LeSS Newsletter - November 2024

Hello 👋

The world of LeSS keeps rocking further. The recent LeSS Conference in Tokyo, Japan, just concluded, attracting an amazing number of participants—the same as in Madrid! Many new conferences are still happening this year, all organized by passionate LeSS enthusiasts. 💪

LeSS communities continue to grow in new regions. I see an increasing amount of companies starting to discover how LeSS can help them kickstart and navigate the challenging changes needed to reach their organizational goals. Patience is virtue. 

To strengthen your learning journey, we have been busy in the background with two features, which we will enable to the community, in the coming months.

The first one is titled LeSSons, which are additional, often short, courses provided by Certified LeSS Trainers. They will enrich your LeSS jouney with practical experiences and knowledge, ready to apply to your situation. 

As for the second feature, we have started working on adding video content to the website, the videos will contain practical answers for the questions many of you have been discussing at the meetups, conferences and gatherings. The videos will be available for Certified LeSS users, and certain videos will be public. Recordings with Bas and Craig have started and other Certified LeSS Trainers will follow soon.

Inside this letter, you'll find inspiring words from Craig, the Scrum Guide LeSS version, and details about upcoming conferences—gear up to elevate your LeSS journey!

Keep it simple and experiment,

Bastiaan van Hamersveld
CEO at less.works

LeSS Conference Singapore about to start

The Singapore LeSS Conference, on November 4th, promises to be a pivotal event for organizations aiming to enhance their organizational design and embark on a learning journey toward adopting LeSS.

The conference begins with Craig Larman's keynote on "AI & HR: Evolving Organizations in an AI World," exploring the impact of artificial intelligence on organizational structures and human resources. Attendees will engage with sessions like Viktor Grgic's "Overwhelmed Teams and Cognitive Load," offering strategies to manage team capacities, and Sofia Pelzl's "How to Start With a Transformation," providing guidance on initiating effective organizational change.

Featuring real-world experiences from industry leaders, the event includes a compelling LeSS adoption case by Chokchai Phatharamalai and Jane Phongsak Ritpitakphong in "LeSS Example." Maya Kartika's session on "Fostering Growth and Self-Managing Teams: HR at Bank Jago" delves into creating environments that promote self-management and continuous improvement. The conference concludes with thought-provoking talks by Alexey Krivitsky on "Org Topologies: Elevating Organizations with Human and Artificial Intelligence" and Douglas O’Loughlin on "Flourishing at All Levels of the System," encouraging participants to rethink organizational design and embrace holistic development.

Check out https://singapore.less.works.

The LeSS Community in Singapore can be found here.

A word from Craig

At the wonderful Madrid LeSS conference this year, I shared thoughts on two topics:

1. As have each year since 2020, focussed on the coming impact of AI on HR and organizational design, and
2. The widespread misunderstanding of “Conway’s Law”.

Impact of AI on HR and organizational design: As is becoming increasingly evident, AIs can take on more and more routine knowledge-worker tasks, and they can help people learn new skills and assist them in their performance. The extrapolation of that makes it easier for a person to do more, and to do more different things... leading to more flexible broad job categories. Why would a person be titled just a “DB designer” if they can easily also learn and do -- and do skillfully -- programming, UI design, and other skills, with the aid of powerful AIs? This creates an influence for job redesign towards broader titles such as “Product Developer” with a career path and incentive system that rewards multi-learning over single-doing. And I make the claim that AIs will surpass human skill in most single specializations of routine knowledge and that the remaining (at least for the short term) value-add of human workers is their ability to learn and adapt on the spot; something still difficult for AIs. Is there any organizational system already designed for this? Yes, it is called LeSS.

The widespread misunderstanding of “Conway’s Law”: First, it isn’t a law, but let’s leave that aside. A very widespread misunderstanding and incorrect communicating about Conway’s Law is the false idea that it means it is a good idea to create a stable architecture of software components, and then attach teams to those. That is the creation of component teams around the architecture. It is easy to show that this is a widely communicated message of Conway’s Law, and yet... it seems no one is reading the actual conclusion at the end of his original paper because that is *not* his recommendation. Rather, Conway observes that it is a *constraint* or *weakness* when people organize around the architecture, because -- and this is his key point -- the current architecture *will* be “wrong” (or at least not ideal), and thus to organize and lock in team structures around current architecture creates an inflexible organization and inflexible architecture. Thus, he recommends against organizing around architecture, but on the other hand, creating a flexible organization that is not coupled to an architecture which should in fact evolve. Is there any organizational system already designed for this? Yes, it is called LeSS. 

Warm regards,
Craig

TalkLeSS Conference Warsaw (Poland)

Near the end of the year there is another episode of the Talk LeSS 2024 Conference in Warsaw, Poland! 3rd of December.
Dive deep into LeSS with:

• A keynote from Bas Vodde, co-creator of LeSS
• Practical introduction to Org Topologies from its founders, Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flem
• Real-world case studies on LeSS adoptions
• engineering, cooperation, and organizational structur
• Interactive workshops, and networking with other professionals.

If you are seeking to extend your learnig journey, this is a great opportunity. 

Secure your tickets: Talk LeSS Conference 2024

Looking forward to seeing you there!

LeSS Scrum Guide 2024

After lots of tweaking, Craig and me have published the first version of the Scrum Guide (LeSS Version). This is the version of Scrum that LeSS assumes within the LeSS rules.
This Scrum Guide van be found at: https://less.works/less/scrum-guide (and the PDF version too).
This update to the Scrum Guide has the Scrum Guide 2020 as a basis, yet some parts have been taken from the Scrum Guide 2017 instead. The larger changes are:

• Re-introduced product instead of “work for complex problem.”
• Removed the Scrum Team concept.
• Renamed Developers to Team.
• Removed Sprint out of Events and made it a separate thing.
• Renamed Product Goal to Product Vision.
• Removed “creating and communicating Product Backlog Items” from Backlog * Management in the Product Owner section.
• Removed Topic 1/2/3 terminology and just called it why/what/how.
• Added Product Backlog Refinement to the Scrum Events, yet mentioned that it can be done as an activity rather than an event.
• Removed the language of commitment to artifacts.
• Moved Sprint Goal in one place, inside Sprint Planning.
• Introduced Definition of Done, not as commitment but as an agreement.

With this change we hope to create a stable base and focus on the more interesting LeSS parts such as the organisational design system, adoption challenges, and different event structure.

Bas

Global LeSS 2024 Conference Madrid

The Global LeSS 2024 Conference in Madrid was a resounding success. Over two days, numerous individuals and companies actively participated and learned a great deal.

To get a feel for the vibrant atmosphere, visit the photo section here. The presentation slide decks from all the talks are available for download here. For those who missed the conference, the recorded videos will soon be accessible to Certified LeSS users and will be publicly available over the next four months.