My personal note from Lean Tribe 30 - Adjustable organizations. Held in Stockholm 2015-10-13

1. #30 - Adjustable organizations
2014-10-13, King.com, Sveavägen 44
Tomas Rybing, Aptilo Networks
”Lean Tribe är ett nätverk av människor som delar de värderingar Lean står för och
övertygelsen att Lean skapar verksamheter med kortare tid till värde och ett bättre
arbetsklimat.”

2. Agenda - Adjustable organizations
• Seven short speeches (10 minutes)
• Team organizations are flexible and adaptable, or? - Johan Westerlund, Uniqa team
• Change in 3 dimensions - Anders Beskow, Softhouse
• Balancing budget in an Agile organization - Karin Hagren, Citerus
• Self reorganizing: The story of distributed teams - Molood Noori Alavijeh, King
• Spotify Running: Lessons learned from building a ‘Lean Startup’ inside a big tech
company - Brendan Marsh, Spotify
• Buffer or suffer? Growth pains and what to do about it? - Andrey Devyatkin, Praqma
• What developers really want – fast tests and fast build systems - Patrik Höglund,
Google
• Open Space - Queries that came up were discussed in 20 minutes slots in ”circles” (5-20
persons sitting on chairs in circle)
• Keynote: SAFe@Lego - our journey so far - Henrik Kniberg, Crisp

3. Team organizations are flexible and
adaptable, or?
• ”Team centric world” (adaptable & flexible)
• Higher resolution & frequency
• Self adaptive (we adapt ourself to the
environment)
• Distribution of decisions & mandates
• What is against?
• Management systems (hard to change)
• Insecurity
• ”The alignment trap” (same for all doesn’t
work)
• Why? Teams make better decisions!
Johan Westerlund,
Coaches teams & organizations
at Uniqa team

4. Change in 3 dimensions
• Adaptation/change is needed - ”You are not in
the state you need to be in”
• Three things
• Tools & Technology
• Processes
• Organization
• All things must gradually transform form ”old” to
”agile” (You can’t just change one or two of the
things above, then you will fail)
Anders Beskow,
Agile coach
at Softhouse

5. Balancing budget in an Agile organization
• Budget cutdown -> New agile organization
• Cross-functional teams
• Continuous integration (shooter feedback loops)
• Clear product ownership
• Focus on flow & bottlenecks
• Decreased market for 3G, re-org needed? Test
something else
• Agreement: ”3G teams” to work with 4G backlog
• Deliver within two sprints
• Training programs etc.
• ”Move the work instead of the people!”
Karin Hagren,
Agile coach
at Citerus

6. Self reorganizing: The story of distributed
teams
• Why? Organization grew from 3 to 30 persons in two years
(supporting multiple customers)
• How?
• Matrix organization
• Feature teams
• Technical (guilds)
• ”20% work” (own time to fix technical debt etc.)
• Teams to decide themselves how to work (3 months trial)
• Result?
• Scrum
• Kanban
• ”Scrumban”
• ”Not agile at all” (Two of three are unhappy in this team)
Molood Noori Alavijeh,
Agile coach
at King

7. Spotify Running: Lessons learned from building
a ‘Lean Startup’ inside a big tech company
• Idea came Q3 2014, a lot of ”running playlists”
existed, created Team Pre (Cross-functional),
launch May 2015
• Steps
1. Get started
2. Visualize business plan
3. Hypothesis creation
4. Ideation & validation (one week cadence)
5. Profit
• ”If it’s easy, you are doing it wrong”
Brendan Marsh,
Agile coach
at Spotify

8. Buffer or suffer? Growth pains and what to
do about it?
• ”Software as a factory”, continuous delivery
(CD) gives fast feedback loops
• ”CD pipeline as automated andon”
• Ways to do it
1. Stop & fix - Assign person(s) to fix
immediately
2. Automated revert of change - Fix without
pressure
3. Prevent blocking by shifting left
Andrey Devyatkin,
Praqma

9. What developers really want – fast tests and
fast build systems
• ”HACKABILITY” (of a product)
• Code health
• Easy to run/debug (for the developer)
• Great infrastructure
• ”CODE HEALTH”
1. Review (code review, pair programming etc.)
2. Readability
3. Style guide
4. Good tests
5. Pre-submit + post-submit (set of tests)
• Unit tests - how to make them happen? Lead by example,
mentoring etc.
Patrik Höglund,
Google

10. Open Space slot 1 - Circle 3 -
”Testing”
• ”So bust chopping down trees, there is no time to sharpen the
axe”
• Test must be automated (developers must write tests, not a
separate test team)
• Run all unit tests on each commit!
• Have automated metrics with thresholds + look at trends
• Fight flaky tests -> ”Pre-test the test” to get them stable
• ”Dynamic thresholds” -> Scenario: ”Allow 100 warnings, fix
five of them, lower the threshold to allow 95 warnings”

11. Open Space slot 2 - Circle 4 -
”Problem based roadmap”
• One product - Multiple teams/components
• Teams - Feature driven
• Guilds - Component based
• Old way - PO made a lot of coordination between
components/teams
• Now - Functions that solves ”the whole problem”

12. Keynote: SAFe@Lego - our journey so far (1/3)
• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), three levels
• PORTFOLIO
• Portfolio Kanban system
• Epics (business case/area)
• PROGRAM
• Agile release train
• Program backlog
• Product increment (n number of sprints)
• Features
• TEAM
• Scrum
• Team backlog
• Sprints
• Stories
Henrik Kniberg,
Agile coach
at Crisp

13. Keynote: SAFe@Lego - our journey so far (2/3)
• Example: PI-planning@LEGO (”a lot like a huge open space”)
• Two days event, 19 teams, 150 persons
• Agenda
• Achievements (videos what has been done)
• Lightning talks
• Fast feedback
• Team breakouts (high-level planning, pulling work from program
backlog)
• End of day one - Draft plan ”fair”

14. Keynote: SAFe@Lego - our journey so far (3/3)
• Program board to visualize dependencies with ”red threads” in a matrix
with 4 sprints x 19 teams!
• ”Scaling is dependency management”
• Scrum of Scrums - Two-three times per week
• Risk board with management review to solve out problems
• End of day two - Presentation of ”the final plan” (maybe stop doing this,
has become tedious)