More often than not, I wonder as an agile coach, what really is the best way to scale Scrum or Kanban or whatever it is for something the entire organization can adopt. Part of truly being agile involves empowering the teams. One framework which allows for this to happen is known as Large Scale Scrum or LeSS. Large Scale Scrum was started by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman. It is really hard to find organizations that would be interested in enabling the teams and empowering them in order to be able to adopt this framework. If you do find such an organization you’ll find that culture plays a very important role.
One might think that it is easy to go in and lay out all the parts of the framework, expecting everyone within the organization to accept the new way of working. There are challenges the diverse mindsets previously existing within the organization might bring. It is important to keep in mind that going from doing agile to being agile is a journey and, this journey it is best accomplished through continuous improvement and continuous training. It is very much possible that along an organization’s way to adopting this framework it might find a different framework to follow, one that is it’s own creation.
Bas Vodde gave a talk on Large Scale Scrum on 14 March 2017 at 7 PM at the Shipwire office in Sunnyvale, California.