Certified LeSS for Executives - Principles, Organization, and Change
For more about LeSS, see LeSS.works
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
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, at least 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.
Greg Hutchings has worked for years scaling lean and agile, and has introduced LeSS to large global companies including Alcatel-Lucent and bwin.party digital entertainment. He is fluent in French and English, and will be available for Q&A in french and followup discussions.
For more information...
The website for LeSS, including case studies of various companies adopting LeSS (Ericsson, JP Morgan, and more) is http://less.works.
There are three 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
Bio of Craig Larman, co-creator of LeSS