Whilst becoming proficient at single-team Agile is not easy, scaling to many teams and/or many sites adds many additional challenges.
Often these challenges include...
1. Water-Scrum-Fall
2. The 'contract game' and its misalignment with "customer collaboration over contract negotiation"
3. Release rigidity - inability to adjust scope and/or release timing in order to maximise value for money
4. Dependency hell
5. Skills bottlenecks
6. Lack of design and architectural alignment whilst avoiding 'ivory tower' architecture
7. Lack of cross-team learning
8. Organisational misalignment issues outside of delivery teams
Not all frameworks marketed as Agile are designed to address these problems. In this session, Rowan will introduce Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) as an organisational design framework and illustrate how it provides solutions to problems that commonly lead to friction, deliver challenges and difficulties realising the benefits of Agile within large programs and product development efforts.
Rowan will outline each organisational dysfunction / scaling challenge, and connect these with the elements of LeSS that avoid the dysfunction or greatly LeSSen the problem.
LeSS is more widely applicable than some other scaling frameworks having been designed from the ground-up to work for efforts from two teams all the way up to a few thousand people in the case of the LeSS Huge framework.
LeSS has been implemented in a variety of large-scale product development groups in a wide variety of domains including...
• telecom-equipment creators such as Ericsson & Nokia Networks
• investment and retail banks such as JP Morgan Chase and BAML
• trading-system creators such as ION Trading
• gaming site creators such as bwin
• offshore outsourcers such as Valtech India
