How a global leadership advisory firm improved release velocity, engineering productivity, and delivery predictability through SAFe implementation
The Current Scenario
A premier global executive search and leadership advisory firm relies on an ecosystem of interconnected digital products to run structured assessments, analyze workforce data, and drive data-backed hiring and promotion decisions. As these products grew more interdependent, coordination became the constraint on growth, adding cost and risk at exactly the moment demand was rising.
Leadership set a clear direction: the firm needed a synchronized operating model that could scale delivery across teams without a proportional increase in cost, coordination, or risk.
Common Challenges Included
- Inter-team dependencies that delayed releases and extended time to market
- Inconsistent methodologies across squads that produced fragmented outputs
- Rising costs as scaling added resources, complexity, and rework
- Heavy manual intervention that diverted effort from client-facing innovation
- Limited visibility into work-in-progress across teams
Establishing a Connected Operating Model Through Scaled Agile Framework Implementation
Harbinger partnered with the firm to implement the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and modernize the platform architecture beneath it. Rather than treating agile as a set of team rituals, Harbinger applied SAFe as a connected operating model that standardized how work was planned, tracked, and released across every product in the ecosystem.
The model was delivered across five reinforcing pillars, giving leadership a single, traceable way of working from ideation to release:
- Unified Way of Working
- Connected Product Ecosystem
- Coordinated Delivery at Scale
- AI-Embedded Engineering
- Continuous Expansion
Business Impact of a Connected Delivery Model
The transformation shifted delivery from a coordination bottleneck into a scalable capability:
Key outcomes included:
- Report turnaround reduced from several days to near real-time generation
- Delivery team scaled from 8 to 70 members to meet global demand without losing efficiency
- Regression testing time reduced by 40%
- Feature completion predictability increased by 16%
- Defect leakage reduced by 22%
- Production incidents reduced by 40%
Ready to improve software delivery with SAFe implementation?
Download the case study to see how Harbinger implemented a scalable SAFe operating model, reduced delivery risk, and improved engineering productivity across a complex enterprise product ecosystem.
