LeSS Newsletter - June 2021

Happy new year 2021... Uh ?

Whoa. It has been almost a year since the last newsletter. We skipped the newsletter, which would have shared what happened at the Amsterdam LeSS Conference. We also skipped the newsletter, which would have contained the reflections on 2020.

So what happened? Well... I (Bas here) am usually the one who coordinates the newsletter and 2020 and beginning of 2021 have been crazy. In the middle of the COVID pandemic, we (my family and I) moved from Singapore to Amsterdam. The move and settling in took quite some time (and still does). Next to that, I saw the current COVID pandemic as an opportunity to get more experience working as a developer on a team where everyone is remote (work from home). So, since the end of last year, I've joined a really nice team and have been focused on developing, learning the product, getting to know the team, and trying to get better at being a team member in a work-from-home team. It is a lot of fun, I learned tons, and I can't wait to work co-located with my team members again! Anyways, with all the distractions, coordinating this newsletter had fallen between the cracks. Good news, I don't expect to move to a different continent again and I hope we won't get many more pandemics, so hopefully, we'll get back to the regular newsletters rhythm.

What has been happening? During 2020, there probably have been less LeSS adoptions as most companies had other priorities. Likewise, there was a lot less training and some are waiting for training to be done in person. Hopefully, 2021 will gradually bring back in-person interaction and travel (I can't remember not flying for this long!). I'm myself looking forward to in-person multi-team Product Backlog Refinements again, they can be so much fun. I'm also expecting to do my first in-person training again in a couple of weeks... wondering if I still remember how to do that. And I should be getting my vaccine within weeks and I urge everyone to get theirs as that will be needed for more casual in-person interaction (If you wonder about the history of vaccine hesitancy, someone shared this insightful video about that: Vaccines: A Measured Response). In conclusion, for 2021, there is hope.

Another thing that will happen in 2021 is the Prague LeSS Conference! It will be on 16-17 September. I am looking forward to that. If you want to talk, the submissions can be done here. The organizing group mentioned that they are especially interested in games and workshops. I hope to see some of you in Prague!

2020 LeSS Conference in Amsterdam

Believe it or not... but the 2020 LeSS Conference in Amsterdam happened! And it wasn't a virtual event. It was very different from the previous LeSS conferences. Much smaller, people at safe distances from each other, and no self-organizing teams. It was still a great conference though!

The conference lasted the usual two days. Most sessions were in person, but a few ended up being video streamed because new travel restrictions were put in place a couple of days before the conference. The self-designing teams and building a conference experience was replaced by an alternative reality game (ARG) named "World Without Hierarchy." This was a lot of fun and, hopefully, we can make and play more alternative reality games in the future. Many sessions were recorded and are available on the LeSS youtube channel. To make it easier, they are also listed below:

• Don’t postpone your team self-design in COVID-19 times, do it remotely! - Mark Uijen De Kleijn and Georgiy Zhytar
• Break the silos - Drive the impact. Transformational story of PandaDoc (video stream) - Evgeniy Labunskiy and Ilya Kazimirovskiy
• All organizations are rational – until you put people in - Magnus Vestin
• Yes, pensions business can be fun and iterative (video stream) - Stephane Goffinet and Tom Jans
• Learning Adaptiveness - Craig Larman
• From a MeSS to LeSS - Cesario Ramos
• Systems Thinking about Diversity - Viktor Grgic 
• Discussion Panel
• Lean IT - The 'Toyota's Secret' - Yves Callens

Thanks to all the participants for this event. It was great (and a bit of luck) that we did manage to continue with an in-person conference during this pandemic.

Learning Resources

Here are some new selected learning resources and experiences. There is more on the LeSS Youtube channel, and on the LeSS site articles and videos section.

Videos and webinars:

• Culture Change is Free - John Seddon (2009)
• The Making of Monkey Island
• Lean Island Conference - Panel - 2012
• Valtech LeSS Introduction
• Testing Minecraft in Minecraft with Henrik Kniberg - Agile with Jimmy
• Customer Proximity in LeSS with Viktor Grgic
• GetAgile #2 - Descaling Organization - Interview with Jurgen de Smet
• Growing Teaminess - Canvas for Self-Managing Teams - Dhaval Panchal
• Scaling Agile has Never Worked... and Never Will - Geoff Watts

Featured posts from the selected list of LeSS-friendly blogs:

• So what is organizational agility? - John Coleman
• Potentially Useful Things to Add to Scrum - Michael James
• How can one Product Owner be enough to work together with multiple teams? - Wolfgang Steffens
• Transformation Gone Wrong - Gene Gendel
• Teamwork, great collaboration and performance, is rare. Don't waste your effort in random team building before understanding the internal and external fundamentals. - Ari Tikka (going for the longest blog post title)

Articles

• Planning an Adoption with Scrum Patterns - Illia Pavlichenko
• Experiences with Large Scaled Scrum - Part 2 - Marcel Lipp
• Answer this Question: "What is Your Product?" - Ellen Gottesdiener
• Deriving the LeSS Framework - James Carpenter
• On Agile Methods - GeePaw Hill
• Organizational design models in the evolution of managerial thinking (part 1) - Alexey Krivitsky
• Systems Thinking, Episode #2: Complex Adaptive Systems
• How to transition from Component Team to Feature Team? - Anshul Kapoor
• Beware SAFe (the Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise), an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness