Our Journey to Mars: BD Rowa's Business Agility Transformation - News, tips & guidance for agile, development, Atlassian-Software (JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, ...) and Google Cloud

In 2020 and 2021, our partner Kegon helped the company BD Rowa transition into a completely agile working environment. Read on to find out Their "Journey to Mars", as they called their process of achieving business agility, went.

Who are BD Rowa?

Every company is different and therefore has its own unique challenges on their way to become fully agile. So to understand some of the challenges BD Rowa had, it's good to know what they do.

BD stands for Becton Dickinson and Company, which is the 5th largest healthcare provider in the world with 75,000 employees. BD Rowa is part of this global corporation and focuses on designing and building solutions for the global healthcare market, like automated storage robots for pharmacies. Have you ever seen these huge, futuristic-looking storage containers in pharmacies where a robot arm automatically picks the box of prescription medication your pharmacist selected on their computer and then gives it to them? Or, like in Germany, have you ever wondered where the box of prescription medicine comes from that just seems to fall out of a tube? There's a good chance the system you saw was built by BD Rowa!

They've been around for 20 years, currently have over 900 employees and 10,000 of their systems are used across 53 countries all over the world. The predominantly handmade parts are produced exclusively in the Eifel region in Germany, largely in cooperation with suppliers from the region.

Why go agile?

According to Thorsten Janning, the process can be quite involved and difficult to go through if you don't do it for the right reasons. For those who know how profound the changes can be, it may come as a surprise that some companies answer "well, because it's the new hot topic, everyone else does it, so we thought we should as well" or "we want to save money". In those cases, Janning thinks an agile transformation would not be a good idea.
However, at BD Rowa, Janning felt there really was a sense of urgency. This was because of three main reasons: growing pains, motivation and innovation and a rapidly changing market landscape.

Growing pains

BD Rowa started as a small startup in the Eiffel with a size of 2 or 3 employees only servicing Germany in the 1990s. In 2011, they were acquired by CareFusion, had up to 1000 employees and were servicing Europe and in 2015, they were finally acquired by BD, had over 10,000 employees and provided services all over the world. More products were added that got more complex, like pouch packaging and digital pharmacy.

Motivation and innovation

So why did BD Rowa want to introduce Agile into the company? They held a survey among their employees about numerous topics, and this survey showed among other things that:
only 34.2% of the employees thought that departments cooperated effectively with each other
only 36.5% thought that calculated risk taking was encouraged at BD
only 44.8% thought that decisions were taken without excessive delay

As Agile focuses on these three pain points, they decided that it was a good idea to go Agile.

The journey in two stages

BD Rowa's journey to Mars, as they call their journey to becoming Agile, consisted of two phases:

Get to the moon (with help from Kegon)
With what they learned from phase 1, make their own way to Mars

The journey to the moon comprised all of the work involved in setting up the Agile Release Trains within BD Rowa's R&D department. When those were established, the real work began: the journey to Business Agility, meaning getting all other departments, like production and services, to work according to Agile principles as well. This meant getting almost 1000 employees to change their way of working, which can be a challenge.

Phase 1: to the moon!

So, how did phase 1 go? Quite quickly, actually. It's important that upper management is fully on board with the whole idea, and this was thankfully the case at BD Rowa, making it easier to identify all of their value streams and create a common vision for the company.
The journey to the first PI planning went relatively smoothly and was concluded within about 7 months; at the end of February, the employees had been trained, for example by organising workshops about recognizing value streams, everyone involved had been heavily coached, the roles had been assigned based on self selection workshops, and the first PI Planning had been created:

Self-selection

The roles were assigned based on self-selection workshops, because it was important that the people in those roles took them on willingly, as the roles could be quite different from what their jobs had been up to that point. That way, they could put themselves forward for roles that they knew they had the skills for, or that they had always wanted to get involved in. This meant that they were actually motivated from within to take on this new role instead of being appointed by others, and this motivation is very important for a change like this to be successful. It even turned out that BD Rowa could fill "gaps" that were previously filled by outsourcing the work with people who were already working at the company, because it turned out they had the skills they were looking for, but no one knew it!

Remote

All of this already sounds quite impressive, but the fact that this all happened during the second wave of Corona meant that all of this had to happen remotely, each of the employees sitting at home. This made it an interesting challenge logistically, but it also had a positive effect on the process: because people were sitting at home, they were even more motivated to participate and be part of something big.

Phase 2: To Mars!

When this was all done, only part of BD Rowa's journey to Mars was completed. When they started the second leg of the journey, it turned out quite a bit bumpier than the first part.

The challenge from that point on was "how do we get the transformation we managed to achieve in the R&D department to become a cultural change in the whole company? And how do we achieve a cultural change in the way we work with the new types of meetings etc.?"

Operational value streams

As usual with SAFe, there are two types of value streams: Development Value Streams and Operational Value Streams. The Trains that were mentioned in Phase 1 provide solutions, but the customers get their value from the whole system that also includes the distribution of the products.

In the case of BD Rowa this means that a pharmacy says "I want to automate my storage", BD Rowa then goes to them, sets up a contract, installs their solution, checks that it's working as it should, gets paid and then provides a long series of service and support for the customer. This is their standard value chain.

There are, however, more value chains. Pharmacies are not their only customers and they don't just have robots for storage solutions, but other solutions as well. This makes the Value Stream of BD Rowa as a whole look quite different. This was also an important lesson from the workshops: many employees thought there was only one Value Stream, but there were clearly more.

What are the Value Streams?

To find this out, it was first important to determine which customer segments the company creates their solutions for.

In their case they found customers in pharmacies, hospitals, industrial industries and consumable consumption to be the most important.

There is not one single value stream that only delivers one solution to one customer segment; the Trains overlap in some cases, sometimes catering to the same customer segment.

They wanted to organize around value streams and that the whole company works in one “rhythm”. Rowa Cadence enabled Business Agility through transparency. They evaluated every 10th week where they were at by asking questions like: where do we stand? Where are dependencies? This way, they could transition smoothly and without creating chaos.

Strategic process

BD Rowa also implemented a strategic process. First they observed and collected different trends. They dissected which trends were relevant for them. Considering the potential threats and opportunities ahead as a result of the trends, BD Rowa conducted a strategy workshop in which 40 employees came up with the company’s strategic goals. In order to consolidate the strategic goals to be functional and realistic operative team goals, the company used the investment horizon from SAFe.

This helped them a lot in deciding what should be implemented in the near future, as well as what they needed to improve on to be more competitive. For example, they realized that they needed to go in a completely different direction and automate a few processes. Overall, this helped them assess what they needed to do, but more so it made them realize that they needed to be clear on what is feasibly implementable and how it would be done. So in order to see where their strategic themes landed, BD Rowa defined their objectives through key results and again asked - are the strategies (their key results) measurable? Having this clear illustration made it easier for DB Rowa to initially define their key results as well.

Decentralized decision making

How was the decision-making process and governance by DB Rowa structured? It was quite typical! A few people decided everything. So what did they do? They split the team so that teams could specifically work together on tasks. For example, the People Leadership Board is relevant for the HR team and nobody else. Not only this, they also separated further into groups covering different topics. This separation allowed them to use more of their company knowledge and they were able to restructure themselves. This is how they were able to bring the resources that they had to the forefront to be successful. They essentially were able to change their governance through this manner.

Conclusion

Overall, for DB Rowa their journey throughout space has been quite dynamic. Their first stage to the moon, introducing the first Agile Release Train, was relatively easy and quite linear. After their success on the moon, DB Rowa began their blast-off to mars, aka their implementation of Business Agility.

Throughout this process, everyone at DB Rowa had an incredible learning curve. Now, DB Rowa sees Mars within reach and as they continue their journey, no doubt they will even reach Saturn. What about your journey?

You can find out which configuration is right for you, how you can use SAFe® in your company and which companies are already using SAFe® in our Knowledge Base.

Scaled Agility with Atlassian Tools

Are you also in the middle of the Scaled Agile transformation and want to use agile methods company-wide? Do you want to finally tackle Agile scaling more systematically? Then you also need to think about professional software support.

Jira Align and Agile Hive are mature solutions that can provide valuable services when it comes to the structured introduction and implementation of a Scaled Agile framework like SAFe. Would you like to find out more about your options? Simply arrange a demo appointment for Jira Align and/or a session on Agile Hive with us!

Our Journey to Mars: BD Rowa’s Business Agility Transformation