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Bas Vodde: I’m Bas Vodde, the “accidental” creator of the large scale scrum or LeSS framework, and I’m spending most of my time building products, writing code, coaching, and giving trainings every now and then. And having a lot of fun doing that while trying to figure out weird organizational dynamics, cool technical problems, and contribute to open source every now and then. And that’s about it. Most of the rest of the time I like to spend with my family

Dhaval Panchal: Dhaval Panchal, based in Houston, I work with organizations for the transition to Agile. I prefer that they don’t have a choice of how to do it, but more interested in solving real problems that they’re facing. And I’m also a Scrum trainer so I do training for folks. I like motorcycles and if I’m not paying attention in a meeting I’m most likely dreaming about football or soccer. You can find me on twitter @DhavalPanchal

Lancer: I’ve a question for Bas. A vice president is looking for a scaling framework. He goes up to you and says, “Hey Bas, I hear you have a scaling framework. I’ve been looking at these other frameworks.” He goes through the list of them and then says, “So tell me, what is LeSS all about?”

Bas: I would be uncomfortable with that discussion to start with. Saying “we need a scaling framework” is the wrong starting point because he’s already assumed too much. So I might just tell him that LeSS is a way of scaling by creating a simpler organization or I would tell him that if he’s looking for scaling framework right now, then he can pick one of the others and come back when he would like to talk about the problems he has in the organization first. Then we’ll help him solve that particular problem. Just assuming that you know all the problems and then assuming the solution is a scaling framework would be an awkward starting point.

Lancer: Does it happen in real life?

Bas Vodde: Not very often. I guess it does happen, but because LeSS is such a seemingly simple way of working, that person will want to look for something complex and–

Dhaval Panchal: —complicated

Bas Vodde: —so they will not seriously look at LeSS and that’s okay. When I work with organizations, I like to help them to figure out their problems, and not necessarily hand them a solution. Like what Dhaval was saying earlier, they need to own the problem that they have. They shouldn’t look to buy the solution to that problem. What my partner Craig Larman likes to stress is that we don’t want them to rent a process. We need them to own the process. Right?

Because if you rent something, it’s not your’s and you don’t really care about it that much. For must people the difference between renting and owning a house is how much you care about it. The amount of care that you give to it is very different.

So therefore when you start off with the assumption of we need to buy in Agile scaling framework than it already starts off with the assumption of we don’t want to own it and we were going to rent something that we’re going to adopt. So it’s kind of the wrong starting point.

Dhaval Panchal: No company ever will get an award for being the most Agile Framework compliant company on the planet. Right? What you get rewarded for is solving the problems for the customers.

Bas: Maybe for one of the frameworks, that would be a good additional business model: the compliance assessment and the yearly compliance award. (laugh)

Dhaval Panchal: Yeah. Don’t get me started because the industry already has a lot of team level compliance–

Bas Vodde: Let’s not leak out that idea to them secretly. (laugh)

Dhaval Panchal: Yeah. (laugh). Organizations often confuse that because Lance was Agile and he got all the goodness so all I need to do is get what Lance got so therefore I will also get the goodness. It’s always the rich guy Ferrari problem. Because the rich guy has a Ferrari let me go get a Ferrari and then I’ll become rich. And it never works that way because there is a directional bias.

Lancer: That’s too bad though! You by a Ferrari and you don’t get rich?! (laugh)

Dhaval Panchal: No, you get really poor!

Lancer: How can a company manager know when they have a scaling problem?

Bas Vodde: When they have more than one team?

Lancer: (laughing) Well, that’s the easy answer.

Bas Vodde: Well you had so much trouble formulating the question, I guessed an easy answer should work. There’s a lot to learn from frameworks and things out there and I hope that people in organizations want to understand their problem and want to know how their problems have been solved in the past. It doesn’t really matter what scaling framework or brand or things they do. So an organization needs to constantly look in the industry at what is available. They need to constantly look internally about the real problems they have, and often not the reported problems because often it’s thought that “our problem is the teams are not productive enough,” but usually there’s more to it than that, and it often goes wrong when organizations start interpreting the surface problems without really understanding the real problems. Then they end up trying to find solutions for the wrong problems, complicating things more, creating new problems again. And again, without knowing where those came from, adding more complexity because adding to organizations tends to be easy without really deeply understanding what the dynamics are and what are the problems that they have.

Lancer: Where should people go to learn more about LeSS?

Bas Vodde: The main place for more about LeSS is the LeSS site, Less.Works. Most of the description of LeSS is there. You can look at it freely. There is a list of courses and events that you can join, a list of practitioners and trainers you could contact if you’d like. There are some discussion groups. So the training that you joined this day is the LeSS Practitioner Training, which I think is, I’m fairly biased, but I think it’s a good training to start. In September or October there is a LeSS Conference in New York. I don’t know the exact date.