[00:00:01.450] - Announcer
Do you wonder if others are dealing with the same project management challenges as you, not sure where to turn for guidance and leadership? Office Hours are in session as we discuss project management and PMOs with global leaders hearing their stories in learning their secrets to success. Our goal is to empower you and help you elevate your PMO and project management career to new heights. Welcome back to Project Management office hours with your host, PMO Joe.
[00:00:29.870] - PMO Joe
Welcome everyone to Project Management office hours. We're the number one live project management radio show in the United States, broadcasting to you today from our Phoenix Business RadioX Studios in Tempe, Arizona. I'm your host, PMO Joe, and for the next hour or so, we're going to be chatting with our special guests. We'll get to hear from them in just a moment. Before we jump into the show, I would like to give some announcements and just want to say the past couple of weeks was fantastic for me. I was able to unplug from work. We always talk about work life balance. And I think my mindset on this is we have that reversed. It should be life work balance. We should put life before work. So I was able to get up to one of the most beautiful parts of America and drive through Montana and Wyoming and Idaho and Utah. Ran the Glacier Park Half Marathon. Which was fantastic and so scenic. And then spent about a week or so in Yellowstone National Park and just was out in the beauty and didn't look at my phone unless it was to play a game. I didn't want to respond to emails if I didn't have to.
[00:01:41.670] - PMO Joe
And it just helps us remember. Some of us are old enough you can see the gray in my beard of life before cell phones when you didn't have to have a phone with you and respond to a Tweet or an Instagram or an email at all hours and all times of day when actually you would go home from work and you were home from work. So it was nice to unplug. And I just encourage everybody to put life first, remember, have life work balance. And I think it actually helps us perform better when we do spend our time and dedicated to work. Also, a reminder if you're listening, we are live, of course, on Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, as well as internet radio. So drop a note in the comments, let us know where you're joining us from. We always like to know what our reach is and where we're hitting people from. Also, a reminder that these shows are worth the PDU, right? We go an hour. We're talking project management related concepts. If you need to keep your professional certifications going, listen to these shows. We have 106 of them after this one's over.
[00:02:48.520] - PMO Joe
That's a lot of PDUs to help you get your certifications. And the best part of all is we're talking to some really amazing leaders from around the world in our industry. So it's not just the PDU grab, it's really helpful, right? I mean there's a lot of fantastic content we've had over the years with some really amazing guests. And talking about amazing guests, I'm super excited to have us with us today. Joining us from Poland, Konstantin Ribel. And joining us from Germany, Robert Briese. Hello Konstantin and Robert.
[00:03:21.970] - Robert Briese
Hi there.
[00:03:22.830] - PMO Joe
Hi Robert. If you want to kind of just take a moment and introduce yourself to everybody and let people know a little bit about who you are.
[00:03:31.240]
Absolutely.
[00:03:32.390] - Robert Briese
I'm really pleased to be here. Thanks for invitation. I'm Robert, I'm a coach and consultant for now over 20 years. My wife's, son and I like to do a lot of sports. You mentioned marathon, half marathon actually I've done ten times now. The inline skate marathon in Berlin, full marathon with inline skates and I love skating and doing a lot of sports business wise. I'm the owner of Lean Sherpas, small consulting company specialized on agile software development for large organizations. Doing it, being an agile, helping companies reach higher goals. I've been doing this now, as I mentioned, for 20 years. I've been working with startups that are becoming bigger and bigger and also with big organization like SAP and BMW. And I just love helping organization become more adaptive and lean and providing more for their customers so much to me and I would like to pass over to Konstantin.
[00:04:54.650] - Konstantin Ribel
Thank you Robert. So yes, I'm Konstantin also usually live in Germany but currently in Poland work a lot together with Robert and I started my career around 2005 in software and hardware development and then at some point just focused on software development. Was software architect for some time, project manager and then learned about agility and being agile and started my journey into this direction. And like Robert already mentioned, what we're trying to do is to help organizations which are maybe stuck in traditional setups and would like to go further and be more flexible and adaptive to the environment which they are in or usually subtitles that grow and maybe grow too fast and get issues because of the growth and get stuck in there. And we help those companies to get going again to leverage the human potentials that there are. To not waste it, to leverage really to use it so that you can actually create environments where people have fun working and enjoy the work and delivering great products to their customers.
[00:06:28.230] - PMO Joe
That's fantastic. Thank you both for introducing yourselves. And Robert, so nice to hear you're a fellow marathon or half, marathoner you're cheating, you're using wheels. So it's not exactly when I was much younger I used to be on the skates and would do some long distances with those and I wish I could have the balance to continue to do that. Fantastic. So you had mentioned Lean Sherpas. I love that name. Fantastic name. Can you just give us the history on that? How did that all happen? What was the birth of Lean Sherpas?
[00:07:06.260] - Robert Briese
Yeah. So. Again. I think the history of Lean Sherpas started already. Like. Ten or 15 years ago when I became a freelancer and then decided actually to run as a company. Not just a single person. And teamed up with people that I admired recently with Konstantin. Had a couple of employees over the past years. And I was first named the Briese Company and later tried to find a name that much more provides an understanding of what are we trying to do? And I was at the Scrum Gathering in Singapore, where I heard a very interesting and amazing talk from one of or actually the first climber from Singapore of the Mount Everest. And he shared a lot of insights, and he even wrote a book about what managers can learn from hikers like himself and how hiking teams actually work. And I realized I saw a lot of parallels, and I saw that actually when we go out there and help our customers who have really challenging goals, like, constantly mentioned, to create a nice environment but also increase productivity and customer value, it's them who have to do the work and to do the hard sweat.
[00:08:49.370] - Robert Briese
But it helps if you have people around who can help you navigate the hardware and tells you what experiments might be helpful and which might not be helpful to give you some guides in the right direction. We have the experience of having done this, having worked with many other climbers and people who have the same kind of goal or similar kind of goal. And I thought that's what we basically do day to day. So we are like the Sherpas from Nepal who are basically the guiders on this path and help companies become more adaptive, more lean, more productive and still and at the same time create a nicer environment where people excel and love to work.
[00:09:51.090] - PMO Joe
Yeah, that's a great story. And you think back, same for us, right? The PMO Squad or at my company, right, it's the same concept of we're a small squad that comes in to help you get your PMO better. Right. And when you start thinking of different connotations for names, to be able to relate it so that everybody knows what a Sherpa does. Right. And you say they're helping you climb that mountain. Right. You're trying to climb up Everest. You need a Sherpa with you. Exactly. I'm going through a Lean or agile journey. And look, you're going to be the company that's going to come help me do that. So it's very easy to understand and I think a great choice of name by you guys. That's fantastic. So let's dig in a little bit, maybe, Konstantin, if you can give your perspective. So what does Lean Sherpas do? Right? I mean, it conceptually. You get it, right. You're a company that's open with agile and lean concepts but what does that mean for somebody that's listing? Because there's several companies out there that kind of do what you do. Certainly you guys are unique, but what makes you unique, right?
[00:10:51.880] - PMO Joe
What is it about you that's your thing?
[00:10:54.160] - Konstantin Ribel
What we haven't mentioned yet is that Robert and I are certified large scale scrum trainers, which currently there are only 23 in the whole world. So we're focusing on large scale scrum as such focuses on removing complexity from the organization, organizational complexity, especially in order to remove the whole fat of the organization, in order to get going again, to be able to move again. And this is actually exactly what we are doing. When we come in or when customers ask us to help them, the first thing we do is we usually observe how the company is working right now for a little bit and then we together discover and teach them usually how or we teach them about organizational dynamics and we also teach them about systems thinking. And this is very important to understand for everyone, for all the leaders, especially in the companies, that the organization as such is a whole system with many variables that change all the time. And you need to create structures in companies that will remove the waste and empower the people and the teams to actually be able to deliver. So we focus on the first step of analyzing the current structures, working together with the decision makers in those companies to realize where the most pain points are in a dynamic system.
[00:12:49.390] - Konstantin Ribel
We find out root causes, usually several of the current issues and then we start to discal the complexity. The organizational complexity is very important, not just on the technical product level, really organizational structure, the complexity of the organizational structure.
[00:13:13.040] - PMO Joe
So that's interesting, right? When we hear large scale, at least me, maybe I'm the outlier in this, but I hear large scale and I hear agile, right? My mind usually goes towards SAFe thinking large scale. So either of you guys have any thoughts on the comparisons between large scale scrum and safe and why one would be a better choice than the other?
[00:13:40.320] - Konstantin Ribel
It really starts with the question what is it that you want to optimize for? So if you want to optimize something really absolutely doesn't matter what it is that you want to optimize, you need to figure out what is your optimization goal? Largescale scrum is truly designed to create an organization which is adaptive, truly adaptive to the maximum level possible. If that is the goal of the company. The goal would not be to be just adaptive, it's a means to an end. And the end would be we need to be adaptive in order to be able to deliver better products to our customers, learn from customers and enhance the products further in order to stay in the market, for example. Right? That could be the story. So organizations who would like to optimize for really high adaptivity or adaptability, we strongly suggest to look at least at Less and then figure out what is their optimization goal, what is their overall optimization goal in order to start working with them. And as soon as we discover the optimization goal, we can look at which parts of the organizations should be changed, how, as far as I'm concerned or informed, safe has slightly different optimization goals and hence there are those different frameworks.
[00:15:25.470] - Konstantin Ribel
Maybe Robert, you can add some more to that.
[00:15:28.040] - Robert Briese
Yeah, absolutely. So the way I like to summarize it is that I see personally SAFe and I had the chance actually to implement it a couple of times and I see the way of scaling Scrum while LeSS. Even though it's often mentioned in the same sentence with other scaling framework as concert I mentioned before. We see it as a descaling framework. Meaning instead of doing multiple team scrum. We try to do instead of having multiple scrum teams. We want to do multiple team scrum saying you don't have to scrub on the team level and then you scale on top and try to manage somehow the different Scrum teams so that you can provide a product increment every couple of sprints by creating PI in SAFe and so on. In LeSS the whole idea is how would Scrum would look like if it would not be one team but many in a big organization. So still trying to be as close as possible to Scrum as a whole construct, not only on team level. So we have one product owner, we have one product backlog, no matter how many teams are involved, because that's how it is in Scrum.
[00:17:14.450] - Robert Briese
There is an important purpose why there is only one product owner and one product backlog, to optimize for the one thing or the things that are so important and to create a priority on the product level and not on team level. So those are things that differentiate LeSS for almost all the other scaling frameworks because it looks like how to create the construct of the whole idea and essence of Scrum. And at the same time considering the fact that we are not talking about a team but a whole organization. So unless in comparison to Scrum, there is a clear definition of a manager and what a manager can and should do in an agile organization, while Scrum doesn't have that for obvious reason, because it's just a very small team that doesn't need a manager to be self organized.
[00:18:20.770] - PMO Joe
Yeah, it's certainly an interesting concept in our industry. And I remember back when we first connected, I'd say probably a week before we connected, one of our clients had reached out and said hey, do we have anybody that is familiar with LeSS? And I was like, what in the world is LeSS? I've never heard of this before. And then about a week later I connected with you guys and you were talking about LeSS and I'm like, man, this is coincidence of the world, right? So you had mentioned there's only 23 of you certified in the world, which is amazing for you guys to have that certification. Where does that come from? Right? So a lot of the Agile stuff comes from Scrum Alliance or Agile Alliance or different PMI with the project Management certifications. Where do we go to learn more about this? Right? Because again, people are familiar with Scrum, but maybe not LeSS, maybe not the large scale Scrum. So where can we go to learn more about it and what's kind of that governing body that's out there?
[00:19:23.560] - Robert Briese
So LeSS was actually created by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde. Craig has been in the Agile movement, I think from the first days. As far as I remember, he once said that he was invited to the Agile Manifesto, to the Utah gathering. He was just not able to make it because he was in Europe, I think at that time. But he has a deep history in Agile and he was invited by Bas at that time was at Nokia Systems and was looking at ways of really doing scrum on a higher level on organization and not on team level. And he teamed up with Craig and both of them created, did a lot of experiments on what things would work in a large organization and what might work and documented this in a really thick book that was published 2011 and actually two years before. They also documented some very important ideas and principles of how to do Agile and lean at large. With those two books they created like the whole knowledge that there is actually for LeSS, that also then they created the sizeless works where you can find all this information. Many things from the book already is published on the sideless orgs and they realize still that they have to create even a third book calling it Large Case Scrum that gives people a real understanding of how to implement LeSS in large organization and what our guides that are experiments that have been proven to be successful over and over.
[00:21:48.110] - PMO Joe
I think it's fantastic, right? I'm always trying to have continuous learning into my mindset to make sure I'm going out and understanding more about it. So for those, as Robert just shared with us, right, LeSS works there's your website. To be able to go out there and capture more information, to be able to get some more understanding on that, it's fantastic. One of the things, Konstantin, that we hear from you, you come into the equation here along the way, of course, and you work for a large company, right? And you weren't necessarily doing this type of work, but how did you get plugged into all of this?
[00:22:24.740] - Konstantin Ribel
Well, it's probably not a secret. I work for BMW since start join their 2010. Always in the field of driver assistance systems and then autonomous driving. And at some point we consider that we realized that there needs to be a change. And especially I was asking myself how to deal with the complexity that we were facing at that time. And at this point I learned about LeSS. And some months later, not so many decision workshops. We came to the conclusion that we would adopt LeSS NPM autonomous driving. And this is where we started. My co author and I, the co author would be Michael Mine. We together published a case study on that. A really in depth case study. Whoever is interested can read more about it, provide the link. Just would be now a little bit unfair to just scratch the surface here.
[00:23:45.230] - PMO Joe
A lot of times we think about big companies not being agile just because they're so big and it's so hard to move in one direction. So how does that work at a large company like BMW?
[00:24:03.330] - Konstantin Ribel
We need to start where I actually began talking today at the organizational structure. In other words, we need to remove silos, we need to break them up, create opportunities for people to collaborate. We need to create conditions for people to actually work together. So especially if I like this phrase very much, if an individual is worse off cooperating with someone, then they will never collaborate. So you need to create conditions that they actually benefit from it individually. That's like on one level, then of course on the other level, from looking from the product perspective, you need to have a clearly prioritized list of work that you want to do so that by having this list, which we have a name for, of course the product backlog, that people can use it to focus on it and actually start delivering all of that. And yes, we did it at really not just large scale, we did it at a really huge large scale at BMW.
[00:25:26.270] - PMO Joe
It's something that I like about what you guys do. I'm always in search of simplicity, right? Trying to make things very easy to understand. And the phrase came up with you guys of more with LeSS. Right. Robert, how do you explain that a little bit to help us understand that concept?
[00:25:48.190] - Robert Briese
The idea is that exactly we believe, as constantly said, that a lot of complexity within organization is created because we thought that by having much more complex work and complexity within organization or within the work gets higher and higher, we also need to create more complex organization. But I think the reality shows that you don't have to and it's easier actually to react and you are more flexible and adaptive if you actually get rid of complexity. And this is basically what Scrum does on team level. We encourage people to take more responsibility by removing the number of roles. We only have three roles in Scrum. And by that we encourage people to take the whole responsibility. There is only developer in product, developer in scrum. There is no engineer, there is no tester, there is no designer, and so on. So the idea is by removing roles, we create more ownership. By removing processes and fixed processes that are given, we create more ownership of the processes from the people that are doing the work. And also by removing artifacts, like those descriptions of requirements, documents that describe how something should be implemented and so on.
[00:27:53.950] - Robert Briese
But allowing developers to talk directly with customers, we create a better understanding of what actually is needed, being able to deliver that. So we believe the more we look for, like the more we ask the question do we need this artifact, this process, this role, or would we actually be better off? And most of the time, the second is true, the better. Are we off, like just having always this question how does it help us to have more roles, more artifacts, more processes? Or how can we simplify that?
[00:28:41.350] - Konstantin Ribel
I would like to add to this, if I may.
[00:28:44.210] - PMO Joe
Yeah, of course.
[00:28:46.090] - Konstantin Ribel
Like Robert mentioned at the beginning, we're trying to remove the complexity and organizations became complex. We are now in the world, not just only now, already for decades in the world of complex software based products, where the creation of those products is non deterministic. If you try to build the same product again, you will go different ways. You will never do exactly the same things like when you build it the first time. So the nature of the work is not deterministic. So we cannot use approaches which work in a deterministic world or for deterministic product development. In a non deterministic product development, it doesn't work. And whenever companies started growing in this direction and they faced problems, what usually happened was that quick fixes were applied. Like for example, the product development group couldn't manage the work. So people introduced split the whole product development group into maybe components, the components that the software is built off, right? Then they face integration issues, then they installed an integration team maybe, or an integration department. Then they face quality issues. Then they install integration department or sorry, quality assurance department or quality assurance team and so on and so on.
[00:30:28.860] - Konstantin Ribel
So the pattern is like for every problem there is a manager or department or a team created, which leads to actually a sequential life cycle. And a sequential life cycle is the next part that adds complexity in a non deterministic development environment. So therefore, you have to remove all of this and solve it in simpler ways by enabling people to learn more, to broaden their skills and to be able to deliver and enable them to deliver on a different level, where the term software craftsmanship and technical excellence as terms really come in. So we spoke a lot about organizational structures and yes, this is a very important point and probably the most difficult to start at all. And then as the next part. What we see is technical excellence and software craftsmanship in organizations. In organizations where there was all of this complexity. Usually the people in those organizations are at the lower level of technical excellence and software carfanships and they need to learn all of this in order to actually use the flexibility of the organizational structure that was created before. That we created at the beginning.
[00:32:11.050] - PMO Joe
Yeah, so this is, I think one of the challenges that I see with organizations as we go into work with them is they have an existing organizational structure, right? They have development teams, they have a QA team, there's an integration team, there's a design team, there's a product team. All of those exist and they call themselves Scrum.
[00:32:36.070]
Right.
[00:32:37.210] - PMO Joe
So their starting point is wrong.
[00:32:40.660] - Robert Briese
Right.
[00:32:41.270] - PMO Joe
So how do you get them in line with what Scrum is supposed to be? Because now you're not just dealing with improving their Scrum capabilities, but it's also organizational change you're making. Right. I would imagine you see this all the time when you're working with organizations. Absolutely.
[00:33:00.620] - Robert Briese
And I think, as you mentioned so I think one of the biggest challenges is that people think they know Scrum because they have been doing Scrum since five years or ten years or even longer. Right. So they think that Scrum is about having these three roles and having a Sprint planning and having daily and doing every sprint, Sprint review. That usually is called demo. And it's just the development team showing their team product owner what they have been working on the last two weeks or so on. So one of the biggest thing is really discuss and really have a better understanding about Scrum, what Scrum actually is, and that what most of teams are doing in big organization has nothing to do with Scrum. Because the moment that you are doing a Sprint review without a customer, you don't do Scrum in a Sprint review, for example, one of the biggest thing is to understand how the whole product is used and actually how it works and how do we need to adapt it, what new product backlog items do we have to create so that we basically are on the right track. So unless you can tell about that, at BMW, every two weeks someone got in the car and got to experience the whole product, the software, the self driving, the autonomous driving software every two weeks and see how things are going, what are the new features and so on.
[00:34:53.640] - Robert Briese
Not like in a product increment every three months or so. We want to learn every two weeks and with actual customers. And so this is one of the biggest things that we are trying to focus on when we teach LeSS and actually LeSS is a very big amount of knowledge. So we do a three day training where, you know, the Scrum is part of it, but also, as constantly mentioned, we talked about the system and system syncing. We try to see the whole organization as a whole and we allow managers and people at all levels who are engaged in this training to understand for themselves the implications of having the current organizational structure. And hopefully by the end of the course they have a better understanding that the current organizational structure might be in line with producing the outcomes that the current organization does, but not in line with the goal of adaptability and the learning organization. So they need to change some of the underlying structure of the organization in order to improve, to get rid of the pains that are at the moment and to improve if they want to become a learning organization, an adaptive organization.
[00:36:32.310] - PMO Joe
So for me, right, I get confusion, there's agile, there's Scrum, there's Less, there's design thinking, there's Lean, there's all of these different concepts. I need a sherpa, right? I need somebody that can help me understand the different concepts to be sure we're doing that right, because as you were describing a lot of that and the customer involved and I'm saying my brain immediately goes, okay, design thinking, I need to make sure that my design is inclusive of the customer. But as you're describing that, you're making sure you're now beyond design and you're getting what has been created is with the customer. And of course the lien then brings in the more with LeSS, right? You're eliminating waste and you're working within lien. So there's so much there to work through. I would imagine again that's why you exist as a company, to be able to help companies work through that confusion, to know what to do is best for them. Is that really trying to summarize all of what Lean Sherpa is there for to help companies with?
[00:37:37.430] - Robert Briese
Absolutely. And our goal is not to push LeSS or any other framework in a company. Our goal is basically to understand and even help organization to understand how they got to this organizational structure, not necessarily the past and so on, but actually how this organizational structure and also the technical excellence that they use and so on produces the current result. And we like to help them reflect on really what they're trying to optimize for, like constantly mentioned before, and then be there with them to help them achieve this goals, to become more in line with their optimization goals, which usually nowadays most of the time is really adaptability being because the market is changing so fast. So being able to improve the skills within the organization to change direction at a very, very low cost because that's what makes organization successful. You look like Netflix. How they were able to reinvent themselves over time from a DVD mailing company, to a streaming company, to a TV show producers and award winning producer company, right? And I think you need a culture and you need an organizational design. And technical excellence that is in line with that.
[00:39:31.090] - Robert Briese
And that's what we are helping organizations do.
[00:39:35.110] - Konstantin Ribel
And talking about culture, Robert just mentioned, culture follows structure. So we need to create structures first that will then lead to the culture that we actually want in the organizations.
[00:39:49.430] - PMO Joe
That makes me think back to this is probably three years or so ago, we had a guest on from American Express and they went through a safe journey to bring large scale Agile to their organization. And they had given it a special project name and they had to go implement the trains and do all the different elements of Safe. But it was the company rallied around this project to go make it happen. So Konstantin, with your practical experience with BMW, was it similar? Did BMW have a project? Or how did you get to the point where you are going to implement these concepts to make it be accepted? Because identifying is one thing, but implementation and acceptance of course, is another thing.
[00:40:38.780] - Konstantin Ribel
Yeah, that's a very important point. So first step is unless we have different LeSS guides, and that usually work in companies. And one of the left guys is getting started and step zero is educate everyone. So we need to create ownership in the organizations of the change. They need to own the change. We discourage from having any change projects. We encourage the people who will be then part of this new organizational setup to make the change themselves. Start with run a smaller setup, get it to run and grow it later on. This is the usual approach. And step zero is educate everyone and then continue the next changes. This is exactly what we did to BMW autonomous driving. We started with the people who were part of the autonomous driving department. Of course, those people spent a significant amount of time on learning about Agile approaches, about LeSS, about other frameworks as well, of course, and evaluating all of this. And then we started implementing it. And those people who were doing all this work up front, those were people from all hierarchy levels that existed at that time. This was like true collaboration that I experienced in my life, that across all hierarchy levels there was a high degree of collaboration to actually get to a decision what will be the next steps that we will do.
[00:42:40.900] - Konstantin Ribel
And then we started the implementation. And after some time, those people who were involved at the beginning just joined the rest of the organization as Scrum masters or as developers or as line managers and continue to work there on the product development. So, another question after that, of course, continuous improvement.
[00:43:12.570] - PMO Joe
Sure. Going back to, I guess the wrong implementation of Scrum question that I brought up earlier with Robert in the project management world, project managers don't exist in Scrum. Yet so many companies still have project managers who have implemented Scrum. So how do you reconcile that and did BMW have project managers previously and did they go away with Scrum or did they with LeSS or did they stay intact?
[00:43:44.360] - Konstantin Ribel
They did go away with LeSS adoption at Autonomous Driving. They were there before, of course. Their role as such was dissolved with the people of State, of course, because we still need the skills and their experience. It's just that another LeSS guide job and salary safety, but no role safety. You need to offer that in order to start the change and to make the change. This is exactly what we did. There was no role safety for anyone. But I was of course dropping salary safety this way. Yes, it was really hard for people to disidentify themselves from their home. Really painful for some people. And it requires a lot of one to one work in order to work through this with people, to make them realize that they are a person and not this role.
[00:44:49.730] - PMO Joe
They needed a sherpa, right?
[00:44:54.070] - Konstantin Ribel
Yes.
[00:44:56.410] - Robert Briese
That's another the reason why we are often guided in, because I think one of the it's much easier to learn a new concept than to unlearn something. There is a very nice video about where they change basically the way how it goes in the direction. And it takes so much time basically to manage to ride this bicycle. Because the unlearning part is so much difficult than learning part. And having someone that constantly makes you understand that you are still with your old thinking and judging things based on your past experience in a different maybe type of environment. It's extremely valuable. And then to have the possibility to reflect on your own and to understand that actually there's so much more success by having self organized teams than managed teams and really stepping out, letting the team do the work and the self organization, which is very hard at the beginning, but once you see the success and the result, it gets hopefully better and better.
[00:46:38.130] - PMO Joe
There's only 23 of you guys that are certified around the world, right? So I get that. And you're both in Europe. Does Lean? Sherpas work only within Europe. Or do you serve clients around the globe? What's your reach? How do people connect with you that are outside your locality?
[00:46:57.540] - Robert Briese
Yeah, obviously working with big international clients. Most of our clients have sites all over the world. I've been working a lot with SAP in Europe, but also in the States. In Newtown Square, in New York or Palo Alto. And so we not only work with clients all over the world, but also try to do trainings even on locations outside Europe was obviously very difficult the last two years. I even tried actually to organize something in Chicago last year, but it was not really possible. I think also Miami was on the schedule but got canceled with COVID. But we are looking forward actually to travel more at the end of how this year will go. But as soon as the coverage restrictions are better, we would love to travel more and also come to the US more often.
[00:48:10.210] - PMO Joe
Fantastic. Well, we are coming up on our hour here. It's certainly been educational for me and I'm sure the listeners as well, to learn more about LeSS and large scale scrum and true scrum and some of those principles as well as the practical application of it. Right. That's always the best to be able to see where it actually has been implemented and worked. So I want to give you guys an opportunity to say, hey, how do folks get in touch with you? Is there any event coming up? And you mentioned different trainings that you're looking forward to. Is there anything that you want to be able to discuss that maybe you haven't had a chance to get to yet?
[00:48:49.500] - Robert Briese
Yeah, from my side, very happy to be invited here. You can always get in touch over LinkedIn or just on links.com. You can find events. And even though we might be restricted with traveling, we are doing online courses. We are late evening online courses here in Europe. So they are able to be attended from East Coast or West Coast. I've done, I think, three months ago, the last one with many people from the US. And I'm happy to have more people who want to learn about LeSS at my last training course. And I'm still the same for constantly.
[00:49:45.180] - Konstantin Ribel
Yeah, exactly the same for me. So you can reach me via LinkedIn easily. Always reply there. And yes, I think we already had the Lin Sherpas events link faced here that we can find our scheduled courses, but of course we can also based on requests, we can create new ones specifically for people maybe who want specifically one in English if it's not scheduled or at a specific time. We can also do that, yes.
[00:50:26.580] - PMO Joe
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Konstantin and Robert. I really appreciate you guys joining us today and sharing all of your experiences and knowledge. As I mentioned, it's been really informative for me and I'm sure it has been for others as well. Of course, thank you to our listeners as well. Right. Without listeners, we don't have a show, so we really appreciate everybody tuning in. Be sure to visit the PMO squad to check out the podcast page. We have all 106 episodes listed out there. Well, this is one of six, so this one will be out there next week and then also the schedule for upcoming shows. We have a fantastic list of guests coming up. Melissa McDonald will be joining us. She's the smart PM smart sheet expert. Mate Sivira track via and PMI will be joining us to discuss the Citizen Developer Program. Dr. Robert Joslin will be joining us. Keyed in will be joining us to talk about their software. Chris Brigg and a group from the project management global alliance. We'll be joining to talk about the work they're doing in the healthcare industry, sanjiv Augustine and others as well. And of course, if anybody knows Fabio Zafishnini, and I probably mispronounced that name wrong, but he's in Italy.
[00:51:45.230] - PMO Joe
He's my go to guest that before this year is over, I need to get him on the show. So I'm working behind the scenes to make that happen. So for all those folks out there who know Fabio, please make an introduction and help me get connected with him. A reminder again, these shows are live, but we record them. So please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, project Management Office Hours on Apple podcast. iHeartRadio Spreaker Spotify, whatever your platform of choice may be. And of course, thank you to our sponsors, the PMO Squad and the PMO leader. Reach out to them on those websites and you can learn more about what they can provide to help you deliver projects within your organization. Well, that's it for now. Office Hours are closed. Until next time, I'm PMO. Joe and you've been listening to Project Management office hours.
[00:52:40.650] - Announcer
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