Does LeSS really descale?
Feeding LeSS Huge to dream.ai. My copyright!

Does LeSS really descale?

A while back I put up a short post on the descaling metrics where I scored XSCALE vs SAFe. SAFe scored DDD 6, MMM 150 and LLL 3 months. XSCALE scored DDD 1, MMM 6 and LLL 20 minutes. Which seems pretty stark. But lately LeSS's originators have banged on about that word "descaling" so that begs the question ...

Of course it's not fair to be so generous to XSCALE. It only gets its LLL down to 20 minutes in the artificial Game Without Thrones. In the real world, one week is much more realistic. Front line XpOps teams might have an LLL of 1 day ...

Also there's no reason we can't use XSCALE to descale SAFe and get those numbers on it too. We'd have to put YAGNI back into SAFe's bastardized XP process to do so which might not actually be ... well ... trigger warning on this SAFe exam question ...

Lateral Learning Latency

If you've got just eight teams, you could do LeSS Mini but as we're talking about descaling, we're talking about organizations larger than that.

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So LeSS descaling must mean the big bowling alley, LeSS Huge. It's for organizations of up to 2,000 people I read. Or is it 6,000? I asked dream.ai to put 6,000 people into this diagram and that's what generated the pretty picture up top.

I hasten to add I'm not LeSS certified so don't take my word on this. Maybe Baz and Craig will kindly turn up in comments below and correct my dumb assumptions here. Straighten me, guys, because I'm ready.

Until then, it seems to me that LeSS basically renames Program Manager "Product Owner" and the Project Managers "Area Product Owner" and squishes PMO meetings ... cough Product Owner Team cough ... into a Sprint cycle co-ordinated with its Feature teams. That's a lot more descaling than what most large transformations have going so big ups from me. Still, since Scrum lets us have 4 weeks Sprints, I guess LeSS gets LLL = 4 weeks.

Doer-Decider Distance

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Let's see ... Head down to Site Product Owner down to Area Product Owner down to Scrum Master down to Team Member ...

I know SM is supposed to be a servant leader and APO is supposed to have equal power with each feature team and ... look, we all know how hierarchies work and who gets paid the big bucks. A bunch of certs for renaming roles doesn't change any of that. Probably wouldn't be marketable if it did. So we can score DDD = 4. Really that's being charitable because, assuming they keep doing their powers-of-8 command and control hierarchy per the bowling alley, a LeSS Huge of 6,000 people would actually need another level. But, hey, let's stick with what Baz and Craig wrote, shall we?

Maximum Meeting Members

This seems to be the vaguest number in LeSS. I don't see where LeSS tells us how many feature team representatives should show up at a PI Planning ... cough Overall Product Backlog Review cough ... nor at one of its Open Space CoPs. I think it's fair to assume that in a 6,000 person org the Head of Product is still going to have some kind of face to face with APOs, but maybe it doesn't make sense to put ... let's see, 6,000 divided by 24 as someone can SM 3 teams ... 250 Scrum Masters in a room?

I'm going to assume the biggest meetings in LeSS Huge only span two levels of the powers-of-8 LeSS hierarchy. This sucks because we get all kinds of learning-flow friction when you have lots of middlemen and artefacts to report who decided what about which. And then that they would have to overlap these in a staggered cadence to fit the Sprint cycle ... somehow. With some hand-waving that might get LeSS down to MMM = 64. I think this is going to have to do until Baz and Craig show up to set me straight!

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In the meanwhile everyone will want to see the numbers for SAFe, LeSS and XSCALE in a table and to make a table less scary to agile folks it has to have squiggly lines drawn on post-it notes. Since it's painful to do that on LinkedIn I asked dream.ai to do it for me. I think it did a great job, don't you?

Marcelo Lopez, AKT, CST ...

Product Delivery Coach and Trainer | Chief Product Owner | IT & Organizational Improvement and Growth | Certifed Scrum and Kanban Trainer | Product Discovery & Delivery at Scale | Finance (CapEx/OpEx) and Risk Management

2 年

Iain, Elisabeth ....always two there are. In this case....3...

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Peter Merel, I liked the terms LLL, DDD, and MMM, but this assessment is pretty linear. Say your org is very flat, you deliver every 10 minutes, and your 'max meeting members' is a small number. Still, just by linearly addressing some structural problems, you can not claim that you're more or less agile. Scrum is disruptive and designed to break rules, and not to be warped to fit them. It’s designed to find out what doesn’t help in a system and experiment within a system. Scrum allows you to de-scale your organization with complete customer-centricity. The best evidence is in all descaled orgs, scrum (or something like scrum) naturally fits there. What I like in LeSS is an emphasis on local plus global optimization, which other frameworks pay lip service to. While systems thinking may help you descale (the need to work as a team by including stakeholders across the entire affected system before taking action), LeSS Huge tends to go in the opposite direction. LeSS Huge won't be as disruptive as scrum, and won't be a natural fit in a descaled org. In other words, LeSS essentially scales an organization and does not help much with descaling.

Peter Merel

Founder XSCALE Alliance. Author "the agile way".

2 年

Gene G., here's a fresh thread to discuss whether the DDD, LLL and MMM numbers for LeSS Huge in this article are reasonable or not. Or whether they're just not good metrics at all - consider the floor open!

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Gene G.

??Certified LeSS Coach & Trainer (CLC- CLT)| ??Certified Enterprise Coach Emeritus (CEC-Em)| ??Business Agility and Resilience Consultant

2 年

Peter, Thanks for mentioning and I am flattered that my short comment inspired you to write the whole post. I recall our exchanges back in 2019, when you were very eager to use LeSS NYC to promote your product.?I recall some local folks (USA), reaching out on your behalf, asking, if our LeSS events could be used to talk about your ideas.? It was all fair - using existing groups to promote new ideas is a great approach for sales/marketing. But I must say that the way you have expressed yourself about LeSS back then and now (e.g. your post) are very different.? About your post:?In a number of places, where you write "I assume", "it seems"... well, it seems that your understanding of LeSS on those topics is different from intended meaning. Also, you don't have to be 'LeSS certified' to truly understand LeSS.?? May I genuinely to take the class, to clarify your assumptions? You may do so in NYC, in November. You wanted to come to NYC all along. I wish to end on a humorous note, since I appreciate a good humor:?your DDDs, MMMs and LLLs - are really eye-catchy (just like some other examples of three-letter acronyms we may know ;) ), so a good job there.? Be well and good luck. Gene

LeSS!!!! First of all they talk about the inverted hierarchy. Secondly, the fact that they have an organizational backlog. Third, the way they define the manager’s role which to me is making managers heroes of the Agile journey because they remove organizational barriers. These approaches can improve any Agile transformation. Let’s talk about a SAFe implementation. They could be baked into the communities of practice and LACE. The organizational backlog could be baked into ROAM, LACE, and Inspect and Adapt cycles. Business objectives can include these. When I have had the runway to address these organizational barriers, they improved flow, value, and quality across multiple teams at once and leaders where the heroes in the journey. There was even an impact to psychological safety. Talented staff want to be heard and want to have time to do value-add work. They want time to innovate. If you want to create loyalty, removing obstacles is the most authentic way leaders show that they are listening.

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