My 2018 LeSS Conference

by Anya Faingersh
17 October 2018

I enjoyed learning from Real people with Real solutions to problems many organizations try to solve(strikeout) avoid.

I wish I made it to parallel sessions too 👥😅, here is

day1:

Nokia’s journey

Manager’s view on failures and breakthroughs.Tero Peltola Bas Vodde did the impossible to summarize it in an hour, Thank you! There are no short cuts, always balance out long vs short terms, start with what’s possible.

Link to the session and download materials

Self-designing Teams

Alexey Krivitsky took us through one of the most critical exercises to success. Emerson Mills thx for sharing with me your experience. Thank you both! Define product to be delivered, not preassigned roles/people; personal choice of the team is best motivator.

Link to the session

Effective coaching and common pitfalls

True coaching, secrets for making it sustainable->decentralize(!), along with anti-patterns very practical “how to”. Thank you Ari Tikka Gene Gendel!

Link to the session and download materials

LeSS Huge in BMW

Nothing speaks louder than benefits of transformation being presented by the Firm itself.Bravo Konstantin Ribel!

Link to the session and download materials

Discussion panel

Viktor Grgic Jürgen De Smet Venkatesh Krishnamurthy Mark Bregenzer Ran Nyman Craig Larman Cesario Ramos Bas Vodde Greg Hutchings Karim Harbott THANK YOU for making Thinking fashionable again! Loooking forward to Day2😉💪🏻👉🏻

Day2💪🏻😊:

🎯Enlightening talk how much we truly control our own decision making process. Thank you Mr Craig Larman!

It takes deep understanding of human mind and system behaviour to successfully lead transformation. IMBO what I took away, what I think, or at least I think that’s what I think;) What tools we have to train mental stamina? What to change knowing blind spots? How we work in the fog of biases? How do we make change for better? How do we eliminate suffer in the way we work?…

Link to the session and download materials

Building Agile Structure

Experience impact of different structures in a fun way, while building common understanding across the board Thank you Justyna Wykowska and Tomasz Wykowski!

Link to the session and download materials

Innovation Games

Learnt from the expert approach to sequencing games, its underlying purpose and best ways to leverage it, which comes only with years hands on experience. Greg Hutchings Thank you!

Link to the session

Sustainable changes in large organizations

3 huge transformations. Merrill Lynch, UBS. Gordon Weir huge shout out! It’s close to impossible, but it’s doable. My favourite🗝Team=Product, if you get that, you get it all.

Link to the session

Last, but not the least, beers, laughs and thought provoking conversations! Looking forward to hashtag#LeSS2019!

by ILLIA Pavlichenko
22 July 2018

If you worked in large organizations you have probably heard about the term “dependencies”. I am convinced that dependencies need to be eliminated, not managed. With a help of system diagrams in this article, I will uncover the main reasons why Scrum Teams suffer from dependencies, how they impact organizational agility, and what the fundamental solutions to this issue are.

How dependences inhibit Teams progress

The more dependencies, the less chances the feature will be done by the end of the Sprint. Thus, the more time it takes for the feature on average to go from Product Backlog queue to the market (cycle time). As a result, agility is reduced because the organization is unable to deliver potential value to the market quickly. This causes organizational stress.

A typical management response to organizational stress is “divide and conquer”. For instance, if there is a problem with the quality, let’s create a separate department “quality control” with set of its own KPIs. Creating new functions, units, component teams and coordination roles, managers strengthen the fragmentation of the organization. More fragmentation leads to even more dependencies.

Fragmentation Leads to More Dependencies

High average cycle time makes the organization less agile. But Scrum Teams should not have any dependencies!

Cross-functional teams have all competencies needed to accomplish work independently from ones not part of the team. The team model in Scrum is designed to optimize flexibility, creativity, and productivity. – Scrum Guide 2017

Why do dependencies exist

Basing on my long experience working with large organizations I see some reasons why the dependencies thrive:

Imperfect organizational design based on component teams ( “bus team”, “analytics team”, “Android Team”, “integration team”). It causes intensive fragmentation.
Incomplete cross-functionality (lack of one or more skills).
Unreasonably complicated architectural design ( “there are 256 systems in our organization)”, which inhibits creation of cross-component and cross-functional Scrum Teams.

How to get rid of dependences

The dependencies issue could be solved in two ways: with quick fixes or fundamental long-term solutions.

The quick fix is to visualize and manage the dependencies. E.g. creating additional coordination roles or using specific techniques (“ropes on the boards”). Yes, it somehow helps to survive and continue the movement. You become an artist of the visualization and dependency management. Your work looks like this:

The fundamental solution is to completely eliminate the root of the problem by:

training people
making the complicated architecture simpler, reducing the number of components
changing organizational design and forming cross-component cross-functional Scrum Teams (Feature Teams)

In this case the board for the scaled Scrum could look much better (no dependencies):

Feature Teams do not need the strings because there are no dependencies or they are trivial.

Let’s get back to the system diagramming. On one hand, we have a cycle explaining the rise of dependencies, on the other hand it is a quick fix of the problem, then a fundamental solution cycle and the final cycle of forming a culture of managing dependencies when time passes.

The bad news is that a strong culture of “managing dependencies” will hinder the implementation of the fundamental solutions.

Ideas:

The more dependencies the less agile organization becomes.
Dependencies thrive because of the unnecessarily complex architecture, lack of skills, and suboptimal organizational design (component teams).
Creating additional roles and using dependencies management practices do not eliminate the fundamental issues.
Fundamental solutions are simplification of the architecture, Feature Teams and training people.

Do you manage dependences or want to eliminate them?

Scrum ON!

by Bas Vodde
3 October 2017

Open Space

In one of the previous blog posts I explained the team-based conference and in another post the Conference Review Bazaar. During the conference we had an Open Space running in parallel with the conference and the Open Space information is collected in this post.

What is an Open Space?

Open Space is a large-group facilitation technique based on self-organization (there is more to it, but for now this description will do). It roughly consists of the “opening of the space” where anyone in the group can propose topics that they would like to talk more about. They post their topic in a timeslot and location so that people who would like to come know where to go. After the opening of the space, everyone can join any session they like… or do something else.

In a LeSS adoption, having a regular Open Space event is common for creating a forum for team members to raise topics for discussion and organize around them. I usually recommend to do it bi-weekly and fairly informal, combine it with a coffee and cake session.

Open Space is a common technique to use in conferences too. Some conferences are only Open Space where the participants of the conference create the conference. Alternatively, some conferences have a separate Open Space track where people can post additional sessions next to the planned ones. That is what we did in the LeSS conference.

So, how did it go?

In my opinion, we didn’t do that well. The opening of the space didn’t go smooth as there was a separation from the conference space and the Open Space space. The Open Space explanation was short and could have had some references to how to use it in LeSS. There were few reminders about the Open Space, and we feel that the Open Space was not utilized as much as it could have been. In addition to that, some people feel the LeSS Conference should be an Open Space conference. I’m myself not sure, but it is an interesting thought to combine it with a team-based conference.

All that said, the Open Space track did happen and it did deliver value to the participants. I joined a few Open Space sessions myself and enjoyed them.

Sessions

As with the team creation and the Conference Review Bazaar, we didn’t collect all the photos yet (we were horrible at documenting the conference). This post will be the collection of Open Space sessions that we know of. If you were in an Open Space session and like to summarize it a bit more or have some photos, please let me know, and I’ll add them to this post.

LeSS for Hardware

System Optimization Goal of LeSS

Product Definition in Retail Banking

by Bas Vodde
2 October 2017

Conference Review Bazaar

In the previous blog post, I introduced the second iteration of the team-based conference concept, which ended with a Conference Review Bazaar. This post collects the output of the Bazaar.

How does it work?

At the end of the conference, the teams get together in their team space and they have an hour to create “a representation of their conference experience.” This could be absolutely everything such as a retrospective, a summary of what they’ve done, a game, a major learning, a website, a test, or a song (?!). My team struggled with finding a nice idea and ended up making a Scrum Master card game (Quartets). I guess we’ll need to productize in the future.

After the team creation time, Craig opened the Conference Review Bazaar, which is done the same way you can facilitate a Sprint Review Bazaar. Each team has some representative which presents their teams work, while the other team members walk around and visit the other teams to see their output. In this case, we added a game element to it where every person could vote for the ones they enjoyed most. This is not recommended on a true Sprint Review Bazaar, but in the Conference Review Bazaar it works well. The Black Ops team created a LeSS Karaoke and they were voted the most interesting product. Below we have a video of them singing the LeSS song.

Teams

We don’t have the output of all the teams yet, but will keep updating this post when people send us more photos. If you have a photo of your output and it isn’t here yet, please drop us a mail!

Black Ops

The LeSS song from the Black Ops Team #less2017 @less_works @jippit pic.twitter.com/MRDsXqV9ry
— Wolfgang Richter (@woof0815) September 14, 2017

The Super 8

NameLess

Lesson Learnt

by Bas Vodde
1 October 2017

Team-based Conference - Iteration 2

It is already two weeks ago now… the 2017 LeSS Conference in London. I’m still missing the discussion, my team, the wine, the people, the weather. Well… not the weather. It was wonderful, I enjoyed it thoroughly and hope and think the other people did too!

One thing I considered very successful this time was the team-based conference idea. This idea started in the previous 2016 Amsterdam conference. In that conference we experimented with this. The origin is in a discussion the organizing group had, which is that in LeSS we focus on teams… but most conferences are done individually. That felt like not following our own principles… so we thought about how we can make the conference experience more of a team experience. In Amsterdam we tried the first iteration, which was rough but good enough to keep trying. The second iteration was much better.

How does it work?

The essence is to make the conference experience a team experience where you learn together with your team, have a place to return to, people you got to know better, and can create a shared output.

The structure is like this:

In the beginning of the conference, we hold a self-designing team workshop so that the people can form their teams.
The teams find a space, which is their team space for the rest of the conference.
The team has a round of introductions where they share their expectations and create a name
After each session, there is team reflection time where the teams share the learning of their session or discuss about the session when they went to the same one.
Lunch is naturally also done within your team
Near the end of the conference, the team has one hour to create a “representation of their shared conference experience” together.
The conference ends with a Conference Review Bazaar where each team share their creations with the other teams

In this blog post, I’d like to share the teams that were creates, in a future post we’ll share the outcome from each of the teams.

The Teams

If you were in one of the team and want to share something about your team or experience, drop me an email and we’ll put it in this blog post which we’ll keep updating regularly.

If your team is missing, lemme know and I’ll add them.