evaluating proficiency across the new practices while the VMO defines value stream metrics capturing throughput trends. Joint status reviews align everyone on progress.

Maintaining Strategic Alignment:

The LACE and VMO ensure various events they facilitate stay synchronized to reinforce priorities enterprise-wide. They quickly resolve misalignments observed between senior leader messaging, team objectives and portfolio funding.

Conclusion: Keys to Transformation Success

By splitting focus areas between practice adoption and value optimization but coordinating closely on vision, timelines, issue resolution and progress measurement, the LACE and VMO provide a mechanism for organizations to drive effective large-scale Agile change powered by SAFe. 

Their symbiotic partnership is key to sustaining momentum during a multiyear journey requiring enterprise commitment beyond early pilots. With the LACE and VMO working in harmony, both bottom up and top down perspectives steer progress until new behaviors, mindsets and outcomes take hold at scale.