Certified LeSS for Executives: Principles, Organization, & Change

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Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) is an organizational system for scaling agile development to multiple teams. LeSS builds on top of the Scrum principles such as empiricism, cross-functional self-managing teams of multi-skilled people, and provides a framework for applying that at scale. It provides simple structural rules and guidelines on how to adopt Scrum in large product development.

What’s a key insight for senior managers to understand about LeSS? That it is not a practice or process. Rather, LeSS implies an organizational design change, which impacts group structures, hierarchy, team formation, roles, positions, processes, and basic policies (such as career path).

The Certified LeSS for Executives course is an in-depth course covering the (1) LeSS principles, (2) adoption, (3) the role of management, and (4) broadly, what a senior manager needs to know and do to help. The course includes stories on LeSS adoptions, exercises, and extensive Q&A to ensure we discuss the topics most of interest to the participants.

The Certified LeSS for Executives course is for people in manager roles that support a LeSS effort. And since a change to LeSS involves both Product Management and R&D (or “business” and “IT”) together, senior representatives of both groups will want to attend together.

Course content

The following topics will be covered in the Certified LeSS for Executives course:

• 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 Started
  • Growing Your Adoption
  • Culture Follows Structure
  • Job Safety, but not Role Safety
  • From Smallish to Huge
  • Multisite Adoption
• LeSS Structure & Roles
  • What is your product? A LeSS perspective
  • Organizing around Customer Value and Feature Teams
  • Role of Managers
  • The Business-Driven Product Owner
  • Typical Organizational Structures and Patterns
  • Multisite Implications

After Course Completion

All participants will be a Certified LeSS for Executives and will get an account on less.works. Here they can find additional information about LeSS, share course information and stay in contact with the other course participants.

All participants get access to an electronic copy of all three Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) Books.

Certification

The LeSS Executive Certification will expire after 2 years and will require a renewal fee.