The company was already successful and had grown quickly, having very large e-Commerce key clients. The size of the group, and its platform had grown quickly, using single team Scrum, but without a scaling framework. The IT department had grown to nearly 150 people in 3 different Polish cities, with dependencies between sites and individual teams, each working with separate backlogs.
As the company grew, problems with scaling increased; coordination and visibility between teams was difficult. It became increasingly difficult for the leadership to know and to control what was happening in the organisation, difficult to change product direction, increasingly slow to develop new features, and some technical challenges that occurred with the growth were also growing.
I was hired to introduce and adapt the LeSS framework, and to lead a transformation team that included the top management, HR, Sales & Marketing, Operations and Customer Service, as well as product, technology and scrum coaching leadership. My previous deep experience in training and coaching LeSS, was of course helpful, but we performed a number of novel experiments along the way that accelerated our learning as a leadership and change management team.
Talk delivered at ABELight 2017 conference.
