Craig is back in Toronto again - More with LeSS: A Decade of Descaling with LeSS

Summary:

LeSS Toronto is proud to have the pleasure of hosting one of the most influential and dynamic thought leaders in the Agile world, Craig Larman.

This is a joint event co-hosted with the CGI Agile Community Meetup group. Please register at only one of the two locations - it is not necessary to sign up at both locations.

https://www.meetup.com/CGI-Agile-Community/events/261329762/

Agenda
6:00p.m. to 6:30p.m. - Registration and Networking
6:30p.m. to 7:00p.m. - More Networking and Pizza
7:00p.m. - 8:30 p.m. - Feature Presentation
8:30p.m. - 9:00p.m. - Question & Answer

Craig has been named one of the top 20 Agile influencers of all time and is the co-author of several books on scaling lean & agile development.

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 www.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 firefighter 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 optimize 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.

In addition to speaking at this event, Craig will be teaching the Certified LeSS Practitioner course in our neighborhood in a 3-day course May 27-29 2019.

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/certified-less-practitioner-principles-to-practices-with-craig-larman-tickets-54271300922

https://less.works/course-details/certified-less-practitioner-toronto-1002

LeSS Summary

LeSS www.less.works (Large-Scale Scrum) is the simple high-impact framework for scaling lean and agile development designed to optimize the whole system. It’s based on over a decade of adoptions in many big groups worldwide (e.g., see case studies at https://less.works/case-studies/index.html). In addition to learning about it at www.less.works, it’s described in the three books on LeSS that come from that decade of experience:

Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS
https://www.amazon.com/Large-Scale-Scrum-More-Addison-Wesley-Signature/dp/0321985710

Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking & Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum
https://www.amazon.com/Scaling-Lean-Agile-Development-Organizational/dp/0321480961

Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Successful Large, Multisite & Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum
https://www.amazon.com/Scaling-Lean-Agile-Development-Organizational/dp/0321480961

Although LeSS is described as for scaling, a key purpose of LeSS -- the implication of its name -- is actually descaling through organizational simplification. Descaling the number of roles, organizational structures, dependencies, architectural complexity, management positions, sites, and the number of people. LeSS is not about ‘enabling’ an existing big and clumsy organization to “do agile” by painting agile labels on top, it is about scaling up the simple Scrum framework itself to achieve organizational descaling.

In a way, LeSS is simple because there’s only a small set of elements, whose purpose is transparency and empirical process control. It’s ‘hard’ because transparency reveals weakness, and empiricism requires learning and change rather than following a recipe.

Unlike some other scaling frameworks, LeSS does not define a one-size-fits-all detailed recipe, and like Scrum, is based on recognizing that development is too complex and situational for a prescriptive detailed recipe that a group can just “buy and install.” Rather, it will require creating a learning organization, and lots of situational adaptation. When you simplify and descale, you ought to be able to achieve more impact and flexibility with LeSS.

For a complete bio of Craig Larman:
http://www.craiglarman.com/wiki/index.php?title=Craig_Larman