Case Study – applying LeSS Kaikaku (Flip-Forward) events

A Kaikaku event is there to facilitate a serious system change to grow product development capabilities within an organization. One can go with Kaizen events and related incremental improvement until the limits of the system you apply them in, in order to improve further one will need to apply some kind of Kaikaku or choose […]

12 enemies of adaptability and what to do about it

Hierarchy Top-down, control based hierarchies discourage individual initiative, lead to slower reaction times, and divert energy to “managing up” or what is called politics. These politics will optimize your organization to CYA (Cover Your Ass), loss of productivity, and an aversion of risk, resulting in a standstill culture. Fear Command-and-control systems lead to organizations filled with […]

A Horror Story: Efficiency is Killing Productivity

Are you working in product development? Creative work? Research? Or any other domain where brains are the main asset? YES? Then this story is for you! It’s called: “Efficiency in organisations has become counterproductive!“ Take the holy grail of efficiency: Clarity – Measurements – Accountability, it makes human efforts derail! And yes, I’ve been tricked into […]

The Good, Bad and Ugly of Being 1 Year in a LeSS Huge Adoption

Large-Scale Scrum or LeSS About 1 year ago BASE Company engaged with Co-Learning in order to improve their time to market, productivity and quality using “Agile“. As many other companies their understanding about Agile was limited to the practices, roles and process and mainly focussed on their “development” teams. Together we generated a better understanding setting […]

One year into a Large-Scale Scrum adoption at Base Company

This blog is different from many others as the author is not really the author at all. We do not see value in telling a customer story by ourselves and as such we let them do it for us, let them explain why LeSS, what challenges and what succesthey see being about 1 year into the adoption. […]

Handling documentation needs in an Agile world

Working software over comprehensive documentation www.agilemanifesto.org   This leads to a lot of misunderstandings in organisations that are considering one of the Agile flavors as a new way of working, especially when they are used to document a lot. Quite often we need to start explaining that Agile does not mean “no documentation” but that […]

Misunderstandings on Productivity Measurements in IT

We get a lot of questions on measuring “productivity” within organisations in relation to Agile or Lean adoptions and today was no different than any other, the big productivity questions came in our direction again. This was the trigger for me to write down some things related to productivity measurements which I find valuable to […]

Value Stream Mapping

First time I taught about Value Stream Mapping was back in 2008 internally, beginning 2009 publicly. First time I tried it was somewhere in 2006 if I am not mistaken. In the mean time I have used it a lot more in a lot of different scenario’s, unfortunaly not ever having a complete value chain in the […]