Episode 14 — Tim Kelly, the SAFe Agilist

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● TIM KELLY NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  It’s a great opportunity to talk about what matters most to you.  Whether you’re a professional project manager, or maybe you’re working toward one of your certifications, we want to help spark your imagination, light a fire under you, and encourage you along the way.  And we do that by talking about issues, friends in the field, and hearing from those in the trenches who are doing the job of project management. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are two guys who know the score when it comes to project management.  They’ve been there, done that.  They know what it takes to succeed.  And they are here to help you succeed.  They are our resident experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And guys, as we look back over our previous podcasts, we’ve had some amazing guests on our show.  And Andy, it looks like we’ve got another heavy-hitter today. ANDY CROWE:  We do.  We’ve got a great guest.  Tim Kelly with McKesson is in the house today.  So welcome, Tim. TIM KELLY:  Thank you. NICK WALKER:  Let’s meet you, Tim; okay?  Tim Kelly, an executive director of technology for McKesson.  He’s with the company’s Business Performance Services business unit.  He has more than 20 years of experience in information technology, information systems management, software and product development, program and project management, as well as wearing many other hats.  Tim, welcome to Manage This. TIM KELLY:  Thanks.  Awesome to be here. NICK WALKER:  Tell us a little bit more about you.  We want to get to know you a little bit better. TIM KELLY:  I have a kind of a unique background.  I grew up managing McDonald’s restaurants, and that was an opportunity to shape the foundation of how I understand people and how to manage profit principles.  So it was a unique opportunity. NICK WALKER:  You know, a lot of people might laugh at that:  “I started at McDonald’s.”  But that is a perfect example of putting what you’ve learned into practice in bigger arenas. TIM KELLY:  Absolutely.  I was studying economics at the University of Utah and had an opportunity to practice what I was studying at the same time.  I learned management principles and clearly a number of key projects.  An example would be trying to put a new HVAC on the roof.  So it had to happen, and you had to figure that out as a manager of a restaurant.  So absolutely had an opportunity to apply the principles.  I wasn’t yet certified at the time, to be clear.  This was many years ago.  But I did recently have a chance to hook up with Velociteach and become certified. BILL YATES:  Yeah, so 2009, Nick.  I had the pleasure of standing in front of a class and looking at the eager eyes of Tim Kelly as he was mastering the Project Management Institute’s framework on project management.  And Tim and I are friends.  We go back further than that.  But it was a rare treat for me to have a buddy in the classroom. TIM KELLY:  Yeah. BILL YATES:  And it was a lot of fun helping you reach that goal. TIM KELLY:  It was awesome.  I tell you what, I also trained for a number of years.  So I opened a training business with Packard Bell NEC in my past.  And just a quick plug for the work that you guys do, the approach, the mnemonic approach about how to retain and learn information, absolutely awesome.  Scored very highly on both the pretest at the end of Bill’s session and then of course did really well on the exam.  So not only did it prove useful from an exam perspective, but I think the approach allowed me to retain the content and then leverage that in business.  So that’s just true-to-life real stuff from someone who’s gone through it and then had to leverage it. ANDY CROWE:  Outstanding. NICK WALKER:  Yeah, bring us up to date now.  What are some of the hats you’re wearing right now? TIM KELLY:  Let me walk you from, if I could, from when I became certified.  I had an opportunity to do some new things for the first time.  And again, the certification was the foundation of that.  I led product development and essentially grew a team of five engineers in building a new product for Hughes Telematics at the time, which then became Verizon Telematics.  We grew that five individual team members into 120 people across 12 delivery teams and built a product that gets plugged into a vehicle, transmits data to a cloud-based communication platform, and then shares that data with both, in this case, State Farm, who was a consumer of the content, and with the consumer so you could see the data. So it started kind of my product development software engineering experience, after I was certified.  Then went on to work for McKesson and an opportunity to lead customer and technical support, which were my foundations and my roots because I began doing that with McDonald’s.  You see a thousand people a day, and you learn how to be nice to people.  It’s important. BILL YATES:  It’s funny.  Nick, I want to jump in.  I remember talking shop with Tim when he was working with Hughes and developing this technology.  Well, later in life, and I may have told you this, Tim, later in life I plugged one of those devices into my vehicles. TIM KELLY:  Oh, did you. BILL YATES:  Yeah, to try to get a reduced insurance rate.  So thank you, my friend.  I think.  The jury’s still out.  Hopefully it will be a decrease and not an increase. TIM KELLY:  Yeah.  It was a complex exercise, a lot of patents for the business.  Again, lots of learning, though, the foundation and the work you guys did for me. NICK WALKER:  Tim, one of the things we’ve talked about on this podcast again and again is the Agile world.  Tell us a little bit about how you’ve applied all of that to the project you’re working on. TIM KELLY:  Absolutely.  A quick bridge from that huge telematics experience.  We started with Agile for the first time.  I had not been an Agile practitioner before that.  And I was not certified in Agile at the time.  But we leveraged it, and I learned a great deal.  We scaled the teams. Joining McKesson later on, four years later, began in customer service, moved into engineering, began applying Agile principles again, and had several teams, five different product teams with McKesson at the time, responsible for electronic medical records and practice management applications.  And it became very clear that these five different product teams could operate independently, and they could do reasonable well with Agile. But if you have a large product that comprises many teams, then Agile in and of itself, even lean Agile, tends to not break down, but become challenging when you want to scale large teams and have them understand the product vision, how they interact together.  And that was a challenge we faced and one we had to wrestle with.  And that’s when we began to look at the Scaled Agile Framework. BILL YATES:  SAFe. TIM KELLY:  SAFe, exactly.  And SAFe is a freely available framework for scaling Agile.  There are others out there.  We chose the Scaled Agile Framework because we thought it had the most experience.  We studied the case studies that go with it, and we found it to apply best to our scenario.  And in my world we have 23 delivery teams, 160 resources across a broad spectrum of the technology framework.  So not just product development or Agile teams, which is a little bit unusual because we are a business performance services, a service-based company. So we have IT back office, which is unusual to think, am I going to apply Agile to IT back office?  We did that.  We have 60 people in that space across various IT functions, and we have a business intelligence team, both managing, developing, managing their infrastructure.  And we applied SAFe to that group, as well.  We have classic product development in engineering, and we applied it to that group.  And then, last but not least, probably the most exciting part of the puzzle is that we have portfolio and program management, which is the core of driving SAFe successfully. NICK WALKER:  Can we back up for just a second and tell me, what is SAFe?  How does that fit into this scenario? TIM KELLY:  Yeah, SAFe is a model where you can take Agile teams, and kind of the secret sauce or the value proposition in SAFe behind just lean Agile... NICK WALKER:  Secret sauce.  Did you see what he did just there? BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. TIM KELLY:  Little McDonald’s trade secret – is that you can, when teams get very large, how they interact to be the most efficient for both either a large-scale business or just a product, it tends to break down when you have all those teams together.  Bringing people together, a classic thing, is that we’re all over the U.S.  So we have 160 resources that are not in a single location.  So they’re all over.  But finding ways for them to communicate successfully together and partner together to understand the vision, scale and schedule the work, and prioritize it with the business is what SAFe does. NICK WALKER:  So SAFe is a new approach overall and is probably new to a lot of people that you’ve been working with.  It was new to you. TIM KELLY:  Absolutely. NICK WALKER:  What are the challenges that come with applying a new approach? TIM KELLY:  Yeah, thank you for asking.  It is – you have to both educate – I had to educate myself.  We have to educate our business partners.  And as I think about the transformation we were trying to effect, and the transformation – it’s a big program.  Maybe for all the listeners, that’s the way I would frame it is there is an enormous number of things to do.  They are linked together in smaller projects.  And the biggest challenges, of course,