Stay Calm, Be SAFe, Do LeSS

Defining a "Calm Agile" Delivery Pipeline

Purpose:

This document defines the overall flow and the structure of the product delivery teams. While the flow is lean, the structure is customized from SAFe, LeSS, the related DevOps model, based on philosophy called Calm (Creating Action with Least Movement).

The Calm Philosophy:

Calm is a philosophy to help create action with least movement and reach goals by maximizing the team effectiveness while minimizing the overheads and stress on the team, thereby preventing any burnouts.

Calm promotes a team, their roles within the team, and helps reduce resistance, interference, and impediments in environments while straightening teams and people on an individual purpose and path to reach milestone, accomplishments, and aspirations.

Calm protects the individual contributor and team without sacrificing quality excellence, expense, and or time. Calm also measures your quality!

 
Main Principles:

• Focus & Unwind
• Deliver & Learn
• Align & Commit

Focus & Unwind:

Calm ensures complete focus on the work on hand until it’s delivery. Sprints are defined and anything undelivered is considered incomplete. Creating action with least movement allow teams to focus 90% of their work on reaching a defined destination, the strategy or sprint completion and allows 10% of the sprint for decompression, diversity, and innovation as a critical step to recoup and maintain the focus in the long term.

Deliver & Learn:

Successful delivery is the primary responsibility of everybody in the organization & team. Learning that happens as a part of the delivery distribution and outside of it is critical for continuous improvement. Keeping boundaries on capacity and work in progress allows teams to remain fully engaged while shielding effectiveness and enabling to innovate without diminishing quality, time, and cost.

Align & Commit:    

Aligning to the organizational goals and having a common & shared understanding is critical to success. The team, program, solution, and portfolio does everything at its disposal to meet its commitments.  

The Organizational Structure:

The organization follows the full SAFe/LeSS model to run its operations. The company goals are listed as Themes in the portfolio layer, the products, services and enablers that help the company meet the goals are modeled as products/capabilities and enablers in the large solution layer, the features detailing the capabilities and enablers build up the program layer and the stories and the tasks/cards formed by decomposing the features would make up the team layer. Each layer shall have its own backlog and all the backlogs are linked with each other. The following picture illustrates the Calm model.

The Flow:

The enter system flows together as one, albeit under multiple cadences. In the example below, we will us a longer program (13 weeks). Note: the duration is not what is important! The key is building in the ability to leverage a calm approach.

1.The portfolio system flows through a Kanban system and is tracked in realtime.

2.The solutions are planned on a yearly or a quarterly basis.

3.The programs are one quarter (13 weeks) long.  *if you choose! The reality, the time could be flexible based on your current needs and desires!

4.The sprints are 2 weeks long with the exception of a last Sprint in a PI, with is 3 weeks long. (again there is flexibility for defining the time of your overall sprints, programs, and so on).

Calm Strategy : Sprint & Capacity:

•90% = Build & Test The Strategy + 10% Decompress, Diversify, & Innovate. Deliver X 5

•92% = Planning The Next Strategy & Decompress, Diversify, & Innovate + 8% + Report Effects, Results & Status. = Complete and Repeat.

Decompress, Diversify, & Innovate:

Diversification is a set of activities wherein one or more team members temporarily step away for a short duration of time from the specific sprint/program goals and invest their time in diversified activities like learning, research, per projects, helping others out, attending conferences  etc. This is scheduled at two levels - Sprint & Program. People can work on whatever they want, with whomever they want, so long as the work reflects the mission of the company.

While a sprint is in progress, if the team comprises of all generalists (Dev also doing QA), the last day of the sprint is regarded as the sprint diversification day (d) whereas in a PI, the last sprint (typically the IP sprint will treat the last week (12th or 13th week of the PI, depending on the holiday schedules) as the diversification week (D).

In other words, every general sprint consists of 9 days + d whereas every PI consists of 5 Sprints + IP sprint containing D

Reporting Effects, Results, and Status:

The reporting day is used to regroup the teams and report out the status of the work. Diversification must result in a report allowing freedom with boundaries of expectations and responsibilities. Teams demo their efforts to the rest of the organization before returning into the next strategy and recycling the process.

Conclusions:

This approach leads to the following positive changes

• Alignment with the SAFe/LeSS core values and value delivery
• Reduced wastage and stress.
• Motivates an energetic workforce.
• Self-Organizing
• Innovation