Large Scale Scrum, LeSS for short, has caught your attention. Maybe you’ve just started with Scrum but are already thinking about the next steps. Maybe you’re a veteran of single-team Scrum, looking to expand it to other teams. By @nimblework.com.
LeSS keeps Scrum’s core intact: exposing organizational design weaknesses through a minimal framework and letting you solve the complex problems inherent in development, through empirical process control and continuous improvement.
This article covers:
- Brief history
- Principles, and practices
- Rules
- Practices
- Queueing theory
- Key roles and responsibilities
- Organizational structure
In a LeSS organization there’s no place for project managers or a program/ project management office (PMO). You don’t need them because their responsibilities transfer to a Product Owner and the feature teams, and to avoid confusion and potentially even turf wars. In a LeSS organization, Feature Teams do the development work. They are what others would call product teams. Each team creates and is responsible for end-to-end customer-centric features, rather than components or a technical layer.
LeSS seeks to apply the “principles, purpose, elements, and elegance of Scrum in a large-scale context, as simply as possible.” Among other principles and practices, it uses Lean Thinking and Systems thinking to keep the framework and your overhead as light as possible and still guide you in important decisions.
If you subscribe to the idea of “Less Is More” and want to keep overhead to a minimum. If you value keeping everyone focused on the whole product at all times. If you’re comfortable with running experiments and adapting as you go. If you like teams progressing in their Scrum adoption at their own pace. Then you’re ready to adopt Large Scale Scrum as your framework for scaling agile. Your first step toward that would be to learn more about LeSS, especially its core principles and its principles for adopting it. Super interesting read!
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