03.12.2024 | Warsaw

Unveiling LeSS:
Scaling Agile for Simplicity and Success

Join us at the Talk LeSS conference to delve into Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), an agile framework designed to bring simplicity, flexibility, and efficiency to the world of scaled Agile development. LeSS provides practical strategies for larger organizations to foster collaboration, and deliver value at scale.

Discover streamlined Agile approaches at our conference to boost organizational agility. Learn to simplify complexity in large-scale product development and enhance team empowerment. Gain insights from successful case studies on the LeSS framework, and leave with effective strategies for better performance and quicker market delivery. This essential event is your key to driving real change in Agile implementation at scale.

Learn from experts:

Gain practical insights through case studies, workshops, and keynotes.

Network:

Connect with Agile and LeSS professionals from diverse industries.

Ask the experts:

Get personalized guidance and advice from LeSS coaches.

Explore real-world examples:

See how LeSS enhances agility and reduces complexity.

Our Speakers & Trainers

Bas Vodde

Co-creator of LeSS

Dragan Stepanović

Sr. Principal Engineer

Błażej Drobniuch

Agile Trainer

Jaga Biernacka-Urban

Social Psychologist

Paweł Urban

Staff Engineer

Adam Piekarczyk

Adaptiveness enthusiast

Roland Flemm

Org consultant, PST

Alexey Krivitsky

Org consultant, CST

Oskar Szewczyk

Software Engineer

Aga Szostek

Strategy and leadership expert

Łukasz Szostek

Consulting Value Aficionado

Agenda

9:00-9:45

Registration

9:45-10:00

Opening

10:00-11:00

Creating Elevated Organizations with Org Topologies

Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm

Talk Description

Many organizations have already adopted “agile ways of working ” and are wondering what’s next. In most cases, these adoptions have brought only partial success, as they were mainly aimed at the team level in most companies.

What limits organizations from gaining the promised benefits?
What is there else to try?
What can be the target state to aim for?

This talk will briefly introduce the concept of Org Topologies, focusing on mapping current organizational design that provides radical transparency of the status quo.

For the Org Topologies assessment, we will consider popular “scaling methods” such as SAFe and Spotify. That would set the stage for understanding the “First Wave of Agile” – a concept Org Topologies introduced to separate two kinds of agile adoptions.

Then, we will discuss the concept of “Elevated Organizations.”

What separates traditional ones from the elevated ones?
What are the paradigm shifts that need to be bridged?
Which benefits does it bring?

We will consider practices borrowed from LeSS and FaST methods to demonstrate the difference between traditional and elevated organizations.

Join Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm to explore these complex questions and get insights on Strategic Agility for your organization.

11:00-11:20

Break

11:20-13:00

Workshop I:
The Big Five. What psychological elements are important for an effective team?

Jaga Biernacka-Urban & Paweł Urban

Workshop Description

The research has identified five elements that need to be addressed to create a high-performing team:

team leadership,
mutual performance monitoring,
backup behavior,
adaptability,
team orientation.

In addition, there are three coordination mechanisms: shared mental models, closed-loop communication and mutual trust. During the workshop, we will explain these eight concepts and show how to work with them in practice. We will show the perspectives of a Staff Engineer and a Scrum Master. The workshop consists of a short theoretical introduction followed by practical exercises. As a result, we will create a plan for working with a team described in a case study.

11:20-13:00

Workshop II:
Organizational design principles for scaling and a summary of their impact.

Bas Vodde

Workshop Description

Adaptive organizations are optimized to maximize value delivery and the ability to respond to changes in its environment, as opposed to efficiency and predictability. This has been the goal of the agile development movement. Unfortunately agile often ends up in organizations as a shallow process change without having a big impact. Agile processes do have it’s place but in order to achieve adaptiveness organizations have to create simpler organizational structures.

This session will go over the seven organizational design principles to create simpler organization. Some examples will be shared for each principle usually taken from the LeSS organizational design system. The outcome of this session is an insight in the reasoning behind LeSS or an inspiration to make your organization simpler and more adaptive.

11:20-13:00

Workshop III:
Umami – building an experience strategy.

Aga Szostek

Workshop Description

A unique experience can be a key strategic differentiator if you want to stand out in the marketplace.

I take that back.

It should become a key component of your strategy.

Internal research from one of my clients, a large financial organization, shows that emotional experience is responsible for up to 40% of Net Promoter Score (NPS). In this workshop, I invite you to dive into the “Umami” approach to defining an experience strategy that will make your customers really like you, and maybe even love you. We won’t be able to do everything, but I hope to show you some key elements that will help you develop such strategy.

11:20-13:00

Workshop IV:
Value-based Decisions: Applying LeSS Principles to Product Backlog Management.

Lukasz Szostek

Workshop Description

Important note: you will reap the maximum value from this workshop if you prepare a little in advance. You’ll find details at the end of this description.

Have you noticed how most of Agile frameworks focus on the delivery of whatever someone else put into the Backlog? They usually have some wording about business or customer or user value of Backlog Items but nothing really specific. I think it is time to change that.
During this workshop we will hold your Backlog to the same standards you hold your development process. We will bring transparency, system(atic) thinking, empirical process control… You know what? Let’s see how many LeSS Principles we can fulfill (or surpass!) when we treat “what we do” with similar discipline as “how we do whatever we do”.

Preparation:
You will benefit the most from this workshop if you work on your own Backlog. It could be a backlog for your product, your team or your personal one, anything meaningful to you will help. If you are not close to a product (as a Scrum Master, an Agile Coach, a Leader or a Manager) a prioritized list of the actions you want to do with your team or organization will work just fine.

Working on an “artificial” or someone else’s Backlog will work to some extent. You will get the “tooling” working but you will probably miss the oh-so-deep epiphany when your intuition will meet a somewhat more structured approach.

13:00-14:00

Lunch

14:00-14:30

From Conway’s Law to Cognitive Load: Rethinking Organizational Agility

Błażej Drobniuch

Talk Description

We will dive into some ideas that have been trending in top management circles recently, which actually hinder organizational agility. We will explore, in a thought-provoking way, why these ideas might not be as great as they seem and how to challenge them with solid arguments.
Topics we will explore include:

Conway’s Law
Cognitive Load
Code Ownership
“Having to fix someone else’s shitty code at 2 am!”
The Flow

In this talk, Blazej will challenge the recently trending approach to designing organizations while engaging the audience interactively. Learn what better organizational design patterns you can use to improve your company’s agility in the era of rapid introduction of GenAI tools for software developers. Get ready for an exciting exchange of ideas and insights!

14:30-15:00

A journey with adaptiveness in a heavily regulated, legacy environment – SoftNet Case Study

Adam Piekarczyk & Oskar Szewczyk

Talk Description

Siloed, hierarchical structure, 35 years of developing a single product, and a heavily regulated environment in one place — what a nightmare? We saw it as a challenge!

We will tell you a story about an amazing journey of overcoming obscure obstacles and guiding the organization to change its mindset.

We will discuss the following:

How did we start?
How do we use kaizen, and why have we decided it is no longer enough?
How did change agents gain a lot of influence?
How did we carry out radical (or maybe not?) changes?
What are we going to do next?

15:00-15:20

Break

15:20-15:50

Async Code Reviews Are Choking Your Company’s Throughput

Dragan Stepanović

Talk Description

“Never had a huge Pull Request that didn’t look good to me”.

We’ve all been there. A PR is so big you don’t even bother properly reviewing. It’s already too late to build the quality in, so you make a sad face, comment “Looks good to me”, and click approve. That’s still the case in lots of teams, but after a long time our industry, on average, learned the value of small batches idea from Lean applied to PRs. And that’s a step in the right direction. We do a bit of coding, raise a PR and then ask for feedback. People are more likely to engage on smaller PRs, it takes them less time to review, and they feel that they can course-correct if something goes astray. PRs go sooner out of the door, and we feel productive as a team.

But, here’s the surprise. What if I told you that teams doing small PRs (with async code reviews) actually have way lower throughput than teams doing big PRs. “Wait, what?!” Yes.

I got this surprising systemic insight from analyzing more than 40,000 PRs, and in this talk, I’ll present you with the results of that study. On the bigger PRs side of the spectrum, we tend to lose quality, while on the smaller PRs end of the spectrum we lose throughput. We’re forced to make a trade-off.

But! There’s a parallel universe of ways of working where you get to have a cake and eat it too. Where you can have both throughput and quality. That universe is called co-creation patterns (Pair and Mob programming).

Join me on a journey where I’ll show you the data invalidating the assumption that two or more people working on the same thing, at the same time will hurt a team’s throughput, and why the opposite is actually the case.

15:50-16:20

Empowering teams through collective knowledge acquisition. Let’s explore the strategies for effective learning.

Jaga Biernacka-Urban & Paweł Urban

Talk Description

Most time spent in the software development process is spent to understand exactly what and why we need to develop (or fix if we got it wrong). therefore knowledge acquisition and sharing is one of the most important assets a high-performing team may have.

This talk addresses key aspects:

How deep (or shallow) should team members share the knowledge?
Is it more effective to learn from others?
Why do people avoid sharing knowledge?
Why are mental models so important?
What is transactive memory?

During the presentation we will discuss how you can work in a structured way to improve your team’s learning and sharing culture. All this from two complementary perspectives – a developer who happens to act as a Staff Engineer and a Scrum Master.

16:20-16:40

Break

16:40-17:40

How to do a LeSS adoption

Bas Vodde

Talk Description

While LeSS is not hard to understand, it is counterintuitive for organizations. It usually requires structural changes of which the importance is often underestimated. After many many LeSS adoptions, we know what changes and decisions need to be made in your adoption. Not making these changes will lead to predictable problems.

A typical LeSS adoption requires a preparation phase in which certain decisions need to be made. Following that the change is made which is also referred to as the flip. The change is only the beginning and the first six months will require gradual improvement.

This talk describes a typical LeSS adoption. It will cover: