A basic overview of Large Scale Scrum LeSS

Help teams to produce maximum client satisfaction and product quality. Interestingly, even some Executive Directors (a relatively high-level role in the bank) who had previously been excellent developers , returned to hands-on development, the work they got the most satisfaction from. These moves have been publicly recognized and well-rewarded. Since a real Scrum Team is self-organizing teams without a team lead, the role was eliminated. Identification and development of master programmers as teachers who work directly with teams to coach Extreme Programming techniques, such as TDD. Clear articulation of the products the department supports and identification of Product Owners empowered to make release date, content, and priority decisions each Sprint.

large-scale scrum (LeSS)

Product Backlog Refinement – The process of refining the list of tasks to be completed to improve the product. Daily Scrum – Every day, the team comes together to evaluate progress, challenges, and inefficiencies. Sprint Planning – This is the first step of each Sprint, during which the teams plan the Sprint https://globalcloudteam.com/ Goal and the work to be done to achieve it. Sprints – Sprints are short operational cycles, which usually last around a month. During each Sprint, the teams work together on a certain task. In particular, a lot of the framework’s success is based on certain events that take place on a regular basis.

Benefits of the LeSS framework

In terms of large, what’s a typical LeSS adoption case? We’ve been involved in adoptions of that size, of a few hundred people, and up to a LeSS Huge case of well over a thousand people, far too many development sites, tens of millions of lines of C++, with custom hardware. Both DevOps and Agile are cultural movements that inspire organizations to reach higher. Read here to learn exactly how agile and DevOps interrelate.

large-scale scrum (LeSS)

Project managers can build a Scrum board to chart and keep tabs on their team’s LeSS steps toward completing a project. This is a useful visual tool for all team members, helping to keep everyone on the same page and moving forward at an appropriate pace. Scrum boards may work similarly to a Kanban board, with steps or columns such as To Do, In Progress, or Complete. Scrum project management tools typically come with built-in templates to make setup easier. Afterwards, they use a shared spreadsheet to discuss and write a single example for each of the new split items, so that the people at both sites gain a lightweight but concrete understanding of the details. Later, the group does estimation of the new items, using especially big planning poker cards that can be easily seen by the cameras and video when held up.

Systems thinking—See, understand, and optimize the whole system , and use systems modeling to explore system dynamics. Avoid the local sub-optimizations of focusing on the efficiency or productivity large-scale scrum (LeSS) of individuals and individual teams. Customers care about the overall concept-to-cash cycle time and flow, not individual steps, and locally optimizing a part almost always sub-optimizes the whole.

Next—The next section shifts to the LeSS Huge framework, used for large groups of many teams. Later, Portia and those team members meet with Paolo to review the Product Backlog changes and to answer his questions. From now on they will focus on that tiny bite, clarifying and implementing it.

LeSS Frameworks

Matt Winn is Securities Location Coach for Singapore and Manila at J.P. He is responsible for coaching and mentoring over 100 staff who are members of 14 cross functional and multi-skilled Feature Teams in the Corporate and Investment Bank . Matt and the teams are focused on the Securities Processing product which is integral for many Business Units within the CIB. Prior to his current role he was Chief Business Technologist responsible for several mission critical applications. He has 15 years + of software development experience predominantly in financial services but also in computer communications, computer telephony integration, and the high speed telecommunications network test domains.

One of the leading frameworks is the Scaled Agile Framework® . There is overall product backlog refinement where the product owner again meets team representatives and a scrum master and they talk about what work might be coming up in the upcoming sprints. The leadership session also explored the idea of real feature teams — cross-component and cross-functional feature teams that could delivery end-to-end customer features without handoff, dependency, or delay. This would require the elimination of organizational barriers such as functional departments and component teams, and the related manager roles. SAFe, contrary to LeSS, requires additional roles such as the Release Train Engineer, Solution Train Engineer and Epic Owners.

  • Sprint Review – This event is held at the end of the sprint and aims to review the work completed and the way it changed the organisation.
  • This assumption often leads to the creation of bloated processes.
  • The overall Securities product group works together in one Sprint, with one final shippable product increment.
  • The team members come to know the customer domain of that area well.
  • The feature teams self-manage to deliver the “done” items prioritised by a business-side Product Owner.

The Large Scale Scrum framework is designed to help growing organisations introduce a lightweight framework within their product development projects. The teams might also incorporate aspects of other frameworks such as OKRs to focus on business value. The LeSS Rules define what is LeSS (and what isn’t) and they provide a concrete framework for applying LeSS. Within the LeSS Framework, product groups can apply the experiments and discover what works best for them at a certain moment.

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)

Pablo, the Area Product Owner of asset servicing, comments on some close item relationships he now sees between their areas. Portia agrees to meet with Pablo and some team representatives later. Their first Sprint is an unusual balance of clarification versus development, but nevertheless quite useful in this extreme situation. They spend almost half the Sprint in clarification with Portia, Gillian, and Zak. They expect that in future Sprints, the amount of time needed for clarification will soon drop down to a more common 10% or 15% of their Sprint. Over time an area will change in importance, and then it grows or shrinks with teams joining or departing—most likely to or from another existing area.

large-scale scrum (LeSS)

The original Scrum method was developed for small independent teams. One way of using the same approach for larger and multiple teams is called Large Scale Scrum . Without explicit ROI for difficult decisions the customer is made happy at any cost.

Large Scale Scrum

They’ve been around for years and they were a true pain in the ass when they adopted LeSS. The team contained two former members of their now-abandoned architecture group and a couple of people who had been working on the system for over fifteen years. Those people’s resistance to the LeSS adoption was legendary as they were afraid they’d lose their “system perspective.” To their surprise, the opposite happened! Because of their deep knowledge they continuously get tough items to develop. And they regularly participate as expert-teachers in current-architecture-learning workshops with newcomers, and Mario—one of the former PowerPoint architects—is now coordinator for the architecture community.

Some of the bigger items are split into two or three new smaller ones. On the sixth day, everyone in three of the teams gets together for a multi-team PBR workshop in the big room. There’s no design workshop needed this Sprint related to overall architecture, but she wants to hold a half-day spike in the next Sprint for a new technology. She posts her idea on the community collaboration tool, and suggests the community do the spike together with mob programming to increase their shared learning. The Test community, with volunteers from most teams, gets together for a half-hour to hear Mary’s proposal to try a new automated acceptance-testing tool. They enthusiastically agree, and Mary volunteers her Team Margin to do the actual experimental work next Sprint, since they are really interested in learning this.

Join us for two days of sharing and learning about Scrum at scale.

After Sprint Planning, the teams dive into developing items, with an emphasis on communicating in code. The continuous integration of all code across all teams creates the opportunity to cooperate by checking who else made changes in the component being worked on. That’s useful, because the group uses integration as a way to inform and support their coordination. Roles—One Product Owner, two to eight Teams, a Scrum Master for one to three Teams. Crucially, these Teams are feature teams—true cross-functional and cross-component full-stack teams that work together in a shared code environment, each doing everything to create done items. Empirical process control—Continually inspect and adapt the product, processes, behaviors, organizational design, and practices to evolve in situationally-appropriate ways.

Hubstaff Software Review 2023

The London representatives tape up some flip-chart papers and start writing questions. The Cluj team members enter their questions in separate sheets of a shared spreadsheet. Portia spends some time at the different paper flip charts, discussing answers and sketching on the paper. And she spends some time at the spreadsheet, typing in answers for the Cluj team, while also talking with them face-to-face via the video session.

Scrum vs LeSS

While implementing the small item they had bitten off first, they spend much of the time together at whiteboards to discuss the overall design implications on the system. The team moves frequently back and forth between the code and the wall. And so they also only spend about half the Sprint developing one small item. But the discussion and the learning from coding pays off.

The course contains an overview of LeSS, stories on LeSS adoptions, exercises and extensive LeSS Q&A. Are you planning to introduce a project management software solution to your employee? To help you make the right choice, we’ve gathered the best project management web applications. Used by 800,000+ teams in companies like Airbnb, Google, and Uber, it brings all of your projects into a single app! Built for teams of all sizes and industries, Our fully customizable & proprietary features make it a must-have for anyone wanting to keep project management in one place.

And bottom line, Priti didn’t want any of the other London teams to shift from their current areas. A dispersed team is rarely a real team; it is much more likely a loosely connected groups of individuals. The communication and coordination frictions are higher, and they seldom jell as a team. A few Sprints later… It’s time once more for the per-Sprint Product Owner Team meeting. They use it to align and coordinate between the different Area Product Owners, and for Priti to give guidance.

The LeSS framework structure

The line coaches are learning to support and mentor rather than dictate. For larger requests, release burnup charts have created transparency on progress and release planning. Software is integrated into production every Sprint so nebulous and unpredictable merge, integration, and test phases are a thing of the past. For small, urgent demands the delivery cycle time is being measured and has improved. Within the Securities department some fundamental organisational changes have been implemented, towards a closer-to-real Scrum-based organization.

But each Requirement Area holds its own Sprint Review, all more or less in parallel. Each Requirement Area holds its own Sprint Planning meetings, all more or less in parallel. In Portia’s new area, she starts her Sprint Planning by introducing two unfamiliar faces to the Zombies. As with LeSS, there are rules and optional guides for LeSS Huge; those are introduced in the following stories and fleshed out in later chapters. An early transitional situation when the group is incrementally growing a new area that is fully expected to ultimately have four or more teams. Naturally, four isn’t a magic number, but it strikes a balance so that the product group is not composed of many tiny Requirement Areas.

The other two teams, in discussion with some other traders, hold separate PBR workshops to complete clarification of some items already under refinement and to start on some new ones. Also, one of the company’s three lawyers specializing in financial regulations and compliance joins one of these teams to help them in clarification. On the fifth day, Mark and Mira join an overall PBR workshop, with representatives from each team, and Paolo, the Product Owner. Paolo starts by sharing his current thinking on product direction and where to go next in the short term and, most importantly, why. To help them understand his reasoning, he reviews his prioritization model with the group, that factors in profit impact, customer impact, business risk, technical risk, cost of delay, and more. Later in the day Mark and the rest of Team Trade are doing tasks for their second item.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *