LeSS Newsletter - July 2018

LeSS Conference New York

Two more months! We're so looking forward to it. The next LeSS Conference. The program is now mostly finalised and I'd like to share with you some of the session that will be there.

The first track is the experience track. This is usually my personal favourite as there is almost no better learning than listening to other people adopting LeSS. At the moment, we have 6 case studies. The one I (Bas) am most excited about is the Nokia Networks LTE Basestation case study. I'll be doing that together with Tero Peltola who is the former head of development of the product. I've worked with Tero for years and looking forward hearing him talk about the 8-year long LeSS adoption at Nokia Networks. Also Craig has been busy the last years and he will be presenting the second huge LeSS adoption at BMW autonomous driving together with Konstantin Ribel. Angela Johnson will be sharing her experience from a company building agricultural manufacturing equipment and Gordon Weir will share experience of multiple LeSS Huge adoptions. The last two case studies are from Russia with one from a telecom operator and one from a bank.

The experiment track is meant for sharing concrete ideas that people can use in their LeSS adoption. I'm looking forward to the session on technical practices in LeSS by Anton Bevzyuk and learning more about LeSS together with Management 3.0. It is always a pleasure hearing Ellen Gottesdiener speak. This time she will talk about What is our product. I've not heard that talk yet and looking forward to it. Nils Bernert will be presenting about multi-team Product Backlog Refinement and hope to steal some new tricks from his talk. Last but not least, Ari Tikka and Gene Gendal will be talking about avoiding pitfalls when coaching LeSS adoptions.

Games are an excellent way of learning new ideas and the Games track is full with games to learn more about LeSS. This year we'll have at least four sessions from building structures with Lego to doing test-driven development on a flipchart. The Snippets track will have several LeSS trainers present a snippet of their course and an opportunity for discussing feedback related to that. Of course, we'll also have Open Space going on.

Craig will also do a keynote this year. His title is "Blind Spots: Cognitive Biases and Systems." He doesn't want to tell us anything more about that.

Even though we have a lot of tracks and sessions, we will keep the conference small this year. We've enjoyed smaller conferences in the past. If you want to come, you probably want to make sure you register in time otherwise there is a risk that we do not accept additional people.

LeSS case study - Huawei

We're excited about the new case study of Huawei written by Lv Yi. Lv Yi has been involved in LeSS adoptions for a very long time but never wrote a case study about one. Some quick introduction to the case study.

This experience report is from two development groups of Huawei in Hangzhou, China during 2015-2016. Lv Yi worked as a consultant to help their large-scale agile adoption. The two groups represented cases of different sizes, as cases of LeSS and LeSS Huge respectively.

The product groups applied LeSS organizational design elements for large-scale agile adoptions without first introducing Scrum in teams. This is what the title “LeSS without Scrum” tries to describe. It illustrates an organization-first approach, in contrast to the more common bottom-up team-first approach seen in what is arguably a somewhat naive approach to adoption in large-scale domains. The proper organizational design provides the solid foundation for the further coaching and amplifies its effectiveness.

Learning Resources

• Descaling organizations using LeSS Large Scale Scrum - Ran Nyman - Moscow Agile Days 2018
• Eliminate Dependencies, Don't Manage Them - Ilia Pavlichenko
• Lessons learned from rolling out feature teams- Maarten Dalmijn
• The Story of LeSS - Bas Vodde - Agile Middle East
• Scaling Agile at Zalando - Samir Hanna
• Centralized vs Decentralized Coaching - Gene Gendel
• Dysfunctional Product Owner Patterns - Ram Srinivasan
• Chapter: Getting Folks in the World of Agility to Lead by Example in book "Pivot: Real Cut Through Stories by Experts at the Frontline of Agility and Transformation" - John Coleman (proceeds go to cancer charity)
• Agile has crossed the Chasm. What Does it Mean for Agile Coaches? - Tomasz Wykowski

LeSS Trainer

Last weeks, we have a new LeSS Trainer from China: Lv Yi. He has been involved in the very early LeSS adoptions and is writing a book on systems modelling. Exciting. More about Lv Yi:

I am Yi Lv, living in Hangzhou, China. Lv, my surname, is probably hard to pronounce, as in fact, the correct Pinyin is Lü. So, pronounce as Lü and write as Lv:).

From late 2005, while working in Nokia Networks, I started to get acquainted with agile software development, in particular, Scrum. That turned out to be my first experience of LeSS adoption. Bas and Craig were both much involved in it, and I had learned greatly from them. I led a department inside that product organization and focused on developing teams and Scrum Masters to create sustainability. During the year of 2008, I also became the first Certified Scrum Trainer from China. I left Nokia Networks in late 2010 and joined Odd-e till now.

As a coach at Odd-e, I also worked in other industries such as Internet companies. My focus has been on large-scale product development, especially helping organizations benefit from LeSS and/or its adoption. One of those experiences has been documented as a LeSS case study, Huawei - LeSS without Scrum.

I have been learning and practicing systems thinking since 2009, after attending a workshop by Jean Tabaka and Bill Wake in Agile 2009 conference. Over the past couple of years, I wrote a series of blogs to help see system dynamics in organizational design and change. In China, I also initiated a great community group working together to “bring systems thinking to more people” since a year ago.

Why promoting systems thinking as a LeSS trainer and coach? I explained this in my view of LeSS. In short, I believe that LeSS opens up the stairway to a learning organization in the field of product development. I welcome you to be part of it.