Overview

First, see http://less.works for a listing of courses, more course descriptions, and a complete introduction to LeSS.

What’s the single most important insight for a senior manager to understand about LeSS, Large-Scale Scrum? That it is not a practice or process. Rather, LeSS is an organizational design, which impacts group structures, hierarchy, site strategy, roles, positions, processes, and basic policies (such as budgeting, career path, and rewards).

Organizational design is the proper remit of executive management, and so it is critical that you actively both learn and lead a successful LeSS adoption. This is not something you can “phone in” your support for, or delegate to mid-level management.

A second key understanding is that this change involves both Product Management and R&D (or “business” and “IT”) together, and so heads of both groups will want to attend together.

In this 2-day highly-participative course, you get a thorough introduction to the organizational design implications of LeSS — in both R&D and Product Management — and managing its adoption, from the perspective of what a senior manager needs to know and do.

As highlighted in The Fifth Discipline — from MIT Sloan School of Business professor Peter Senge, and named by the Harvard Business Review as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years — a critical skill for leadership is Systems Thinking, which is also a cornerstone principle of LeSS. Therefore, a significant part of the course focuses on actively learning to apply Systems Thinking to your organizational system and a LeSS adoption, with Causal Loop Modeling in small groups working together.

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 and working with senior management.

In addition to course material, each participant will also receive 3 books on LeSS:

Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS
Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite & Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum
Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum=

Outline

Introduction

Why LeSS: Benefits to Your Company?
Systems Thinking, Organizational Design, and the Contract Game

Principles & Management Implications

Empirical Process Control for the Entire Organization
Lean Thinking in LeSS: Across All Functions
Systems Thinking: From Local to Global Optimization
Whole-Product Focus: Group and Role Impacts
Customer Centric: Process and Group Impacts

Adoption

The 3 Key LeSS Adoption Principles
Getting Starting
Growing Your Adoption
Culture Follows Structure
Job Safety, but not Role Safety
From Smallish to Huge
Multisite Adoption

LeSS Structure

Feature Teams & Component Teams
ScrumMasters
Role of Managers
Typical Organizational Structures and Patterns
Multisite Implications

LeSS Frameworks

LeSS and LeSS Huge
Product Owner and the 5 Relationships
Definition of Done and it Organizational and Change Impact

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 working with senior managers, will dialog and explore solutions with the group.

Certification

All participants will be a Certified LeSS graduate and will get an account on less.works. Here they can find additional information about LeSS, share course information and stay in contact with the other course participants.

Maximum Participants

30

Environment - Room and Supplies

Read this: Course Environment - LeSS

Texts and Course Notes

There will be several PDFs of course notes, and supporting student learning aids, that will need to be printed and distributed to students

As mentioned, in addition to course material, each participant will also receive 3 books on LeSS:

Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS
Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite & Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum
Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum=

Certified LeSS for Executives: Principles, Organization, and Change

Contents