Presentation with Mark Richards at RallyON, June 2013 in Boulder, Colorado.

1. TELSTRATEMPLATE4X3BLUEBETA|TELPPTV4
TELSTRA’S JOURNEY TO SAFE
EM CAMPBELL-PRETTY, GM BI COE STRATEGIC DELIVERY
MARK RICHARDS, PRINCIPLE CONSULTANT, RICHDATA
Em
• Twitter: @PrettyAgile
• Blog: http://prettyagile.com
Mark
• Twitter: @MarkAtScale
• Blog: http://agilenotanarchy.com

2. OUR SCALED AGILE JOURNEY
March 2013
• 7 Agile teams
• 24 concurrent projects
• One Agile Release Train
November 2011
5 “WAGILE” teams
4 large projects

4. THE AGILE RELEASE TRAIN
• A virtual organization of 5 – 12 teams (50-100 individuals) that
plans, commits, and executes together
• Common cadence and normalized story point estimating
• Aligned to a common mission via a single program backlog
• Operates under architectural and UX guidance
• Produces valuable and evaluate-able system-level Potentially
Shippable Increments (PSI) every 8-12 weeks
The ART is a long-lived, self-organizing team of agile teams
that delivers solutions
Define new
functionality
Implement
Acceptance
Test
Deploy
Repeat until further notice. Project chartering not required.

5. STRUCTURING THE AGILE RELEASE TRAIN
Deployment
Services
Pipeline Services
(connecting, feeding, and shielding the delivery
teams. Identification of strategic opportunities)
Delivery Teams (x5)
(engaged and delivering directly to
Epic/Feature Owners)
Leadership Team ‘Loco’
+ Specialist Chapters
(virtual teams made from the workers themselves)
Epic, Feature, Release Walls
(capacity balancing and tracking against wider Telstra
releases and commitments. Weekly release.)
Team Iteration Walls
(10% dedicated innovation time)
SD
System Team
(identifies, manages, and eliminates bottlenecks)
Work
Cohesion
Team
Collaboration

6. SCALING THE SPRINT

7. THE BEST WAY TO START
 Train everyone at the
same time
 Same instructor,
same method
 Cost effective
 Align all teams to
common objectives
 Commitment
 Continue training
during planning
 Orientation for
specialty roles
 Open spaces
 Tool training for
teams
Training:
SAFe
ScrumXP
Release
Planning
Enterprise
Scrum
Master
Quickstart
Enterprise
Product
Owner
Quickstart
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri
Tooltraining
You
Are
Agile,
Now
When you find the first train, go “All In” and “All at Once”

8. HOW WE STARTED
Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z38itkVtEqI

9. WHAT’S IN YOUR BACKLOGS
EPICS
FEATURES
STORIES

10. VISUALISING THE PROGRAM PORTFOLIO

11. RELEASE PLANNING
• Two days every 8-12 weeks
• Everyone attends in person if at all possible
• Product Management owns feature priorities
• Development team owns story planning and high-level estimates
• Architects, UX folks work as intermediaries for governance,
interfaces and dependencies
• Result: A committed set of program objectives for the next PSI
Cadence-based PSI/Release Planning meetings are the “pacemaker”
of the agile enterprise

12. ‘PSI-LITE’ BECOMES UNITY DAY
1212

13. YOU NEED A LEARNING CULTURE

14. SERVANT LEADERSHIP

15. SCALING THE PRODUCT OWNER
Source: Agile Portfolio and Program Management in the Scaled Agile Framework, Dean Leffingwell, Agile Melbourne Meetup, 15/02/12

16. SCALING THE PRODUCT OWNER
EPIC OWNER
FEATURE
OWNER
PRODUCT
OWNER

17. THE RELEASE BOARD – FEATURE LEVEL

18. CONTINUOUS INTER-TEAM COORDINATION
• Agile team members may visit
other team’s…
• Backlog grooming: to see what’s
coming next sprint, request
adjustments
• Sprint planning: request
adjustments
• Daily standups: follow up on
execution
• Team Demo: summarize current
stage
Agile teams self-manage dependencies and resolve risks
Agile Team 1
Agile Team 2
Dependent
story
Join other
team scrum
ceremony

19. COCKTAIL PARTY
19PRESENTATION TITLE | PRESENTER NAME | DATE |
9:00am 9:15am 930am
9:45am

20. SAFE SCRUM / XP

21. SAFE SCRUM/XP

22. OUR RESULTS
• Average delivery cycle time down from 12 month to 3 months 
• Frequency of delivery increased from quarterly to fortnightly 
• Cost to deliver down 50% 
• 95% decrease in product defects 
• 100% projects delivered on time and on budget 
• Happy project sponsors (NPS 29) 
• Happy teams (Team NPS 43 )

23. A LITTLE TASTE OF OUR CULTURE
Source: http://www.prettyagile.com/2013/05/the-power-of-haka.html