Certified LeSS Practitioner by Craig Larman in London

I recently attended the first of hopefully many Certified LeSS Practitioner Courses in London. We were facilitated, trained and educated by Craig Larman, one of the co creators of the LeSS framework to scaling agile in organisations. Over a year prior to the course, I had participated as one of the lead coaches in a LeSS adoption for a large gambling company, so I had already read the two existing books, Scaling Lean and Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum: Successful Large, Multisite and Offshore Products with Large-scale Scrum and Practices for Scaling Lean and Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum.

Coming into the course, I felt I knew LeSS and that I was at risk of just hearing everything I had already read. By the end of the first session that was no longer a risk. Overall, my key takeaways were learning from hearing how Craig applies LeSS with clients, attaining a deeper appreciation for the interrelatedness of all the rules and principles, and how much LeSS really is just Scrum, done properly. I also felt challenged in how I understood some parts of basic scrum, and the debates were super beneficial. I also learnt new tools, in particular, Causal Loop diagrams. I really enjoyed Craig’s approach, and “a man walks into the bar” jokes running throughout the course.

So suggested preparation for the course: Know scrum, read the scrum guide,again. Read the 2 and soon to be third book from Craig and Bas on LeSS. There is an assumed level of Scrum to do the course, and I would advise against doing the course if you do not know Scrum very well.

Would I recommend the course: Yes, wholeheartedly. If you have an interest in deeply understanding how to approach “applying scrum” and what supporting factors you need to consider to do so, for one or more teams, then this is a great course to attend. So much so, that I am looking forward to attending the upcoming course lead by Bas

Also, some participants in London gave feedback during an interview, you can find that video here