Adoption

The issues to take into account when adopting LeSS are:

Many people—LeSS adoption involves big organizations and lots of minds with deeply rooted assumptions in them about how organizations should work. Successful adoption requires breaking assumptions and changing structure, with all the explosive politics and “loss of face” that entails across a big group. Adoption needs everyone to improve towards a shared goal.

Continuous improvement towards perfection—Naturally, a group adopting LeSS brings to the table their assumptions and habits about adoption. Those are? Create a change vision and kick off many change projects. When the original goal is apparently achieved then:

1. “the change is done”, and
2. the organization settles into a new status quo, until
3. the next change effort surfaces, and then
4. undoes the previous change.

This classic approach is like the sequential and “big batch” approach of software development where change is an exception strictly managed… by many change-control boards.

In LeSS adoptions, there is no change initiative, no change group, no change managers. In LeSS, change is continuous through experimentation and improvement and change is the status quo.