Earn your wings: A novel approach to deployment governance

This paper presents a model to assess team autonomy developed and deployed in a South African bank’s IT department. The bank has been deploying SAFe® for the last two years and in the process has increased significantly the number of software releases. Historically, the teams had to obtain multiple levels of authorization prior to a release but this level of governance and control was contradictory to the principle of team empowerment at the core of agile approaches. The model is inspired from the theme of a pilot’s ability to fly an aircraft using five levels. The level is determined based on team fly-ability and elevation safety described in detail in this paper. Team fly-ability includes two elements: (1) maturity of engineering practices and (2) the ability to manage traceability and risk through ease of recovery. Elevation Safety is based on two components: (1) historical data on deployment performance and severity of incidents and (2) the application dynamics and criticality. The main benefits of this program are improved accountability of teams, reduced approval time, and reduced attempts to find workarounds and loopholes.