In 2015, I helped an F50 health insurance company with the most visible enterprise initiative. Through a thoughtful application of SAFe, the 500+ person effort was able to turn around an 18-month project that was 6 months behind schedule, and they successfully delivered one week before the government-imposed deadline.

In this effort I honed my “speak truth to power” while also developing a much stronger empathy for executive leadership and the many constraints within which they must operate. This candidness and ability to have respectfully frank conversations helped that team accept and even embrace their reality, and through that making the shifts necessary to achieve success.

I also appreciated the fun and motivation that emerges, even at 500-person scale, when people are offered a hard mission and the trust to deliver against it.

Finally, it provided an opportunity to test and evolve a variety of patterns for scaling multiple ARTs in a solution train, including what we would now describe as identifying fracture planes in the customer journey and technology landscapes.

In 2013, I helped a small entertainment company with their agile adoption efforts. In scale, it was small: Just 10 teams and a single ART. In impact, it was incredible, enabling a business journey that increased their share price by 10x over the following decade with a clear hockey-stick shape.

My primary learning here was the power of simplicity, and how removing friction from the developers’ efforts to help customers and business leaders can have transformative effects.

Throughout 2014 and 2015 I delivered dozens of courses in both the Kanban Method and Leading SAFe in the same company while also advising their agility office on organizational adoption and helping launch a couple ARTs. This variety and repetition starkly highlighted the tension between enterprise consistency and team-level adaptation, allowing me to experiment and refine a variety of different techniques for resolving that tension in healthy ways.

I also witnessed the power of broad enablement with permissive adoption guidelines, and how it leads to a far more fit-for-purpose and sustainable adoption.

Finally, I observed first-hand the incredible effectiveness of a well-formed team of teams with a strong relationship network. One newly formed ART was able to reduce from a quarterly defect rate of 100’s to 3. (and they still argued one of those 3 wasn’t actually a defect)

After the 2015 acquisition of Rally by CA, I was invited to lead the overall agile transformation team across the product organization of ~3000 engineers. Over the next two years, I observed the human and economic impact of bringing mid-range agile steering to product businesses.

I also further refined and witnessed impact of broad enablement and permissive adoption through simple guardrails, allowing us to transform the majority of the product organization with a team of just 5 people by working through the many advocates across the business units.

I had the joy of actively coaching and mentoring the global center of excellence across five levels of leadership, and watching that team flourish as they tirelessly supported the slow growth of agility enterprise-wide.

In this environment I learned many lessons around the social and political challenges of agility, yet also saw how intentional, supportive energy can slowly bring many different groups into the alignment required for effective growth.

I also refined and captured many of the patterns I use for shaping enablement-focused global centers of excellence, many of which found their way into my unfinished 2020 book on leading LACEs.