This post is cross-posted from the Tabar page at their blog

LeSS is more in Australia

It was great to have Bas Vodde in Melbourne from 24 - 26 February 2015 to bring the first Certified LeSS Practitioner course to Australia. Its been several months in the making following a plot with Bas to visit Australia, crafted over great Japanese barbeque and Sake at Clarke Quay in Singapore. The Melbourne location was also good enticement to exploring Tasmanian Whisky in pursuit of the most excellent in the world! With that trigger discussion still clear in my memory I started day 1 of the 3 day LeSS training with Bas and 15 others at our partner organisation Elabor8’s training room.

My initial expectation of LeSS was that there could not be that much more to scaling Scrum that we weren’t already intuitively doing in some way, so anything new under the sun? I was very wrong! It dawned quickly that what Bas presented was taking Scrum itself to a whole new level of excellence! What I learned was somewhat of a surprise because “LeSS lets you do better Scrum” too. It’s not only about scaling teams and large product delivery but also at the same time amplifying the practical goodness at the heart of Scrum i.e. the agile stuff that really works. The course also brings many new agile aspects to the fore while also remaining simple, compact and focused. The particularly powerful concepts that resonated deeply with me were:

This post is cross-posted from the Gosei page at their blog

Comparing LeSS and SAFe

Both Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) have a history with Nokia and use it as a reference. What most people do not realize, is that Nokia was two big loosely coupled companies. LeSS was and is mostly used at Nokia Networks (now still called Nokia Networks) side while SAFe was mostly used at Nokia Mobile Phones side (now mostly Microsoft or closed down).

Cross-posted. Find the original at the SolutionsIQ Website at this link

We’ve got a guest post from Ran Nyman who briefly reviews last weeks Certified LeSS Practitioner course:

Last week I participated Certified LeSS Practitioner course that was thought by Bas Vodde in Helsinki, Finland. Bas is one of the key persons behind the LeSS-framework, who has co-authored 2 and half books on the subject (The half if upcoming Large-Scale Scrum book that is not published yet). Before the course, I had spent time at reading already published books and draft of the upcoming book. The amount of material is overwhelming, and it was interesting to see how all the content can be compressed to 3 days course.

Last week, I finished the first Certified LeSS Practitioner course in Helsinki, Finland. It went really well I think. A lot of my training material is in a new order than I’m used to so that caused me to be somewhat uncertain about timing and things like that. Also the participants were probably above average in LeSS knowledge as some of them I’ve been working with for years (whereas some were quite new).

The first day, we focused on the LeSS overview and the LeSS principles. We also did some causal loop diagramming. One team decided to use it to ‘proof’ that offshoring was a bad idea but the further they went the better it started to loop. It wasn’t what they were expecting making it quite amusing. We also looked at feature teams and component team structures.