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Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak about Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) at Agile PM meet up group  in Melbourne.  It was really an honor to speak with such an incredibly experienced, knowledgeable audience. At the end of the session, we had very engaging Q&A.

As part of the session, I shared some of the challenges of  scaling Agile and possible solutions as well. One of the solution being, applying the Large Scale Scrum(LeSS). 

Based on my experience of working on several large scale Agile projects, I have come to realize the following 4 types of challenges common across large enterprises.  They are People, Process, Tools/Technology and Org Structure/Culture. 

I have summarized the challenges into this diagram

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Even though these challenges are common in small Agile projects but gets amplified while scaling Agile.

The popular  Scaling Frameworks are as follows:   Spotify,  XScale, SAFe, DAD (Disciplined Agile Delivery).

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In addition to the above,  Large Scale Scrum(LeSS) by Craig Larman is popular as well.  I have personally applied this while working with Craig Larman during 2006 at Valtech India. LeSS and LeSS Huge are two variants for large scale projects.  LeSS huge can be depicted as shown in the diagram below:

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LeSS is based on some of the proven principles around Queuing Theory,  Systems Thinking  and Empirical Process Control  as shown below.

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If you want to learn more about  applying Large Scale Scrum on your projects, do drop me an email and happy to share the ideas.

2 comments:

Nick Zdunic said...

Hi Venkatesh

Did you have a look at Jeff Sutherlands latest presentation on Scaling Scrum. He covers other models like SAFe and Spotify. Interestingly some models are more suitable depending on context. SAFe is not a one size fits all from what I read. This link may or may not work :) http://34slpa7u66f159hfp1fhl9aur1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Scrum-at-Scale-A-Modular-Approach.pdf

Nick

Venkatesh Krishnamurthy said...

Thanks Nick for sharing the link.

I agree, there is no silver bullet in scaling Agile. However, principled approaches of scaling are better than "practice" based approaches.