Mid year 2020: Applied SAFe 5.0, Cased Studies,
Public Webinars, Trainings, Conferences, Partners, and More!

Thanks to your valued partnerships, despite Covid-19, the first half-year of 2020 was quite successful so far. We look forward to more of the same for the rest of 2020.

What we have been up to…
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In the past 6 months, we attended at several conferences in Europe until COVID 19 stopped us, after that we even continued with virtual conferences. We spoke to various professionals in industries such as Aeronautics, Insurance, Hardware, IT-Software, Banking, Medtech and Automotive in various countries such as Brasil, China, Europe, Middle-East, and U.S.A; mostly about Applied SAFe, but we also held several trainings, workshops, and tutorials on Lean-Agile Compliance, Lean-Agile Process-Engineering and -Execution as well as SAFe (including public classes of SAFe for Teams) and process engineering.

Official Release – Applied SAFe 5.0

We have released Applied SAFe 5.0 just 10 days after the public release of SAFe 5.0, including the offical approval of Applied SAFe 5.0 by Scaled Agile Inc. The new version of Applied SAFe includes all changes of SAFe 5.0 as well as new features and benefits.

This new version include an introduction to Business Agility, Design Thinking, the Seven Core Competencies of the Lean Enterprise, and more. Mastery of these seven competencies enables enterprises to successfully navigate digital disruption and to effectively respond to volatile market conditions, changing customer needs, and emerging technologies.

We now support both platform versions of Stages 6.x and Stages 7.x.

To get a glimpse of what Applied SAFe 5.0  provides and what it looks like just watch the short video below; for a full presentation of the new version watch the recording of the past public presentation as of January

Applied SAFe serves as your own customizable instance of SAFe®. It includes all roles, activities, templates, guidelines, milestones, and phases as defined by the SAFe® methodology in order to bring the framework to life; including metrics and tailoring. Applied SAFe is a comprehensive implementation of SAFe as a process model with a sophisticated customization mechanism that allows instantiating each SAFe level independently but in line with the intended new SAFe configurations. For each of your endeavors just select the chosen SAFe configuration (e.g. Essential SAFe) and Applied SAFe tailors all elements accordingly.

Want to customize more specifically? Over 460 pre-built tailoring options give you the flexibility you are looking for besides of engineering your individual extensions. Share your knowledge via the integrated practice library and benefit from additional capabilities to reach compliance requirements like Automotive SPICE, HIPPA, CTR-180 (FDA), SOX, CMMI and many more while executing your lean-agile SAFe endeavor.

Join us at our upcoming webinars:

  • Functional Safety in Applied SAFe with ISO 26262, together with Dr. Tobias Maier from our Partner MethodPark.
    July 9th, 2020 11:30 AM, U.S. Eastern Time Zone.
  • Agile Hardware Panel : The Cost of A Defect  – THE BURDEN OF QUALITY IN AGILE HARDWARE DEVELOPMENT together with our partner Cprime.
    Tue, July 14th, 12:00 AM -1:00 PM US ET
    Panelists: Harry Koehnemann (Scaled Agile), Giancarlo Gavidia (Cprime), Scott Barnes (Cprime), Eyal Abukasis (Cprime), Peter Pedross (PEDCO)
  • Implementing SAFe Remotely, together with our partners from the Netherlands Theo Geelen from Yellow Intelligent and Jeffrey Turboer from IT’s a success.
    July 15th, 2020 12:00, Central Europe Time Zone
  • Webinar from our partner SAFe Journey in Denmark, held by Mette Bruhn-Pedersen
    Let Your Teams Implement SAFe® Effectively
    August 6th, 2020 03:00 PM – 04:00 PM Central Europe Time Zone

Watch recordings of past webinars

Want to organize the participation of PEDCO at your events?

  • Get in touch if you want us to present topics from our experience around scaling agile in regulated environments at your in-house or open door event or conference. Contact us.

Join us at future conferences in Europe and USA

​Meet us in 2020 at (as possible & reasonable due to the Coronavirus):

We will continue to offer trainings for SAFe®, Applied SAFe® and Lean-Agile. Based on our deep design and development experience with process engineering on the Stages platform we now also offer specific workshops and trainings, hence, created an additional training category for process engineering:

Click here to check out all the Trainings we have going on this year!

More than 50 Partners in 4 continents!

All participants learning about the intricate details of Applied SAFe.

We have updated our Partner Directory! Now you are able to search for Partners via their country, making it easier for you to navigate and find what you are looking for.

In 2020 we continued to intensify and to grow our collaboration with partners, our newest partner is from Poland, we just signed the contracts two days ago, the official communication will follow soon.

Partner Enablements

Remember, as a Partner, you have 3 free days of training during the year. If you attend one of our trainings you will also get a certified Partner Badge along with a badge for what you are certified in; reach out to marketing@pedco.eu if you haven’t received your badge!

Do you have clients that need to comply with certain regulations such as ASPICE, CMMI, ISO 26262, etc. ones that have large processes and don’t know how to connect them with SAFe, or even, clients that work in an agile manner but also some waterfall?

Through the Quality Manager partner training you will learn about the full features, advantages, and benefits of Applied SAFe, along with how to create instantiations for your clients, how to tailor, and more! This will prepare you for in-depth SAFe coaching in conjunction with Applied SAFe. We had two partner trainings in the USA in New York and San Francisco. This was in February 2020 – just before Covid19 and the lockdown.

Interested? Send an email to courses@pedco.eu and let us know which location you would like to attend! 

Hear from past participants of our Quality Manager partner training:

Newest partners in 2020

Valueflow partners with you and your leadership team to bring about a positive and lasting change in your organization. At Valueflow they develop a roadmap of activities, workshops, coaching, training and consulting for individuals, teams and leaders and guide large-scale organizational change efforts such as agile transformations and DevOps.

: English, Portuguese

: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Specializations: Agile Transformation, Coaching, SAFe, Agile at Scale, Change Management, Business Agility, Agile, Lean, Scrum, Kanban, DevOps, and Flow framework.

Genesis Agility was founded in 2016 with a single mission: to provide a high-quality Training and Coaching experience. They approach each of their clients with fresh eyes to develop customized, unique strategies that help achieve sustainable Agile & DevOps Transformation.

Their trainers are certified experts in their field and are not just full-time trainers. They are agile consultants, coaches and experts, specialists who bring a lot of value to each class with their experience in implementing Agile at global companies in India and across the world. Genesis Agility is a DASA ( DevOps & Agile Skills Association) and offers programs on fundamentals of DevOps as well as the newly offered DevOps Product Owner.

: English

: India, United Arab Emirates, Oman

 IT’s A Success is an IT service provider that specializes in Lean/Agile transformations and IT project management. Our mission is to make sustainable change happen as smoothly and as easily as possible. With more than a decade of experience in delivering successful projects, we make change happen by ensuring customer centricity and relying on scientifically proven methods and techniques.

We believe getting certified and keeping certifications up to date are an important way of making it easy for clients to assess your worth, as well as keeping yourself on your toes with the latest advancements in your field of expertise.

Partner Type: Transformation

Languages Supported: English, Dutch

Office Location: Netherlands

Krishcon Consulting helps insurers achieve an end to end business agility transformation starting from enterprise and digital strategy formulation and roadmap, business architecting the business value streams and capabilities and scaled agile (SAFe) adoption and transformation.

: English

: Toronto, Canada

Why Innovation, China

Organizations are facing increasingly complex and frequent innovation challenges. We help tackle these challenges by nurturing a culture of agility and innovation and enhancing the development of new digital products, services and ways of working within organizations. We deliver sustainable and practical outcomes through consulting, coaching and training teams, organizations and leaders across Asia. We’re operating with 20+ professionals in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

: English, Chinese

: China, Singapore

: Architecture, Lean Management & Continuous Improvement, Organizational Agile Transformation, Information Security, and Education Services

Our Case Studies

We have been asked about case studies for a while, we started to collect them and will continue to publish further case studies.
Please find here a selection of available case studies with Applied SAFe:

Lean Process Transformation in a MedTech Organization

Discover how Applied SAFe helped a MedTech organization reduce its processes while still being agile.

 

 
DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY

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Being Agile AND Regulatory Compliant at a Large Insurance Company

Read how Applied SAFe provided assurance to an insurance company's Agile processes and their risk controls (and to be compliant with their regulatory requirements).
DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY

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Lean Process Transformation in the Automotive Industry

See how Applied SAFe was able to ensure compliance to ASPICE using agile processes and the SAFe.

 
DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY

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Instantiation and Tailoring in a Digital Transformation

Read how our Client dealt with having some endeavors that were running Agile and others not.

 
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SAFe® News

On January 7th Scaled Agile Inc. released SAFe 5.0. Here a brief summary of changes:

The new release adds key elements that help solidify business agility across the enterprise while putting the customer at the center of everything. Therefore, new elements have been added to the Big Picture, while others have been updated or completely changed.

What’s New in SAFe 5.0? Read more.

Key Highlights of SAFe® 5.0:

  • Focusing on customer centricity and design thinking enables the organization to understand the problem and design the right solution
  • New Measure and Grow guidance helps the organization determine its current state of business agility and identify tactical steps to improve economic outcomes and reach its desired future state
  • New Continuous Learning Culture competency provides a set of values and practices that encourage everyone in the enterprise to continually learn—and innovate together
  •  New Organizational Agility competency helps teams optimize their business processes, evolve strategy with clear and decisive new commitments, and quickly adapt to capitalize on new opportunities
  • By expanding to include business teams, SAFe 5.0 enables all teams in the organization to participate in creating, delivering, and supporting innovative business solutions
  • A new SAFe Principle—Organize Around Value—helps enterprises align their development efforts around the full, end-to-end value flow

SAFe is the most widely-used approach to scaling agile – 14th State of Agile Report

  • Scaling Methods and Approaches: The Scaled Agile Framework® continues to be the most popular scaling method cited by respondents (35% this year compared to 30% last year). As a percentage of all responses, SAFe® outdistances the next nearest response, Scrum of Scrums, by 19%.

This year, the benefit of cost reduction was less of a factor than in previous years. Instead, organizations are focusing on audit compliance, and measuring technical risks.
-> This is exciting, because this is exactly our focus with Applied SAFe.

As for challenges in 2020, the most cited issue respondents face is the difficulty of establishing an Agile culture to organizations. The report states:

The highest-ranked challenges to adopting and scaling Agile continue to be related to organizational culture.General organizational resistance to change, inadequate management support and sponsorship, and organizational culture at odds with Agile values remain in the top 5 challenges.

Agile while working from home

In May 2020, Digital.ai added a short addendum in order to take the effects of COVID-19 into consideration. Companies have responded to necessary remote work and now plan to increase the pace and scale of their Agile journey, as the benefits of it become more apparent in the current working from home landscape.

From the press release:

55 percent say their company plans to increase the use of Agile in the next 12-14 months. This is an increase of 13 percent over the original survey completed just five months ago.

43 percent of organizations say their momentum for Agile adoption has increased over the past 90 days, with 15 percent saying it has increased significantly.

33 percent say they increased or expanded Agile adoption in the last 90 days to help manage distributed teams.