LeSS

Software Product Development

LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) aims to simplify the product development organization, even radically.

It provides an elegant process for organizational units with seven or fewer teams, optimizing teamwork, learning, and business value creation. This is the starting point for adaptive improvement.

For the larger organization, LeSS provides several hundred reality-tested organizational design patterns with a recommendation to try or avoid.

Inquire about Certified LeSS Practitioner training

Design for collaboration

Our 25-year experience of Agile movement crystallizes to
1) Competent and empowered front-line teams
2) Iterative work with fast feedback from reality.

Lean is optimizing the system using flow and continuous learning.

Surprisingly few organizations reach these and the expected benefits.

Why? The fragmented or superficial organizational design leads to bureaucracy instead.

Learn to see what works for you, using our library of thinking tools and organizational patterns. See some examples below.

Examples of our thinking

These topics are often referenced and not easy to find elsewhere.

Coordination Chaos

Every organization declines to Coordination Chaos unless the leaders know what to do. Without wise use of power, the organization will take the broad path of short-term optimization.

Read how management thinkers like Gary Hamel , Allen Ward, Konosuke Matsushita, Clausewitz and von Moltke, Joseph Tainter, and Chris Argyris have all explain the same pattern from different perspectives.

Popular 4 minute explanation video.

The death of NOKIA Mobile Phones

Nokia Mobile Phones fell from 40 BN revenue and 9 BN profit to zero in five years. A warning story for fast-growing companies.

A careful study by INSEAD and Aalto University claims that the root cause was management by fear. A concrete business reason was the reluctance to challenge the cash cow product internally.

Our intimate experience suggests that the missing competence to lead software product development led to deep Coordination Chaos. It reduced productivity and intensified both abovementioned patterns, causing the final failure to produce a working product.

The cultural story of NOKIA Mobile Phones.

Dreaming - Thinking -Doing

Dreaming-thinking-doing is the fundamental development and learning process, giving the helicopter view and context for designing the details. It

  • Explains fetching coffee, building my new house, or creating a new car
  • Provides a base for mapping Agile and product design practices
  • Provides a collaboration-friendly thinking compared to "requirement management"
  • Is easy to draw and understand
  • Sticks fast in the vocabulary

Elaboration and interview video

Bureaucracy versus Teamwork

William G. Ouchi identified three control mechanisms in organizations:
1) Market system, make a deal, choosing the best option;
2) Bureaucratic system, an organizational machine; and
3) Clan system, in practice Teamwork.

Bureaucracy is like a machine that efficiently produces the same results in stable conditions.

For novel, ambiguous, and interdependent work, only Clan control (Teamwork) succeeds. This concerns service, product development, organizational change, and of course top management's challenges.

So Teamwork is the only antidote for bureaucracy. Unfortunately in case of failure, organizations usually increase bureaucracy.

Path from Bureaucracy to Teamwork

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