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LeSS Newsletter - May 2016

2016-05-06

It's already May! We would like to share some of the things we've been doing and working on.

Large Scale Scrum BookLeSS Book

The LeSS book has finally been send for final copy-editing. Thus the the book ought to be out this summer. The writing was planned to take 6 months but took 3 years, so as you can imagine, we are so relieved it is finally done. Not just that, it has become so much better than we expected so we're extremely happy with the result. We'll probably send out the next newsletter when it is actually finished.

Rowan Bunning, a ScrumAlliance Scrum Trainer for Australia , was one of the early reviewers and had the following to say:

I've been saying to clients and people in the Agile community for months: "just wait until the new LeSS book comes out". I think that it will represent a significant 'stake in the sand' not just about what LeSS is but about what good Scrum is. I applaud Craig and Bas for taking a stand on clarifying what the implication of Scrum is for organisations in ways that the Scrum Guide is silent about and most Scrum books either omit or provide less well-considered guidance on.

In short, I think this book will help people to see where they are diluting or not properly implementing Scrum - even single team Scrum. If it that happens to a significant extend then I think it will be an important achievement even beyond furthering the adoption of LeSS.

LeSS Conference

Then, just as great news as the book, on August 30-31 we expect to hold the first LeSS conference in Amsterdam. This will be just a smallish conference and both Bas and Craig plan to be there. We've been thinking for months on how to do the conference differently and will be, in the spirit of LeSS, doing several experiments. Let's hope they succeed, if not, at least Amsterdam is a nice place to be in August.

LeSS Site

On the LeSS site, we've been quite busy adding lots of small features such as support for internationalization (e.g. support for Japanese names), graphics summary of the site (work to be done there), improved performance, and LeSS-Friendly Scrum training. The latter allows ScrumAlliance Certified Scrum Trainers and Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers who's scaling part and terminology is in line with LeSS to post their courses on the LeSS site. So, if you are in a LeSS adoption and in need for basic Scrum training, we'd recommend the LeSS-Friendly Scrum trainings.

Last weeks, we've been working on LeSS and Scrum self-assessments on the LeSS Site. TheScrum Test is already available right now. Feel free to share it with others or to use it before a course. Any feedback about it is more than welcome as we're still working on improving it.

Case Studies

Unfortunately, due to the book, we've not been able to review and add a lot of LeSS case studies, so only two new ones were added:

There should be more case studies to come in the following weeks.

Videos and article:

There has been many new videos and articles about LeSS. Bas was in Melbourne a couple weeks ago where he did "The Story of LeSS" talk. A cartoonist (Luke Watson) joined that session and made this wonderful graphic of it. The session wasn't video-ed but it was roughly the same as the talk Bas did in Agile Tour Singapore (see below). So, new videos and articles worthwhile:

LeSS Trainer

Every newsletter we'd like to introduce a LeSS Trainer and this time it is the Greg Hutchings's turn.

Greg is an expert in new product development and organizational improvement, providing training, coaching and consulting. He is the founder of Amelior Services, and leads our training and consulting practices. He can help you to lead change in your teams and organization with an emphasis on improving organizational design, strategy and leadership skills, as well as product management and development capability.


He is qualified to teach and coach Agile, Large Scale Scrum, Lean thinking and Innovation Games and has worked in the domains of Startup and New Product Development, Luxury goods, Digital Entertainment, e-Commerce, Finance, Industrials, Education, High tech and Telecoms. He has led the agile and lean transformation of many large companies over the past 10 years. His diverse experience provides you with alternative perspectives for introducing change and focusing on what is most important to improve first. Greg works with a global network of highly experienced coaches and trainers which permits Amelior Services to offer large companies an integrated, experienced and high quality, dynamic team to provide for their training and coaching needs.


Several large clients that Greg has worked with in LeSS adoptions include Alcatel-Lucent(fixed access and wireless product divisions), Bwin.party and PayU, a Naspers Group company. Greg engagement model includes consulting with the executive leadership team, a deep dive with product and R&D management, training and coaching of HR, organizational structure and site strategy advice and management, and in-depth work with teams. He compliments LeSS with Innovation Games to improve consumer and B2B customer understanding, provide large scale retrospectives, create dynamic product roadmaps and to introduce an optimizing and adaptive portfolio governance process. In addition to in-depth client work, Greg also offers a small number of public LeSS and Innovation Games training sessions.