Certified Large- Scale Scrum (LeSS) Practitioner with Ben Maynard

The Certified LeSS Practitioner course is an in-depth course covering the LeSS principles, framework and rules, and guides. This is not your standard agile training course or your standard course on the Scrum framework. It is so much more.

Whether you are a newly minted Scrum Master looking to accelerate their Scrum knowledge, a Product Owner wanting to find out how to make Product delivery work at scale or a manager needing guidance on organisational design, this is the course for you.

What is LeSS?

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) was created by Craig Larman, and Bas Vodde is a unique blend of organisational design, framework, principles, rules and guides. It is the only tried and tested Scrum-based framework that has successfully allowed companies to deliver complex products with multiple agile teams all working in harmony.

It has all of the Scrum practices, such as the Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospectives and Sprint Planning. More than this, it adds a whole group-wide Retrospective known as the Overall Retrospective. This is the ideal event for Scrum Masters to share systemic insights and something you can learn so much more about on the Certified LeSS Practitioner course.

Want to know how it works? We recommended this video to give you a taster and this course for the full meal.

 LeSS is much more than just the LeSS and LeSS Huge frameworks.

What’s The Most Critical Insight For Someone To Understand About LeSS & The Certified LeSS Practitioner Course?

 LeSS is an organisational design which impacts group structures, hierarchy, site strategy, roles, positions, processes, and basic policies (such as budgeting, career path, and rewards).

Organisational design is the proper remit of executive management, so you must act to learn and lead a successful LeSS adoption. This is not something you can “phone in” your support for or delegate to mid-level management.

A second critical understanding is that this change involves both Product Management and R&D (or “business” and “IT”) together, so heads of both groups will want to attend together.

As highlighted in The Fifth Discipline — by MIT Sloan School of Business professor Peter Senge and named by the Harvard Business Review as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years — a critical skill for leadership is Systems Thinking, which is also a cornerstone principle of LeSS.

Therefore, a significant part of the course focuses on active learning to apply Systems Thinking to your organizational system and a LeSS adoption, with Causal Loop Modelling in small groups working together

Project to Product

Large Scale Scrum goes above and beyond the Scrum Framework and practices It provides essential guidance for moving from a Project-driven to a Product-led organisation through using & improving LeSS.

LeSS Framework – Roles, Events & Guides

The course deeply delves into the most critical part of the LeSS Framework.

• We learn the LeSS events and how to facilitate them whilst building a Lego town.
• We explore why the Scrum Team does not exist in LeSS and what replaces it
• How the role of the Product Owner shifts from being involved in the clarification of Product Backlog Items to setting the direction of the Product
• We make clear how the role of Scrum Master evolves to cover multiple teams
• We introduce new roles such as LeSS Manager and Area Product Owners in LeSS Huge and spend time understanding how Scrum Masters can support them effectively.
• Exercises and extensive LeSS Q&A to ensure we discuss the topics most interesting to the participants.

What, No Scrum Team?

In LeSS, there is no Scrum Team, not one. the roles you would expect are still there (Product Owner, Scrum Master and Team), with the Scrum Team concept being replaced by the Product Group. 

The Role of Scrum Master in LeSS

The best way to describe a Scrum Master is LeSS as a Product Group Coach, much more similar to what we know as an Agile Coach role. Part of this increase in responsibility is due to the replacement of the Scrum Team with the Product group, which leads the scope of the Scrum Master role to increase.

Who Is This Course For?

The Certified LeSS Practitioner course is for:

• Scrum Master’s
• Product Owner’s
• Agile Coaches
• Managers in an Agile environment
• Project Managers (whether agile projects or otherwise)
• Anyone involved in a LeSS effort
• Anyone who is LeSS Curious