Conclusion

Factors for decision-making

1. If business leadership is seeking improvements in operational performance (e.g. in any of the areas listed below), then behavioral changes must be driven in addition to the introduction of a new tool to yield better results
2. Enterprise transformation (i.e. scaling agile) is most successful when sponsored as a major “change-the-business” initiative across the organization, with top talent leading the effort
   1. Change is hard, so following proven change management practices can help
   2. Seek to find the sponsor from within the team (or extended organization), instead of relying on an external coach or consultant as the sponsor - the sponsor needs to have “skin in the game” for the results of the change
   3. Leaders set the vision for change, and the change management team builds and executes the plans to achieve the change - start with clearly defining where the vision will come from and place the accountability for results with this leader
3. One of the primary benefits of leveraging an industry standard framework (e.g. SAFe, S@S) is that the taxonomy (and glossary) can be coherently adopted as the single source of truth
   1. When a custom taxonomy is created, if a word is re-defined to mean something different than what it means in one of the industry frameworks, it can create confusion for people with background in those other environments
   2. One of the most common questions we encounter is the different usage of the term “epic” in the SAFe glossary and in the Atlassian product, Jira - one popular approach is to adopt the term “Jira Epic” inside Jira Align to refer to the level of the work hierarchy above stories
4. The taxonomy (i.e. Atlassian platform terminology) should be owned and actively managed by the Agile CoE or the enterprise coaching community - the tools should be configured with the terms defined by the scaled agile transformation
   1. Note: The terminology overrides can extend beyond the names of the elements/objects in the three hierarchies, and into the names of the attributes on those items as well

References

• SAFe 5.0 Framework
• Measure and Grow - Scaled Agile Framework
• Implementation - Train Lean-Agile Change Agents - Scaled Agile Framework
• Program Health Radar Assessment - AgilityHealth
• Scrum@Scale - The Scaling Framework Created by Dr. Jeff Sutherland
• http://disciplinedagiledelivery.com/
• Epics, Stories, Themes, and Initiatives
• The 8-Step Process for Leading Change | Dr. John Kotter

Congratulations!