Case Study: Large-Scale Scrum at BASE Company

Base Company was the third Mobile Operator in Belgium and stayed within the top 3 market leaders, even today now the organisation has gone through a new change. Their IT was part of the technology department that was also responsible for the mobile network, from design to operations. Within the IT organization were a couple of hundred […]

The Shocking Truth about Firefighting in I.T. Organizations!

Why are there so many IT people out there who have the feeling they’re actually a firefighter? Why do they have the feeling to be jumping from one burning house to another? Why do they have the feeling work is driven by fire alarms? Why is it that the loudest voice in the office, the […]

How to fix Scrum teams that are terrible at estimating and forecasting?

First of all, we should ask ourselves: “Why do we estimate?”. In a lot of cases it’s because of the wrong reasons, but let us assume we are in a context where estimates are needed.  What would that context look like? A Large-Scale setting where a Rolling Wave Plan is used by other parts in the organization (sales, […]

Re-Thinking the Organization: Sociocracy 3.0 – Reversify – LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum)

If you are not moving at the speed of the marketplace you’re already dead – you just haven’t stopped breathing yet. – Jack Welch The organizational structure in which most of us operate today can be quite an obstacle to respond adequately to a fast-changing business environment. In fact, traditional organizational structures are not designed […]

How organizations go nuts?

It is amazing how easily organizations go nuts in the sense of complicated structures, amount of roles, process and so on and the reasons are very obvious. Organizations with money to spend will make mistakes by going for quick solutions and not allowing their teams to find more appropriate ways to deal with issues at […]

Stop Managing Dependencies!

Dependencies in Software Development have been an issue since decades and lots of practices have been built to “manage” them, creating an environment that becomes more complicated with longer time-to-market times as dependencies grow (or the product/solution grows). This is creating an illusion and no dependency management is alwys the only answer! Coordination to remove dependencies […]

20 New Year’s Resolutions for Scrum Product Owners

The end of the year is nearby, time for some New Year’s resolutions! As I experienced a lot of stress within the role of Scrum Product Owner, and as I know you’re busy, I’m going to help you get started… Here are 20 New Year’s resolutions to get you started: Update the product’s vision (or […]

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 […]

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 […]