Whilst becoming proficient at single-team Agile development is not easy, scaling to many teams and/or many sites adds many additional challenges. Often these challenges include...
1. Water-Scrum-Fall
2. The 'contract game' and its misalignment with "customer collaboration over contract negotiation"
3. Release rigidity - inability to adjust scope and/or release timing in order to maximise value for money
4. Dependency hell
5. Skills bottlenecks
6. Lack of design and architectural alignment whilst avoiding 'ivory tower' architecture
7. Lack of cross-team learning
8. Organisational misalignment issues outside of delivery teams
Not all scaling frameworks marketed as Agile are designed to address these problems. In this session, Rowan will introduce Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) as an organisational design framework and illustrate how it provides solutions to problems that commonly lead to friction, deliver challenges and difficulties realising the benefits of Agile within large programs and product development efforts. Rowan will outline each organisational dysfunction / scaling challenge, and connect these with the elements of LeSS that avoid the dysfunction or greatly LeSSen the problem. LeSS is more widely applicable than some other scaling frameworks having been designed to work for two teams all the way up to a few thousand people working on a single customer-centric product in the case of the LeSS Huge framework. LeSS has been implemented in a variety of large-scale product development groups in a wide variety of domains including...
• telecom-equipment creators such as Ericsson & Nokia Networks
• investment and retail banks such as JP Morgan Chase and BAML
• trading-system creators such as ION Trading
• gaming site creators such as bwin
• offshore outsourcers such as Valtech India
About Rowan:
Rowan Bunning is an Australian pioneer of the world’s most widely used Agile framework - Scrum. Rowan has trained around 3,000 people in Australia and New Zealand making him one of the most experienced Agile trainers in the region.
Rowan is a practitioner first and foremost having begun using Agile software development practices (then known as eXtreme Programming) in 2001 and introduced Scrum company-wide in 2003 to deliver projects and innovative enterprise products in complex environments.
As an Agile Coach in Europe and Australia since 2008, Rowan has a track record of facilitating rapid Agile transformations including team building, ScrumMaster mentoring, management consulting and cultural change at organisations ranging from start-ups to global brand-name enterprises across the real estate, media, food, building security, data security, collection and content management industries as well as the public sector.
Rowan’s Agile Coaching engagements include successful Scrum transformation for an in-flight programme with an expected spend of over $100M, a Scrum initiative that scaled up to 160 team members and delivered an enterprise solution to 43 countries as well as introducing Scrum within a global engineering company of over 400,000 personnel.
Rowan has been running high impact Scrum courses both publicly and privately since 2008. His courses include two and three day Certified ScrumMaster® and Certified Scrum Product Owner® courses with associated accreditations with the Scrum Alliance. As a Mountain Goat Software Authorised Trainer, he also offers one day courses on Effective User Stories and Agile Estimating and Planning as licensed from Mike Cohn - author of the most popular books on these topics.
Rowan founded Agile Canberra in 2007 and helped to initiate Scrum User Groups in Sydney and Brisbane in 2008. Rowan holds a Bachelors degree in Information Technology, is a PRINCE2® Practitioner, is Cognitive Edge accredited, is a trained Innovation Games® facilitator and is a Certified LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) Practitioner. As a director of not-for-profit Scrum Australia, Rowan has been heavily involved with organising two sold-out Regional Scrum Gatherings® in Australia.
