hello and thank you all for joining our last Thursday's webinar today I'm Deborah McGrath senior manager technical product Solutions marketing at servicenow and I'll be hosting today's webinar on transforming agile at scale and joining me today also from servicenow are Fred Champlain who's an agile evangelist and one of our thought leaders on everything agile and safe and Greg sand advisory solution consultant who has deep knowledge and expertise across our entire strategic portfolio management Suite so um we're confident that most of what we'll be discussing and showing our features that are available as of our current Tokyo release but just in case Fred and Greg May point out some upcoming features we've included our Safe Harbor notice that this presentation may contain forward-looking statements that reflect the current beliefs of servicenow all based on current information available actual results May differ materially and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions and as always we'll save a few minutes at the end for a q a session welcome Greg and Fred thanks so much for being here today fantastic thanks Deborah um why don't we uh talk a little bit about uh why do we need scaling in agile why is this a a current topic a Hot Topic and and agile and we want to talk a little bit today um about some of the pain points some of the drivers some of the issues that organizations have when when they are taking agile from a small handful of teams and they need to add additional teams we'll talk about some of the pain points and and then we'll also provide you with um a look at how do we do this within service now so first let's talk about the pain points um once you're past three or four or five teams um in trying to coordinate those teams together organically that can work for a lot of organizations but frequently there comes a point where there's um additional challenges additional pain points that just emerge and and some of the indicators of this we'll look at several of these indicators are when you have multiple handoffs between teams and frequently there may be long lead times between those teams a team can't just pick up work and do it immediately they've already planned out their work there may be other dependencies that other teams have on them so this quickly becomes a challenging network if you will of reclass between teams dependencies and then consequently delays and and frequently these teams might Drift from having shared priorities over time and overall there's a a sense of that we're missing some dependencies they're just not a focus maybe on the architecture or maybe Architects aren't really in the loop to be planning out a Runway a road map of just the enabling type of pieces of functionality that are required for a product or for solution so additional pain points um they come in all different shapes and sizes uh visibility across teams of all the work together is a frequent pain Point uh if you're not using the same tooling you're not using the same Cadence we'll talk about that later um in the larger picture products might be late to Market meaning you're missing deadlines if they're internal if there's Milestones that are planned and those are missed um the organization might be misaligned overall and it may be that the agile teams are just running into organizational roadblocks policies procedures lines of reporting maybe getting in the way as well um there's technical reasons uh that that become pain points as well technical drivers such as not being able to do builds frequently enough maybe daily maybe hourly depends on your organization what the expectations are but at some point there's if you've got teams running independently or Loosely Affiliated and the architecture might not support clean builds you may have issues with code management that may not be alignment on on check-in and when builds are happening and when testing is running um they may run into administrative issues such as multiple charge codes for resources there might be a lot of back billing for the organization just to keep teams going and at some point that takes a whole effort itself to unravel so you get 50 60 people 75 people there's a breaking point for more most organizations where these pain points just overcome the benefits of trying to orchestrate agile in an organic fashion and there's several Frameworks and approaches that have been tried and have emerged over the years um where there's different ways to align uh and and look at well how do we plan together for example well one of the predominant Frameworks or the dominant framework right now in the marketplace is a framework called scaled agile framework uh frequently referred to as safe we know from for example from the state of agile 2021 report that safe continues to be the the dominating framework that people turn to to solve uh these pain points of scaling of taking your organization from a handful of teams into tens or hundreds of teams for for many organizations that are successfully using safe now we're focused on safe today there are other Frameworks out there that are perfectly valid um some will come to mind we won't go through all of those today we're going to focus on safe um for for this discussion today but servicenow does have the ability to support lass and Dad and and other any framework out there essentially it uses a backlog and a kanban to be managed so thinking about safe in particular uh this is a view of safe that really is based on competencies and and safe has a a focus on driving and providing business agility overall to an organization and there's several areas of Competency all focused on a customer so in an agile true agile focus is always being customer-centric on what we're doing uh you can see here there's several different competencies um ranging from lean portfolio management which we can talk about another day from from a service now perspective today we're going to look at the team in technical agility competency because that's the foundation of scaling and that's where many of our customers start is taking those organic teams and just giving them some structure and frequently that structure is in the form of as you can see here in the larger graphic is what safe calls an Agile Release Train or a team of teams you may be familiar you may have seen in the upper left here a kind of a busy picture of safe and and is overwhelming for people who are not familiar with with the the need for all of this uh structure in the framework uh and you can get very easily get lost in this so we're just looking at the bottom portion of this framework this pictured here today and really focusing on this art which you can see in in the the middle of the second the larger graphic here this is where we think about things about this team of teams we'll talk about that next a little bit talk about what does that team up teams look like but within safe there are several aspects of safe practices such as planning together on the same calendar for example starting and finishing Sprints or iterations on the same literally on the same days giving demos on the same days getting together to do what safe calls Pi planning which is roughly akin to quarterly planning uh in organization having a vision that pulls together the team so there's a vision and there's a road map that the team is aware of what's Over the Horizon and all of these things allow us to align teams there's a shared purpose a shared Vision shared planning together we're in that planning we're working out those dependencies and anticipating those and coordinating and making the trade-offs that are necessary we're also thinking about architectural Runway what do we need from the architect's perspective that will enable us Downstream to continue to build out new functionality we we may need a new upgrade for our Erp we may need a new set of services from a cloud provider we may need several things that have some lead time to them and may need some development of themselves we also are thinking about well how do we build and how do we have a cohesive build uh process so we think about devops being underlying this to really Drive what safe calls a continuous delivery pipeline so by sharing all of this together as a team planning together thinking around a customer and having the same customer in mind personas design thinking comes into play and customer Journeys sharing all this and working on this together is really one of the keys to success not only within safe but in most methods that are looking at scaling there's always a sense of how do we get aligned on the calendar how do we work together how do we plan together how do we synchronize together so this is the beginning of scaling it's the foundation of safe there's many more elements of safe we won't go into it today and as I mentioned earlier safe goes all the way up to the portfolio level or layer where you can manage the funding for all of this work across many many teams of teams safe in fact has the concept of a team of teams of teams for complex large products that may allow you to scale to thousands of individuals hundreds of teams and this is occurring in real real life for customers around the world they're adopting safe as they've matured their adoption of agile they've run into these pain points and and they see that there's value in a framework such as safe so let's take a look at how do we align uh with Agile Release trains and what do we mean by an Agile Release Train and then we'll transition and Greg will show us uh how this works in service now so when we talk about a a Release Train it'll be referred to as an art it's a term specific to to safe but it's really as I said just it's a team of Team structure so what we're after is having a cross-functional teams and then these teams can be some of them can be aligned uh to particular functionality that the team is working on if you're working on a product or service as a product there may be particular features uh that come you know are in the backlog and the team's working on a set of features there may be some if you have a platform they may be a team as you can see in the lower right here there may be a team that is thinking more about platform Services there may be a team that's thinking about a particular backend like this complicated subsystem uh there may be a team that's more about enabling there may be an integration team on this art the idea is to have teams that are cross-functional and also to have the art be self-sufficient as much as you can so this is why you want this this art which is typically maybe you know anywhere from 8 10 12 teams you pull them together you want them to be self-sufficient with the work that they're taking on so if you need some support from architecture and you need support from security you need ux designers um all of this is wrappered into an art and it's a really nice way to if you will package um a team of teams that's ready to to Take On The World if you will and you can see here an example in the lower left uh just a picture of what we mean by planning together and it literally from a safe perspective the recommended practice is to literally pull everybody including developers including testers including anybody and everybody involved into the same room because we want to gain a shared understanding we want developers to hear directly from the business owners what are the business objectives and also to hear what the technical objectives are as well and all of this is covered in MPI planning which again occurs roughly on a quarterly basis that varies across organizations on exactly how they want to Define their their program increments and you can see in the upper right here what happens during one of the pi planning events is we have what's called a program board where teams have rows and each of the the blue and the red items here are planning items some are risk you can see some red connections here that are depicting dependencies between teams that need to be planned for so you can see how this pulls together safe really allows us to enables us I should say to to pull together teams have some structure that's coordinated is in sync with each other and then we're actually thinking practically about what are our dependencies how do we handle them and and so we surface all of this and one of the keys is to have this be transparent across all teams be transparent on the performance how are we doing be transparent on the risk so why don't we take a look at what how we do this within servicenow and we'll have um Greg show us a quick demo thank you Fred and I just want to talk a bit just for a moment before we begin our demonstration we had an opportunity to actually talk with a number of our clients at the scale digital framework Summit earlier in Denver uh in May and they absolutely Justified some of those pain points saying organizational change that's taking place realizing that there is a large number of teams that they have to address and they absolutely have to scale and another client use case they have 7 500 team members that are operating in that safe practice and we're absolutely seeing how they have that need to scale especially at the you know the large number of products and features and capabilities that they're providing for their customers so with that let's talk about how safe in application and service now allows us to help carry that Journey forward and really allow them to scale and we're going to start with our safe application here from that Team level we have a chance to see that we can toggle between those different teams that we need to plan for we can see the different pis that we can toggle from one pi to another to help with our planning creating stories straight from this particular view to add more to our overall Sprints and to also think about our overall backlog that we have here we can see we can filter these by maybe a particular feature that that we have we can Mark Sprints complete and we can see how we have story points in group capacity that we have assigned to the Sprint so we can see how much how much we are performing against those Sprints and stories that are being completed and at the bottom we have an opportunity to see our backlog and what we can see in our backlog down here is it can also include other elements from the servicenow platform as part of maybe that devops pipeline as you brought up which is thinking about those service management components that we may need maybe we have problems or incidences or defects that we need to bring into our backlog and allows us to also seamlessly create a story from those in incidents is to help us streamline and automate some of those operations that may come from development work as well as from that operational work we can also think about this from a kanban capability using our visual task board capability here where we can use drag and drop and move stories back and forth and easily create assignments into these stories as well so the other Vision that we have is when we got that Team Planning that's taking place and as you mentioned Fred we really need to take that to that train level and we're going to move on into that Agile Release Train that we see here and now we're getting a chance to visualize through our product capabilities of how we can see those different teams that are working on this particular pi and you're getting a chance to see that Pi here we can toggle those pis back and forth we can easily create we can edit that program increment here or Mark some of these complete like we did before or maybe we could select a specific feature to help filter some of the views and lenses we have here in our planning board we're also getting a chance to talk about those dependencies as you brought up earlier and we're getting a chance to see some of those lines on these stories and those dependencies we see that we have some that we need to help resolve so we can easily click and drag and help resolve some of those dependencies very interactive being able to drag tag from the backlog into the different Sprints to very easily begin to work on those items we can also change this lens to our features and be able to see what do those features look like what do those dependencies look like from a featured standpoint we can even highlight even some of those features to see how they're taking place what's the timeline what are the back-end stories that are helping with that and we can also look at this from a backlog capability from features as well as we were able to do with our stories as well as leverage our visual task board capability here in a kanban style fashion to also drag and drop and think about how we could easily interface with moving our features as well now that we have our train and we've got our team of teams working together we can then also think about this from the portfolio perspective what is that Big Rock Planning that we need to do what does that look like from a portfolio perspective how are we applying lean portfolio management how are we getting this on our roadmap and this is where we can easily come in and we can create those high-level epics to help bring into our backlog of epics and think about what is that planning look like from a portfolio perspective and to help visualize this in a roadmap style fashion we can leverage our alignment planner workspace capability here that brings that portfolio to bear and look at those major epics that we have and see how they might be aligned to say our primary goals and our priorities in the organization we can personalize these roadmaps to be able to surface different data points that we could change on the fly so we get a great lens and look at those topics that we need to do as part of our planning and we can see even some of the interdependencies that we have here even at that major Epic Level to help us understand what's the order of you know that we need to execute on these what does this look like from a planning standpoint and how are these aligning within our organization to help us with that we can also think about prioritization of our portfolio and that's where we can come in here and be think about the prioritization that some of these items may have we may want to surface some approval dates or who owns these particular initiatives and maybe even some prioritization that we need to have and more importantly especially with our latest Tokyo release is allowing us to be able to rank and stack and be able to move things up and down from uh from a ranking standpoint that we may need to do but how is this aligning with the organization how are we sure that we are achieving those objectives and that's where the goal framework really comes into play in thinking about that okay or a model that you have in your organization we see here that we've got some major goals and targets that we've established and we can align our work to that so we can begin to get those things like actual value against those base targets that we've described this makes sure that we work what we're delivering is providing value to organization and thinking about that value and those metrics and the and what does value mean to you and how can we can collect that together on the servicenow platform so as we begin to think about grooming and we think about how we're delivering on those portfolios effectively we also want to make sure that we pay attention to our performance and that's where I'm just going to surface a couple dashboards that we offer out of the box that can absolutely help you with those epics those Sprints those features you can see we can think about a pi dashboard or a prior Pi dashboard paying attention to some of those uh trending capabilities that we may not have as we perform our work so this concludes our demonstration of our scaled agile framework capabilities and with that I'm going to turn it over to Debra Deborah thanks Greg and Fred for that thought-provoking discussion and the great demo showing us how you can leverage Services Agilent safe applications um really shows how we can deal with some of those common pain points scale agile Drive business agility and most importantly um I think it was a great discussion on transforming with agile so you can deliver on business outcomes and now I'd like to invite our audience to join us for a couple of additional great upcoming events please join us on Tuesday November 1st for our next SPM Summit for the Americas where you'll hear from joab Boaz the general manager of our SPM business unit and Karina Hatfield director of product management who will discuss our product roadmap and a special treat we also have several servicenow customers who will be sharing their experiences with managing change to deliver on business outcomes and of course on the last Thursday of every month we present a webinar on strategic portfolio management capabilities or enhancements to existing applications um however our next webinar will be our annual holiday edition and it will be on the first Thursday of December where you'll learn about a brand new feature called lenses that will help you easily create and manage portfolio plans against business goals and you'll be able to view this webinar again and access any of our other previous last Thursday's webinars on demand from the SPM Hub at the community.servicenow.com and I'm going to post the links to that in our chat session but right now we'll turn to our q a just to see if we have any questions coming in let me just see here um a couple questions so Greg and Fred I'm just going to put this out there and I'll let you fight over who wants to answer so one of the questions is one of the main complaints we get from our users about save or service sound safe is that the user interface is quite old-fashioned especially in comparison to other agile planning tools are there plans to give the safe module including the visual task board a visual overhaul so this is where we have our Safe Harbor notice because if we talk about Futures any thoughts on that yeah Deborah um we recognize that there's an opportunity to give that a refresh uh and and we are certainly have that on the roadmap for next year for 2023 that as you see some of the improvements overall on the platform from a user interface perspective uh those will also make it uh to to the safe module as well so expect to see something uh in 2023 as we have additional releases um it's definitely on our roadmap perfect thank you Fred um next question will you share the registration links in the chat I posted um some register some the navigation links to our SPM product Hub as well as to our last Thursday's blog if you click on the bitly link it will bring you to the blog and then click on whichever webinar you want to see and you'll find the registration Link in there we update that on a periodic basis so if it's not there just check back periodically and you'll find the registration um link there next question um the functionality that was shown for alignment planner workspace what release is that is it Tokyo um and yeah I'll take that one so this was today was definitely Tokyo but we've had alignment planner workspace capability out for quite some time and and especially out of the box templates that you can use for Willamette partner workspace for safe specifically so that's definitely available in San Diego um so definitely take a look and see what family instance or release that you're on to make sure that you have the appropriate alignment plan workspace version join us just to add on to that join us on our December 1st webinar because you're going to see some additional capabilities with alignment planner workspace specifically on that webinar including what we're calling lenses or the ability to quickly and easily build new portfolio plans um and the next question um how how does the concept of product fit with this framework yeah I can I can speak to that Deborah um so yeah and again in 2023 we're looking at several um uh improvements in in our safe and agile uh constructs one of them is uh with product and also with value stream so you'll see initially a with this uh with lenses that we're introducing that we will also uh later have a more of a product lens as well so we are working on uh where this product fit into this uh from a safe perspective um some of you may be using what save calls a large solution a layer which is for many organizations akin to a product or a complex product or a family of products um a product Suite numerous names for that um that is where it fits in the framework and we are on our roadmap also looking to support that capability and safe so so you'll see us introduce a product value stream in the ability to work with those through lenses in 2023 thank you Fred and to that as well I would encourage you to join us on our SPM Summit on Tuesday if you can Karina Hatfield will also talk about how product fits within this framework as well as our customer panel we have some back and forth questions and you'll hear them discuss how they're approaching it um what they're taking so encourage you to do that the link is in the chat for that another question are you able to show dependencies between different safe boards wondering about interdepartment dependencies yeah um so a great question by the way uh this really gets into how do we scale the ports uh and again this is what you'll see in 2023 so we have a fair amount on the 2023 roadmap around this in in terms of being able to scale with that additional layer uh supporting the solution layer the large solution um layer in safe this is where you will see us provide that capability to link uh dependencies across arts and be able to visualize those and then associate those with a portfolio optic as well so again you'll see us bring this uh the scalability for their scalability within our support for safe in 2023. thanks again Fred so I'm seeing unless anybody can type really fast that seems to be all the questions we have and we're coming right up on the half hour anyway so in the meantime I'd like to say thank you again Fred and Greg that was wonderful and most of all thank you to our last Thursday's audience for joining us we hope to see you at the SPM Summit on Tuesday November 1st and for the next last Thursday's webinar which is actually the first Thursday of December December 1st thanks everyone