LeSS Newsletter - October 2017 - LeSS Conference

Hi,

The LeSS Conference 2017 London happened 3 weeks ago. I'm sad it's over and missing all the great people there. In this newsletter we'll only focus on the LeSS Conference and share what happened there.

LeSS Introduction Video

We started off the conference with a new LeSS video. We've been secretly working on a good introduction video now for quite a while and were happy it is done, happy with the result and happy to announce it at the conference. The video introduces the LeSS framework and clarifies why adopting LeSS can be so wickedly hard for organizations. We hope you like the video and that it will be of use.

LeSS Books for Certified LeSS Practitioners and Executives

The second announcement at the LeSS Conference is that the Large-Scale Scrum book and the Scaling Lean & Agile Development book are now available for anyone who has participated in a Certified LeSS Practitioner or Certified LeSS for Executives course. You can find them by logging in on the site and going to your learning resources menu where there is a LeSS books option.

LeSS Conference Session Material

Most of the conference session material is available on the LeSS site. You can find it at the specific session where there is now a "download material" option available. You can see all the session that happened at the conference program.

LeSS Conference Summary

I'd like to share my (Bas here) summary of the LeSS Conference experience. We started with opening the conference with the above announcements after which Craig had a presentation about interesting techniques. Both me and Craig decided to try to keep our talks as concrete as possible. That said, Craig did manage to finally share his love for APL by showing a video about implementing Conway's Game of Life in APL.

After Craig's session, we started the team-based conference theme. We tried this last year, and decided to do it again this year. The idea is to encourage everyone to join a team and share their conference experiences within their team to maximize everybody's learning. A nice side effect is that you get to know a bunch of new people. Greg Hutchings facilitated a self-designing team workshop where teams got formed. The team members introduced themselves to each other and picked a name. I wrote a blog post on the team-based conference experience in case you want to know more!

Ari Tikka facilitated the opening of the Open Space, which we kept as a separate track. The Open Space space was in a lounge area under the main hall and it was a nice space to hang out. We failed a little on documenting the sessions, so if you joined and want to add some to the summary, let me know! The open space sessions that we know about can be found in the LeSS Conference Open Space blog post.

The rest of the conference consisted of several tracks with sessions going on in parallel. I started off by joining the experience track where case studies were shared. Most of the time I spent in either the experiments track, or just walking around talking to people. There were a lot of great people there. Unfortunately I missed the Games track and the Training Snippets tracks completely. I did crash into some Open Space sessions, which were great.

At the end of day #1 we had a social event with drinks in the main hall. I've had some excellent discussions with people there. There was no food, unfortunately, but then pizza emerged as a solution to that problem. I've never seen 25 pizzas been eaten that fast though.

I had a talk about coaching LeSS Huge at the beginning of the second day. It summarized some coaching activities that I've done in one LeSS Huge adoption. I tried as much as possible to make it concrete so people can take away practices and start experimenting with them. The feedback I got was quite positive (or... I got only the positive feedback).

The rest of the day continued with the parallel tracks as during day 1. Towards the end of the conference the teams convened to work on an expression of their conference experience. This was followed by a Conference Review Bazaar facilitated by Craig. There is much to say and share about this, so I wrote another blog post about this for if you want to know more!

Conference videos

Jurgen de Smet made two wonderful summary videos of the conference.

More LeSS Conference videos can be found at:

• LeSS Conference Announcement
• LeSS Conference Introduction
• Interview with Davel Shar
• Interview with Greg Hutchings
• Interview with Ben Maynard
• Interview with Jacek Bochenek and Michael James
• Interview with Viktor Grgic