Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn))

Products are created by teams, yet traditional (Western) organizations are built around individual accountability. You are held accountable by your manager for your individual performance. This gets reflected in practices such as assigning work to individuals, individual performance reviews, and individual rewarding. These practices promote individ

Structure the organization by using real teams as the basic organizational building block. Each team is (1) self-managing, (2) cross-functional, (3) co-located, and (4) long-lived.

Traditional organizations form a project group with exactly the right set of skills and people for each new feature request. But organizations with long-lived teams don’t re-organize but instead split the work and give it to an existing team that can learn and adapt.

Imbalanced and asynchronous dependencies—Customers want features and those tend to involve multiple components. This causes dependencies between the teams. These dependencies are (1) imbalanced, e.g. team Zombies have lots of work but team Draculas have little, and (2) asynchronous, e.g. team Mummies have work that depends on team Werewolfs who won

No more planning hell and enormous dependency matrices. You need a new feature? Find a suitable team.4 The team won’t have exactly the skills required, so they get to practice their meta-skill of learning.

A key difference is in splitting work into customer-centric parts instead of into component parts.

Having dedicated, long-lived teams automatically causes people to practice those learning skills.

Rather, involve regular teams, and offer improvement items to them via the Product Backlog. This way, all the work is visible on the Product Backlog and continuous improvement becomes the normal system.

When following the team-based structure, the question will no longer be “Which individuals do we need?” but will become “Which teams do we need?”