Adventures with Agile is very fortunate and proud to host a 3 day highly-participative course given by Craig Larman in Central London which will result in attendees becoming Certified LeSS Practitioners. Every attendee will also receive the latest LeSS book written by Craig and Bas.
LeSS is also supported by the Scrum Alliance – the world’s most established and influential professional membership organization and certifying body in the Agile community.
Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) gives us the ability to scale Scrum, the most popular Agile framework, remove organisational impediments and provide solutions and options that are not found elsewhere to common and not-so-common problems.
In this course, you will not only learn LeSS from its co-creator but also have access to his huge knowledge and experience in making Agile work in large multi-site organisations and be able to join in on discussions and Q & A, and network with other very experienced Agile attendees. If you have mastered Scrum and want to grow Agile beyond the team, LeSS and this course are the next step.
Places are limited to 30 and we expect them to go quickly, so please book now to avoid disappointment.
Secure your place: Book your seat & register here.
About Craig Larman
Craig Larman is the co-creator of LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum), and since 2005 has worked with clients to apply the LeSS framework for scaling Scrum, lean thinking, and agile development to big product groups. Much of his work is organizational-design consulting with senior-management teams of product groups adopting LeSS.
Craig has served as the lead coach of large-scale lean software development adoption at Xerox, and serves or has served as a consultant for LeSS at Ericsson, JP Morgan, Cisco-Tandberg, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Alcatel-Lucent, UBS, bwin.party, Nokia Networks and Siemens Networks, and Ion Trading, among many other clients. Craig has also served as chief scientist at Valtech and while living in Bengaluru India, at Valtech’s development centre helped to create agile offshore development with LeSS.
In addition to his focus on hands-on LeSS consulting and product work, he occasionally speaks in public, such as keynoting on LeSS at the 2014 Software Executive Summit, the 2013 Agile India conference, and the 2011 QCon conference.
Craig has been named one of the top 20 Agile influencers of all time, and is the author of several books on scaling lean & agile development with LeSS, including:
- Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS
- Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking & Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum
- Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Successful Large, Multisite & Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum
- Agile & Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide
Craig was one of the first Certified Scrum Trainers, and helped kick off the Agile movement,
especially with his 2003 book “Agile & Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide”.
LeSS – Large-Scale Scrum
What is the strength of Scrum? That’s not an easy question to answer. Of course, the principles behind Scrum, such as transparency, empirical process control, iterative development, and self-managing cross-functional teams of multi-skilled workers are critical. But there’s something else, subtle but important:
Scrum hits the sweet spot between abstract principles and concrete practices.
Thus, in order to keep Large-Scale Scrum as Scrum, we’ll need to find a similar balance, so that we will be able to say:
For large groups, LeSS hits the sweet spot between defined concrete elements and empirical process control.
This leads to some decisions in the creation of LeSS:
- LeSS needs to be simple
When scaling, there is a tendency to add roles, artefacts, processes, etc. This should be avoided so that a process can empirically be created by the product group. Most other scaling frameworks fall into the trap of providing a detailed defined process with many prescribed methods. In LeSS we want to avoid that trap and keep LeSS minimal and simple.
- Large-Scale Scrum is truly Scrum scaled
Rather than having Scrum simply as a lower-level building block for a different scaled framework that is inconsistent with Scrum at higher levels, we need to look at Scrum and for each element ask “Why is it there?” followed by “If we have more than one team, how can we achieve the same purpose on a larger scale, and remain consistent with Scrum principles all the way up?”
For more information
Visit the LeSS website to find out more – including case studies about various companies adopting LeSS (Ericsson, JP Morgan, and more).
The Certified LeSS Practitioner Course
In this 3-day highly-participative course, participants get a thorough introduction to LeSS.
Attendees are introduced to — and practice — Systems Thinking with Causal Loop Modeling. There will also be an in-depth clinic with Craig Larman, the co-creator of LeSS, based on his long experience with Large-Scale Scrum adoptions.
LeSS Course Outline
LeSS Overview
- LeSS principles, frameworks, guides, experiments
- two LeSS frameworks: basic & LeSS Huge
- learning resources
Adoption
- pre-adoption: building interest
- the adoption guides
- 3 principles
- getting started
- scope of first adoption
- stories of LeSS adoptions
Local Optimization & System Optimization
- local versus global systems optimization
- local optimization in backlogs
- local optimization in product definition
- local optimization in planning
- local optimization in in analysis & design
- local optimization in programming
Product Definition
- redefining the scope of product, and the impact on global optimization
- portfolio management
Adoption: Organizing by Customer Value
- towards global optimization: multiple feature teams on one product
- adoption & organizational design implications of feature teams
- 3 types of development
- where is the Product Owner?
- discovering/defining your product scope in LeSS
- incremental change: feature-team adoption mapping
Why LeSS?
- shu-ha-ri and frameworks
- empirical process control
- why “More with LeSS”?
- systems optimization
- occupational psychology
- lean thinking & value-driven
LeSS Sprint
- preparation meetings before first Sprint
- Sprint Planning with many teams
- coordination & integration: from communities to architecture
- scaling Product Backlog Refinement
- scaling the Sprint Review & Retrospective
- multisite
Done & Undone in LeSS
- perfect and imperfect Done
- improvement, organizational design, and Done
- handling Undone
- shipping and DevOps
LeSS Rules
- rules for smaller LeSS framework
- rules for LeSS Huge
LeSS Huge Framework
- Requirement Areas
- Area Product Owners
- role of Overall Product Owner
- Area Backlogs
- adoption
More on LeSS Principles
- systems thinking and causal-loop modeling
- whole-product focus
- lean thinking
- queuing theory
More on LeSS Roles
- Managers in a LeSS organization
- Scrum Masters at scale
- Product Owner in LeSS
In-Depth Special Topics: A Deep-Dive Q&A Clinic
Although there are some constants in a LeSS adoption, there are many variations, due to myriad contexts. And there are many special-topic questions that participants have, usually variations of “When scaling Scrum, how do we…?” These questions range from “contracts to career path.” Therefore, a full half-day to day of this course is dedicated to a structured Q&A session that works through a group-prioritized list of burning issues and questions.
Craig Larman, drawing on his many years of experience of actual LeSS adoptions, will dialogue and explore solutions with the group.