Create a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence

A guiding coalition that operates as an effective team can process more information, more quickly. It can also speed the implementation of new approaches because powerful people are truly informed and committed to key decisions.

—John Kotter

The Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) is a small team of people dedicated to implementing the SAFe Lean-Agile way of working. It is often one of the key differentiators between companies practicing Agile in name only and those fully committed to adopting Lean-Agile practices and getting the best business outcomes. The LACE is the third element of the “sufficiently powerful guiding coalition” for change, which is made up of three primary ingredients:

• Training a number of Lean-Agile change agents as SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs)

• Training executives, managers, and other leaders

• Creating a LACE

This chapter provides guidance on the size, structure, and operation of the LACE. It is based on our own experience, as well as the experience of others working directly in the field.

Details

In the chapters Training Lean-Agile Change Agents and Training Executives, Managers, and Leaders, we described how the organization can help change agents and leadership gain the knowledge and skills necessary to lead the transformation.

The challenge is that most of the people who are qualified to drive the change have full-time responsibilities in their current roles. While a significant portion of their time can perhaps be devoted to supporting the change, a smaller, more dedicated group of people is required to drive the transformation throughout the organization. Although these groups go by different names—the Agile Center of Excellence, Agile Working Group, Lean-Agile Transformation Team, Learning and Improvement Center—they are all staffed with people whose primary task is to implement the change.

Team Size

How many dedicated individuals does it take to create an effective LACE team and accomplish the change? In addition to the number of people, one must take into account the organizational and financial impact of assigning talented resources to the new charter. As author John P. Kotter notes: “The size of an effective coalition seems to be related to the size of the organization. Change often starts with just two or three people. The group in successful transformations then grows to half a dozen in relatively small firms or in small units of larger firms.”[1]

For perspective, we’ve observed that in SAFe-practicing companies, small teams of four to six dedicated people can support a few hundred practitioners, while teams of about twice that size support proportionally larger groups. Beyond that, team size gets unwieldy, and a decentralized or hub-and-spoke model is typically more effective.

Responsibilities

No matter its size, a LACE typically has the following responsibilities:

• Communicating the business need, urgency, and vision for change

• Developing the implementation plan and managing the transformation backlog

• Establishing the metrics

• Conducting or sourcing training for executives, managers and leaders, development teams, and specialty roles such as Product Owner, Product Manager, Scrum Master, and Release Train Engineer

• Identifying Value Streams and helping define and launch Agile Release Trains (ARTs)

• Providing coaching and training to ART stakeholders and teams

• Participating in critical, initial events such as Program Increment (PI) Planning and Inspect and Adapt (I&A)

• Fostering SAFe Communities of Practice (CoPs)

• Communicating progress

• Implementing Lean-Agile focus days, with guest speakers, and presenting internal case studies

• Benchmarking and connecting with the external community

• Promoting continuing Lean-Agile education

• Extending Lean-Agile practices to other areas of the company, including Lean Budgets, Lean Portfolio Management, contracts, and human resources

• Helping to establish relentless improvement (see Sustain and Improve in the roadmap)

For a small team, this is a pretty significant list of responsibilities. Luckily, many of them are shared with numerous SPCs, who may or may not be regular members of the LACE.

Organization and Operation

The LACE may be a part of an organization’s emerging Lean-Agile Program Management Office (Agile PMO), or it may exist as a stand-alone unit. In either case, it serves as a focal point of activity, a continuous source of energy that can help power the enterprise through the necessary changes. Additionally, since becoming a Lean-Agile enterprise is an ongoing journey, rather than a static destination, the LACE often evolves into a longer-term center for continuous improvement.

Operationally, the LACE typically functions as an Agile team and applies the same iteration and PI cadences. This allows the LACE to plan and inspect and adapt in harmony with the ARTs, serving as an exemplar for Agile team behavior. As a result, similar roles are needed:

• A Product Owner works with stakeholders to prioritize the team’s transformation backlog.

• A Scrum Master facilitates the process and helps remove roadblocks.

• The team is cross-functional. Credible people from various functional organizations are integral members of the team. That allows the team as a whole to address backlog items wherever they arise, whether those items are related to organization, culture, development process, or technology.

• A ‘C- level’ leader typically acts as the team’s Product Manager.

Mission

The LACE team needs to align its work with a common mission. An example mission statement is included in Table 1.

Table 1. Example LACE mission statement

Team Distribution

As mentioned earlier, the size of the team must be proportional to the size and distribution of the development enterprise. For smaller enterprises, a single, centralized LACE can balance speed with economies of scale. However, in larger enterprises—typically those with more than 500 to 1,000 practitioners—it’s useful to consider employing either a decentralized model or a hub-and-spoke model (Figure 1).

The first model is the Centralized model and is shown by a single large circle labeled Central. The second model is the Decentralized model and is shown by five circles placed in a ring. These circles are not connected and are labeled from Local 1 to Local 5, in a clockwise direction from the top. The third model is the Hub-and-Spoke model and is a combination of the previous two models. A circle labeled Central is placed at the center of a ring, along which are five other circles labeled from Local 1 to Local 5 from the top, in a clockwise manner. All these five circles are connected to the Central hub.

Figure 1. LACE team distribution models

Table 2 describes situations in which each of these models is most effective.

Model	Works well when...
Centralized	There is a single portfolio with a single instance of SAFe in a modest-sized development enterprise (hundreds of practitioners). Value streams and ARTs operate under a common budget. Funding for LACE personnel, tooling, and coaching all operate under the same budget.
Decentralized	There are independent business units, each with their own, largely autonomous SAFe portfolios. Each business unit's context varies enough that SAFe may be applied in different ways. Funding for LACE personnel, tooling, coaching, etc., comes from the individual business unit's budget. Cross-business unit collaboration is effective enough to provide the necessary knowledge sharing.
Hub-and-Spoke	In the largest enterprises, a small LACE typically serves as the hub for decentralized spokes. Each spoke operates as the local center of coordination for distribution, consultants, supplier resources, tooling and technology, and sources of funding. Certain core practices are developed centrally in the hub and then shared and adapted locally. Effective local practices are communicated back to the hub for sharing with other spokes. Funding for hub personnel, as well as common tooling, may be centralized. The costs for spoke personnel, as well as outside consulting and coaching, are typically funded locally.

Table 2. Situations where each model is most effective

Improving Incrementally

The LACE has a tall order to fill: Change the behavior and culture of a large development organization. Once a LACE has formed, there will be a natural desire to want to kick it into high gear right away and work through its full backlog as quickly as possible. However, trying to remove all the major organizational impediments right at the start will slow the transformation to a halt. Instead, the LACE—with the support of the entire guiding coalition—empowers the organization to generate short-term wins by defining and launching ARTs. It then consolidates those gains as additional ARTs are launched. This provides the positive momentum needed to tackle the larger organizational issues.

With each PI, ART, and value stream, the gains continue to build, and the organization transforms incrementally.

Moving Forward

The next critical move is to identify value streams and ARTs.

LEARN MORE

[1] Kotter, John P. Leading Change. Harvard Business Review Press, 1996.

[2] Knaster, Richard, and Dean Leffingwell. SAFe Distilled: Applying the Scaled Agile Framework for Lean Software and Systems Engineering. Addison-Wesley, 2017.