2024 Project to Product Summit

Moving from Project to Product: A Five-Stage Journey

When it comes to increasing productivity, creating value, developing agility, and driving customer-centricity, there’s simply no better approach. Regardless of your starting point, Mik will share insights on just how far organizations have come in realizing the importance of such a paradigm shift.

Scaling Success: From Projects to Super-Sized Products

Products and the value streams that build them deliver an organization's value. Therefore, accelerating product delivery is vital for organizations to survive and thrive in the Digital Age. Instead of focusing on projects and defining success as completing them on time and within budget, leaders must emphasize products that deliver business outcomes. This change requires a new organizational structure, moving from Projects to Products and organizing around value. However, additional challenges arise at scale. Some of the largest SAFe organizations have many value streams developing a single integrated product. For example, how should an automotive company align its 8,000 solution builders to deliver a line of vehicles or a large IT organization managing separate platforms, infrastructure, and services?

In this talk, SAFe Chief Methodologist Andrew Sales will share practical guidance for organizing and supporting super-sized product development. Critical to this approach is identifying, designing, and organizing product portfolios around value. Options include organizing around business units, platforms, regional operations, regulation, or innovation. In reality, a combination is needed to maximize value delivery, and organizations must consider the relevant trade-offs and understand what they are optimizing for. However, successful product development at this scale extends beyond the portfolio and requires robust value stream management practices. In an ideal world, these value streams operate independently, but in practice, organizing successfully at this scale requires understanding how value streams interoperate to create nested and networked value streams.

How World-Class Product Teams Are Winning in the AI Era

Join Carlos González De Villaumbrosia, CEO of Product School as he explores how world-class product teams are navigating the AI era. Gain insights into the challenges of digital transformations, the importance of clear strategy, and the evolving role of product leaders. Discover the critical factors for success and understand how product teams are driving revenue growth and competitive advantage in the age of AI.

Key takeaways for attendees of this session:

• Critical factors for success in digital transformations
• Importance of a clear strategy in the AI era
• Leveraging product teams for revenue growth and competitive advantage

Combining the Power of VSM and OKRs to Optimize Flow and Accelerate Speed to Value

Getting to a state of “optimized flow” is journey that starts with gaining visibility into each value stream’s current state through baseline flow metrics. Once there is visibility, data driven insights are used to stabilize the system before making process changes and automations that address bottlenecks and allow a progression from a stable state to a “managed” state of flow. From here, a focus on continuous improvement ultimately achieves an optimized state of flow.

This session will explore how to leverage a Value Stream Management (VSM) platform to rapidly create flow models that generate the key flow metrics and data insights needed to identify opportunity areas and implement flow improvements.

We will also discuss the importance of connecting business outcomes with fast flow using OKRs to deliver an outstanding customer experience.

Key takeaways for attendees of this session:

• How to analyze key flow metrics to find and reduce bottlenecks, wait states, overproduction, and other forms of waste.
• How to create a data driven continuous improvement culture that drives down waste and inefficiency.
• Understand how to leverage OKRs as a strategic alignment framework to address customer needs while driving faster time to value.

Why Your Target Operating Model Needs to Be Flow-centric-insights from Team Topologies

The book Team Topologies points the way to profound changes for the operating model for organizations building and running software-enriched services. At the heart of Team Topologies is the principle of fast flow: multiple ongoing streams of changes to software-enriched services done safely and sustainably. By focusing on fast flow using Team Topologies patterns - especially decoupling and service-centricity - organizations can expect to see significant benefits, including:

• Increased financial efficiency - typically $ millions per year
• Increased end-to-end financial transparency
• Shorter time-to-value
• Better scaling ability without the slowdowns normally found with larger organizations
• Marked improvements in detecting and meeting user needs (or customer needs)
• Increased staff wellbeing and engagement (autonomy, mastery, purpose)
• Greater overall organizational agility

In this talk, Matthew Skelton - CEO at Conflux and co-author of the book Team Topologies - explores some of the reasons why a focus on fast flow helps with much wider organizational and business goals, together with some of the key principles and practices that need to be part of everyday life in an organization that is set p for fast flow.

Ultimately, using "fast flow" as a key organizing principle also results in more generalized business agility, mostly because we are encouraged to think about decoupling between separate "things" and the real value of what the organization provides. So although it is not the end goal, fast flow certainly helps significantly to help the organization to respond in a nimble manner.

Key takeaways for attendees of this session:

• Scale at speed needs things to be decoupled
• Architecture for flow is good for scaling
• Architecture for flow is more humane

Why Agile Teams Have Nothing to Do with Business Agility

In this talk, I discuss an agile transition where approximately 600 people were involved. The goal was to shorten the time-to-market for initiatives to be able to respond to customer needs more quickly and, as such, improve business agility. In order to achieve this, a reorganization was carried out. Cross-functional teams were constructed so knowledge needed for development is fully available within the team. In addition, the teams were categorized according to product in order to remove any dependencies. Visualization of the work, Standup meetings and Retrospectives made the agile transition complete—except for the expected improvements. In this session, I share what we did to improve the situation and reach the goal of "more business agility". I also show how you can approach an agile transition of this size, so you can avoid the issue of no improvements being seen. This much I can tell you in advance: do not start at the team level—it will save not only your nerves, but also a lot of money!

Key takeaways for attendees of this session:

• Agile teams have nothing to do with business agility
• Agile teams have nothing to do with business agility
• Reorganization is not always necessary

Organising for Outcomes

Every organisation is perfectly optimised to get the results it gets!

In this talk I will be sharing antipatterns (headwinds) and patterns (tailwinds) on the topic of optimising for outcomes, including how we organise ourselves. These are lessons learnt first-hand the hard way and from more than 50 organisations, with a scope across the whole organisation.

There is an emerging new normal across organisations. We are living through the biggest pivot in organised human endeavour at scale since the first industrial revolution in 1771, whether it is Darwinian or by design. What an exciting time to be working!

Key takeaways for attendees of this session:

• Value Streams
• How we got here
• How to approach organisational change

Large-Scale Digital Transformations Success and Failure Patterns

Over the years I have led many large-scale digital transformations. There are success and failure patterns that I have learned in helping both business and technology to adopt new ways of working to improve the flow from "idea to in production". In this session I will share from my experience to help other organizations improve their chances of delivering a successful and sustainable change in how the organization delivers value. I will also facilitate a discussion with a few previous clients who can also share from our experience working together.

Key takeaways for attendees of this session:

• 90% of the change is in between the ears
• Don't take a waterfall approach to a Lean Agile transformation
• Start with OKRs and clarity around business value, then harness the power of your own people to make change stick