The first newsletter of 2018. Yeah! First of all, we wish you a happy and LeSS-Friendly 2018!

Reflection on 2017

Starting 2018, I (Bas here) have to do the obligatory reflection on 2017. Last year, in many ways, was yet another rollercoaster ride. So much stuff happening.

In the beginning of the year, the main LeSS Huge adoption I've been involved with took some important next steps of expanding the Definition of Done in two areas to a level that was previously considered impossible. I've supported the areas as much as I could and had enormous amount of fun working with the teams (for those reading this, thanks!). They started working really well which was very nice to see. Towards the end of the year, the adoption took some interesting unexpected turns and I'm looking forward to see what will happen in the future. For me though, it meant I'll move on to a new challenge and this year I'll be joining a new LeSS Huge adoption at a big bank in Singapore. I'm excited about working with the people there and my family is excited about me not travelling as much as the previous years.

From the LeSS Company perspective, we've had a record amount of people joining Certified LeSS Practitioner (CLP) courses. We didn't have a lot of new LeSS Trainers but did increase the amount of candidate LeSS Trainers that are working towards becoming a LeSS Trainer. We started a mentoring program for the most promising candidate trainers and I've heard positive comments about that. 2017 also brought us a couple of new very interesting LeSS adoptions and I'm looking forward to hearing more about. Also, last year re-confirmed our recommendation to not do all-at-once huge LeSS Huge adoptions. Please don't, we don't want to see the pain that they can cause to organizations and people. LeSS Huge should be adopted incrementally and evolutionary in order to get a deep understanding and engagement of the teams and to allow for solving problems in a smaller scope before exposing them to too many teams. 2017 also brought us the cooperation with Scrum Alliance which I'll share more about later in this newsletter.

So....2018? There are a lot of case studies being written right now and I'm looking forward having them published in 2018. We're likely to see an increase in the number of LeSS Trainers (coming out of the mentoring). The first results of a couple of fascinating LeSS Huge adoptions should be visible. The cooperation with Scrum Alliance will happen and will bring new interesting opportunities. All in all, it looks like 2018 will be a pretty exciting year!

Learning Resources

A bunch of useful articles about LeSS or LeSS related topics been written and we'd like to share some of these.

• Interview with Bas Vodde at Agile 2017
• The LeSS Dynamics Games - Cesario Ramos
• How to Change Thinking in the Top Management - Ari Tikka
• “It's almost impossible” - Why is it necessary to start a journey into Agility with the redesign of the organization - Wolfgang Steffens, Ran Nyman
• Review of Certified LeSS Practitioner with Craig Larman - Gene Gendel
• Complexity Theories and Systems Thinking: Parallels and Differences
• Chris Argyris: Theories of Action, Double-Loop Learning and Organizational Learning

LeSS Events

We usually do not use the LeSS Newsletter to inform people about specific events (except for the LeSS Conference), but this time we'll make an exception for a couple of events which might interest people.

• LeSS Conference 2018 - New York (more information later, but you can reserve the dates)
• LeSS Coach Camp 2018 - Berlin
• New LeSS Community: LeSS Hamburg
• A LeSS-Friendly conference: Agile Austria

Scrum Alliance cooperation

Last year, we announced closer cooperation with Scrum Alliance without providing any details yet about what that would mean. At the end of 2017, we worked together with Scrum Alliance to work out the initial details and we’d like to share some of those with you (and more from Scrum Alliance here).

The key areas of cooperation are:

• LeSS will be the current scaling offering promoted and supported by Scrum Alliance. The Certified LeSS Practitioner (CLP) and Certified LeSS for Executives (CLE) will be integrated in the Scrum Alliance certification offerings
• Scrum Trainers (CSTs) can differentiate their Scrum courses (CSMs) by making them consistent with LeSS (LeSS-Friendly). These will be listed also on the LeSS site and will be the recommended Scrum courses for companies involved in LeSS adoptions.
• A new 1-day introductory LeSS course (Certified LeSS Basics or CLB) will be created and the Scrum Trainer (CSTs and CECs) who have demonstrated their deep understanding of LeSS will be able to provide these. They can be combined with a CSM to provide a 3-day training program with 2 days focusing on Scrum and one additional day focusing on LeSS.
• Scrum Alliance and LeSS Company will actively look for mutual benefits and technical integration to better support our customers and users.

We are excited about the cooperation with Scrum Alliance and benefits it can provide to people involved in LeSS adoptions.

Certified LeSS Basics

From 2018, we’ve incorporated a new 1-day LeSS introduction to our training offerings called Certified LeSS Basics. This course can be combined with a CSM in a 3-day Scrum/LeSS training program. The main topics that will be covered:

• Why LeSS?
• Overview of ‘basic’ LeSS and introduction to LeSS Huge.
• LeSS Rules and Principles.
• Organizing around customer value using feature teams.

The details of the CLB can be found from here.

The CLB can be taught by LeSS Trainers (CLTs) and by LeSS-Friendly Scrum Trainers. On the LeSS Site here is more information about LeSS-Friendly Scrum Trainers.

Renewal Certificates

Both CLP and CLE originally had an expiration of two years. For some of the early participants, this has already expired and we've been receiving requests about how to renew. After some discussions, we've decided that currently we do not offer enough value to request a renwal fee. Therefore, we are not going to require renewal at this moment and we'll keep working the next year to increase the amount of value people get from being a CLP. As some people want to contribute or want to get their expiration date to be updated, we'll offer optional renewal somewhere later this year. When we feel we're offering enough value to CLPs, in the future, then we'll ask people to renew or let their CLP expire. More about this later.