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

Scott Ambler - Disciplined Agile Framework

For large scale organizations that need to scale Agile, one of the biggest challenges is selecting the option that will fit best. In this interview Scott Ambler, co-creator of the Disciplined Agile framework offers explains the origin of DisciplinedAgile, what makes it different than the other scaling options  and how to handle some of the more common issues facing traditional orgs that are trying to adopt Agile and handle governance.

SHOW NOTES

00:07 Interview Begins

00:35 Background on the Disciplined Agile Framework

01:34 The Origin of Disciplined Agile and what it was designed to help with

05:01 What drives organizations to want one common way to practice Agile 

06:13 How Disciplined Agile responds to the desire for one process to rule them all

08:36 If you support multiple approaches to development, how do you bring it all together from a governance perspective and how do you communicate with management about process and progress?

11:10 If you are going to govern, what should you actually be governing?

12:30 Do we really want the PMO to be in charge of governing all aspects of the work?

13:20 How Disciplined Agile looks at the bigger picture with respect to governance

15:55 Making room for someone who can watch how things are being measured and keeping track of performance

16:39 We do not want to inflict the same process on 50 different teams. We need to up our game and look at the full enterprise picture

17:24 Everything in the complex adaptive system impact everything else in the system

17:56 The difference between Disciplined Agile and the other options for scaling Agile

20:55 There is no such thing as a best practice… EVER

21:08 If you want to be effective, pick and choose the techniques that work for you

22:50 Teaching them how to make decisions on their own, rather than just prescribing a solution

23:15 Getting qualified, experienced coaches to help you adopt Disciplined Agile

25:19 How Disciplined Agile makes sure the people teaching it are experienced it and know what they are doing

26:42 The first step is not to park your brain at the door. Hire someone who has experience and knows what they are doing.

27:25 The legions of Agile coaches … a 4 day class does not make you an experienced expert

28:55 Avoiding the trap of hiring “experts” who have merely completed few days of training

30:20 Making the case to senior leadership for taking a more mindful approach, despite the additional risk and effort

31:36 If it took your organization decades to get into the state they are in now, it is not going to go away overnight

32:50 The investment is more than just dollars

34:44 No matter how good we are, there is always something more we can tweak to get better

35:12 Organizations need to wake up, observe and have an honest discussion - make the bigger picture obvious

36:47 If you want to get in touch with Scott

37:44 Scott’s upcoming speaking events

38:22 Interview Ends

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON SCOTT AMBLER AND DISCIPLINED AGILE

http://scottambler.com

http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com

https://disciplinedagileconsortium.org

Descaling the Enterprise with James Gifford

Finding a way to scale Agile within the Enterprise has been a very popular topic in Agile for the past several years. With options like SAFe, LeSS, DAD and many others, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that your organization may simply not be structured in a way that can truly support the introduction of Agile.

In this interview, James Gifford took some time away from coaching and his work on the Agile Uprising to talk about why the conversation should really be about how “Descaling the Enterprise”.

SHOW NOTES

• 00:10 Podcast Begins
• 00:44 The work James is doing now
• 01:45 Finding a job that provides you with a lab where you can run experiments
• 04:05 When you are coaching, how do you maintain the “child mind” when you walk in the door
• 06:10 Do you need to be technical to be a good Agile Coach?
• 07:41 What’s new at The Agile Uprising
• 12:50 Descaling the Enterprise
• 14:30 Making the argument for changing the dynamic of how we look at and structure companies 
• 19:11 Have you ever seen anyone tasked with creating flow through the entire organization?
• 23:17 Making the case for descaling OVER simply buying a scaling solution
• 25:10 How long does it take to implement the cultural and organizational change a descaling approach requires?
• 27:27 How do you convince the “C” level to buy into the upheaval a descaling approach will involve (over just buying the promise of a scaling solution.)
• 29:51 Two leverage points: 1. Scaling didn’t work, but we want what it was supposed to give us, 2. your business is threatened and you need a better response
• 30:50 How do you measure progress while you are descaling?
• 36:36 If you want more on this topic, please let us know!
• 37:00 How to contact James
• 38:52 Podcast Ends

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

Agile Uprising Links
Coalition (The Message Board): https://coalition.agileuprising.com
Manifesto Author Review Podcasts: http://podcast.agileuprising.com/manifesto-author-review/
Lean Agile Intelligence
https://www.leanagileintelligence.com

CONTACTING JAMES

Email: james.gifford@scrummando.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/scrummando
Web: http://scrummando.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scrummando/

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. 

The Agilistocrats 001

Click here to go straight to the podcast

Richard Cheng from Excella Consulting, Dhaval Panchal from Agile 42 and I (Dave Prior from BigVisible Solutions) have started a new series of podcasts focusing on new topics and current trends in Agile. In this podcast we got together to talk about some of the key topics from the Agile 2014 Conference and the current push for Agile in the Enterprise.

This is our first recording and we're looking for feedback (and a better name). Give a listen and let us know what you think.

We'd also like some ideas for new topics to focus on in our next recording. So if you have ideas or questions, please send 'em to agilistocrats@gmail.com.