Bas Vodde at the 3rd Annual Large Scale Scrum Conference

This week in New York City the Lower East Side is host to the 3rd Annual LeSS Conference. I stopped by the conference today and had the chance to sit down with Bas Vodde to talk about Large Scale Scrum and the annual event they hold to bring the coaches, trainers and practitioners of LeSS together. 

The LeSS Conference is not like a standard IT Conference. During the interview Bas explains how their approach to setting up and running the event focuses on letting the on-site attendees drive the content and work together to develop new tools, games, and techniques to help  the growth, adoption and practice of Large Scale Scrum.

If you aren’t familiar with LeSS, this interview will help you get an understanding of how this approach to scaling has a philosophy that aims to simplify things as much as possible in order to create greater understanding of what is blocking an organization from being able to truly adopt an agile approach to work. During the conversation we dig into what happens to the traditional portfolio and program view when you adopt LeSS and take a more product focused approach to work. We also discuss the difference between LeSS and LeSS Huge, which is designed to help organizations running upwards of 8 teams create products using agile.

If you’d like to learn more about Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), including case studies, please check:

http://less.works

If you are having trouble finding someone to help you implement LeSS, send an email to support@less.works

And if you’d like to reach out to Bas directly, send an email to basv@odd-e.com

Scaling Scrum with Less - A ProjectsatWork interview with Bas Vodde

Scaling Scrum is an ongoing hot topic in the Agile space. For a while the most common answer to the question was scrum of scrums. It's a sensible approach, and it works... up to a point, and then... maybe not so much.

Over the past few years new options have emerged. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has gained a lot of attention over the past few years (as well as heated debates), but it is not the only option available. 

Since 2005 Bas Vodde (of Odd-e) and Craig Larman have been working on applying apply Agile and Scrum to very large and multisite product development. The result of this collaboration is Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), a framework that is designed to allow you to take the practices of “One-Team Scrum” and scale it up. One of the great things about this approach is that if you are already working with Scrum at the team level, a lot of the work practices are maintained, so you may encounter less dissonance than you’d experience from introducing an array of new practices and workflows. The idea is to allow room for coordinating more complex efforts while still keeping things as simple as possible. 

LeSS offers two different approaches for scaling up with Scrum.  If you are working with up to eight teams of not more than eight people per team, you would use LeSS. But if you need something larger, LeSS Huge has been used with efforts that involve as many as 2,500 people, all working on a single product. To date, LeSS has been used by product companies, project based companies and by companies that want to develop products internally. 

If you are curious about LeSS, you can check out my podcast interview with Bas Vodde.

And if you want to know more about how it has been applied by organizations like Alcatel Lucent, Bank of America, Nokia, JP Morgan Chase, and others, the LeSS.works website has a number of case studies available here.