More Learning on LeSS at the LeSS London Conference

When it comes to taking a whole-product focus to scale agile with Scrum, LeSS (Large Scale Scrum) shines. As an agile product coach, LeSS resonates with me with regards to it’s focus on product, smart use of the Product Owner, reliance on feature teams for product requirements clarification, guidance on smart backlog management, use of multi-team backlog refinement, and collaborative workshops.

That’s why I’m looking forward to this year’s LeSS Conference in London September 13-14.

The tracks (experiments, experience, games, and snippets of LeSS courses) offer variety, depth, and multi-mode learning. Attendees and speakers hail from a truly global community.

I am intrigued and excited to participate in a “team-based” conference whereby each attendee joins a team that convenes throughout the conference to reflect and share what we learned—culminating in an end of conference sharing experience.

To set up our teams, we’ll participate in a self-designing team session, led by Craig Larman and Greg Hutchings. We’ll experience how large-scale scrum teams self-form to create our conference teams. What better way to learn a practice than to use it to explain it!

And there is more.

In addition to Open Space hosted by Ari Tikka there is a Knowledge Café session (a multi-round deep conversation technique, similar to World Café), offered by David Gurteen. You can experience a session on organizational culture presented by Ben Maynards that goes deep into the question of culture and structure using system models.

I’ll have the opportunity to share a useful technique in my session “Product Backlog Refinement with Structured Conversations”, in which I’ll explain how Structured Conversations in facilitated sessions enables you to efficiently explore, evaluate, and confirm a shared understanding of refined backlog items, so they are ready for implementation. (In addition, I’ll be delivering a pre-conference training, Vision to Value: Backlog Refinement Practitioner – registration is now open!)

There will be multiple game sessions at the LeSS conference, including Build a Feature Team facilitated by Wolfgang Richter, and Build Your Own LeSS facilitated by Terry Yin.

That’s just a sampling of some of the sessions you can attend in London.

This unique conference is sure to be a powerful event for sharing, collaborating, learning, and growing your professional network. Join us—and be sure to follow and tweet using #Less2017.

I hope to meet you there!