As the co-creator of LeSS (with my friend and colleague Bas Vodde), after a decade of working worldwide with large product groups in their adoption of LeSS (https://less.works/) (Large-Scale Scrum), organizations are starting to realize that the main goal of LeSS is not to enable traditional big groups to "meet their commitment" more efficiently. And they are realizing that LeSS is not “Scrum contained within each team, with something different on top.” It seems some scaling frameworks contain Scrum like a fire fighter contains a brushfire.
Then what is LeSS about? It is to see the ineffectiveness of traditional large-scale organizational design and to change it, by descaling with LeSS towards a simple model for multiple teams that optimizes for agility (flexibility), learning, and flow of value. It is figuring out how, with multiple teams, to apply the simple principles and elements of Scrum that encourage empirical process control, transparency, self-managing teams, and systems optimization.
But any structural change per definition challenges the status quo of middle-management and single-specialist positions, leading to the dynamics of Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior.
In this meetup I'll explore descaling with LeSS
About the Speaker - Craig Larman
Craig Larman is the co-creator (with Bas Vodde) 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, UBS, bwin.party, Nokia Networks and Siemens Networks, Nordea, Cisco-Tandberg, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Alcatel-Lucent, 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 2016 Global Scrum Gathering, the 2015 Manage Agile conference, the 2014 Software Executive Summit, the 2013 Agile India conference, and the 2011 QCon conference.
Craig was one of the first Certified Scrum Trainers, and helped kick off the Agile movement, especially with his 2002 book “Agile & Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide”.
