Certified LeSS Practitioner

Learn with Craig Larman—the co-creator of LeSS.

In his 3-day highly-participative course, participants (senior managers, agile coaches, …) get a thorough understanding of LeSS, Large-Scale Scrum, for scaling agile development to many teams working together on one product. In-depth, we explore adoption, new organizational design, systems thinking & optimization, the role of management, and very concretely how to work together in a Sprint at scale in terms of coordination, architecture, planning, and much more.

Bonus: Each day there is an in-depth Q&A clinic with Craig Larman, based on his long experience with LeSS adoptions.

Feedback from previous courses

“It was inspiring to discuss Large-Scale Scrum with Craig Larman. The content of the course was top-notch.” – Steve Alexander

“The delivery was outstanding and the supporting material vast and detailed.” – Simone Zecchi

“The best course I have ever been on. Totally blown away.” – Simon Power

In addition to course material, each participant will also receive 3 books on LeSS:

Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS
Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite & Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum
Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum

After course completion…

All participants will be a Certified LeSS Practitioner 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.

Who this course is for

Agile Coaches, Senior Managers, Change Managers, Project Managers, Product Owners and Scrum Masters.

Learning outcomes for this course

LeSS Overview

LeSS principles, frameworks, guides, experiments
two LeSS frameworks: basic & LeSS Huge
learning resources

Adoption

pre-adoption: building interest
the adoption guides
3 principles
getting started
scope of first adoption
stories of LeSS adoptions

Local Optimization & System Optimization

local versus global systems optimization
local optimization in planning
local optimization in in analysis & design
local optimization in programming & technology

Adoption: Organizing by Customer Value

towards global optimization: multiple feature teams on one product
adoption & organizational design implications of feature teams
3 types of development
where is the Product Owner?
discovering/defining your product scope in LeSS
incremental change: feature-team adoption mapping

Why LeSS?

shu-ha-ri and frameworks
empirical process control
why ”More with LeSS”?
systems optimization
occupational psychology
lean thinking & value-driven

LeSS Sprint

preparation meetings before first Sprint
Sprint Planning with many teams
coordination & integration: from communities to architecture
scaling Product Backlog Refinement
scaling the Sprint Review & Retrospective
multisite

Done & Undone in LeSS

perfect and imperfect Done
improvement, organizational design, and Done
handling Undone
shipping and DevOps

LeSS Rules

rules for smaller LeSS framework
rules for LeSS Huge

LeSS Huge Framework

Requirement Areas
Area Product Owners
role of Overall Product Owner
Area Backlogs
adoption

More on LeSS Principles

systems thinking and causal-loop modeling
whole-product focus
lean thinking
queuing theory

More on LeSS Roles

Managers in a LeSS organization
ScrumMasters at scale
Product Owner in LeSS

In-Depth Special Topics: A Deep-Dive Q&A Clinic

Although there are some constants in a LeSS adoption, there are many variations, due to myriad contexts. And there are many special-topic questions that participants have, usually variations of “When scaling Scrum, how do we…?” These questions range from “contracts to career path.” Therefore, a full half-day to day of this course is dedicated to a structured Q&A session that works through a group-prioritized list of burning issues and questions. Craig Larman, drawing on his many years of experience of actual LeSS adoptions, will dialog and explore solutions with the group.

After course completion…

Prerequisites

Basic Scrum knowledge is expected and can be achieved by attending a Certified ScrumMaster or a Professional ScrumMaster course, or thoroughly reading Scrum introduction material such as the Scrum Primer or the Scrum Guide and practicing Scrum.