Mentor-Guided LeSS Case Study Writing Experience Report

The purpose of writing a case study was to re-live the experience of Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) adoption, by going back in time and memory to everything that was done by me – the agile coach, trainer and organizational design consultant at a large financial institution.  This engagement was done in conjunction/partnership with my former trusted colleague Stuart P. (also, an experienced agile and software engineering coach).   Writing this case study gave me a great opportunity to self-reflect (retrospect) and think about what I could have done differently back then, if I had to go through adoption again.  The name of the organization, as well as names of people, products, projects, applications, components, etc. that were involved in the study are intentionally withheld, for confidentiality and privacy protection reasons.Nevertheless, hopefully the case study, when published on less.works will serve as a guideline to others, in their attempts to experiment with LeSS adoptions in their respective organizations.  It is worth nothing that many existing LeSS case studies on less.works had provided my former colleague and me with some great references when we worked on our artifact piece.

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My mentor, also one of not too many Certified LeSS trainers, was very knowledgeable about LeSS (as trainer, coach and practitioner) and very supportive in my case study work.  Him and I have met more than once in real life, at various agile- and LeSS-related public events (conferences, retreats), and this allowed for some of in-personal mentoring sessions.  Visual technology took care of the rest and made our remote sessions also effective (Note: I am based in the US, he is based in Europe)

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The process had been very iterative all along.  My mentor and I used google docs, as a communication media and it allowed us to work incrementally and transparently with one another: typically, I would capture my thoughts directly in the google document, iterate multiple times through them and then, once feeling comfortable enough, would share them with the mentor, asking for his feedback. The mentor would provide feedback, ask questions and suggest clarifications.  My former colleague and the peer-coach, who also had full access to the case study, would attend to it at any point in time, leave his comments, provide clarifications and add his details to mine.  Notably, my former colleague-coach has helped me significantly, by recalling facts, decisions, ideas, events that we lived through together (LeSS adoption took place a few years before the case study was incepted).  Specifically, my former colleague also helped me significantly in those areas of the case study that talked about technology: architecture, design, and development.  In all fairness, this was ‘our’ case study, not just ‘mine’.

Regularly, at least once a month, when meeting with my mentor, I would receive feedback on those parts of the case study that required further refinement and re-work.  Many times, my mentor would ask me questions that initially seemed to be intentionally tricky or even irrelevant.  But I always had to give my mentor the benefit of the doubt that he, being a deep system thinking just like me, tried to set me up to think deeper, broader and most systemically into the matter, helping me to discover better ways to formulate my thoughts.   Specifically, many of his questions made me go backwards from many of the LeSS experiments that were leveraged during the case study, to underlining LeSS principles – and making a connection.

From time to time, my mentor would also share his own experiences and give his own perspective like mine, or related situations.  This made our mentoring more interactive, engaging and fulfilling.

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One of the most important mentoring ‘aha moments’ for me was the decision on how many LeSS experiments that were actually used during LeSS adoption did I really want to describe in detail, as a part of my case study.Here, one of LeSS adoption concepts came to rescue: Deep & Narrow is better than Broad & Shallow.  I consulted with my former colleague-coach on how many of our LeSS experiments and experiences do we really want to discuss and how deep.  We agreed on the shorter list of experiments that represented the crust of our work and could be aligned with logical and chronological sequence of events, as we remembered them.  We made our selection described experiments, based on what we felt was most important during the adoption, relevant to the case study and memorable to us, as coaches.  I consulted with my mentor on the final list and the overall approach and based on his recommendations, proceeded with deeper dives into the case study.

During one of the many case study reviews with my mentor, it became obvious that long paragraphs and dry text would make many readers bored.  This is when I have decided to spice up the case study with graphic illustrations and other visual artifacts (e.g. causal loop diagrams, tabular data).  I had to make a dedicated iteration throughout the whole case study and introduce graphics, were they seemed most appropriate.  Ultimately, this made the case study more readable and informative.

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My overall experience of writing the case study was amazing.  It took me through the process of additional deep re-learning and self-discovery.  It made me reassess my past decisions, now seeing them through the prism of additional experience acquired during the last three years of professional work.