What is LeSS Scrum?

You Asked for It, Winnow Management is Delivering It

Your feedback matters to Winnow Management. Many of you have asked questions about how to use Scrum on a larger scale with multiple teams. Until recently, you had to travel outside of the country to receive training on LeSS. We understand you need sessions closer to home to reduce your expenses and shorten the amount of time for you to bring information back to your team. From July 22 to 24, we will be offering instruction on Large-Scale Scrum at the Westin on Fort Lauderdale Beach and from August 24th - 26th at Penn State Great Valley in Malvern (near Philadelphia.) We hope to see you there!

If you are in charge of managing a large project for your organization, Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) can help you do that in a timely and efficient manner. LeSS uses the same features and functions of regular Scrum but on a larger scale. It allows you to operate in a multi-team environment with Scrum scaled to all different levels. LeSS introduces a new set of rules that can help you uncover problems within the organization. Once issues are identified, it is up to the team to employ lean thinking and other Scrum principles in order to resolve them.

How LeSS Expands on Scrum Principles

For people who are already accustomed to working with Scrum, adapting to LeSS won't be a huge change. It still employs the basic principles of lean thinking, systems thinking, empirical process control, transparency, and continuous improvement towards excellence. One of the challenges in implementing LeSS is keeping the end result focused on the customer. While this is simple to execute with a single small, team or group, adding multiple people and groups to the project can result in some groups being uncertain of the effect of their code on the end user. Fortunately, LeSS has built-in protections that allow everyone in your organization to connect with the customer's experience.

To achieve the goal of remaining customer-centric, managers create feature teams among all LeSS participants. The purpose of each team is to focus on a different area of customer requirements.

Scaling Scrum

When you implement LeSS, it's important to use the best features of the one-Scrum Team elements. You can then determine how to implement them on a large scale while remaining within the confines of standard expectations for using Scrum. With LeSS, you have the option of working with two different large-scale Scrum frameworks. The first allows you to form up to eight different teams with up to eight people in each team. The second, called LeSS Huge, allows companies to have several thousand people actively involved in the same project. The primary difference with LeSS and LeSS Huge when compared to regular Scrum is that all users focus on the project as a whole rather than only their individual parts.

As a scaled up version of regular Scrum, LeSS retains and uses many of the same core principles. With LeSS, you can expect a single “definition of done” for all teams, one overall Product Owner, a single Product Backlog, and no specialist teams. At the end of each Sprint, there is a potential of one shippable product.

Training for Current Scrum Users

One of the major benefits of LeSS is that it's simple to bring teams onboard when they've already used the small scale version of Scrum. Before implementing LeSS, it's important for everyone to understand its benefits and why your company has chosen to use it. As teams are established, they should be expected to take individual and corporate responsibility for their shared work product. You need to decide upfront whether to use dedicated teams, cross-functional teams, or a combination of both. The next step is to hire or appoint someone with a proven record of serving as both a coach and a teacher. This is essential to reduce training time and get the project underway as soon as possible. Come join us for this rare and exciting certification opportunity!