Rocket Nine Solutions

Agile Training and Coaching with Scrum

Why take the LeSS class?

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Craig Larman has made it his mission to reduce suffering in product development. Craig Larman and Bas Vodde co-founded Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) as a comprehensive approach to scaling Scrum. In this video, Craig answers, Why take the LeSS class?

Why take the LeSS class?

You may be asking, “Why take the LeSS class? Why should I take the Certified Large Scale Scrum Practitioner class? LeSS seems relatively simple. What could we possibly learn over a three day period?”

Answer:

One of the big ideas of LeSS is that people need to own their ideas, and own their process instead of renting it. LeSS is quite simple but it has some very deep ideas in it. In order to understand those ideas in a way that we own them rather than rent them, we need to explore together the question, “Why?” very deeply. Using techniques for example, like, systems modeling that you might see on the wall in the video. This is the slow but interesting work of exploring very deeply what the forces in organizational design and product development are, and why we want to set things up in a particular way. This deep thinking simply takes time.

Craig has been helping groups adopt LeSS for over the last decade. Over those years Craig has developed a set of patterns and suggestions on how to make it go more smoothly, and also there’s just a lot of contextual situational questions that people probably have.

LeSS Large Scale Scrum Why take the LeSS classPlease join us for a LeSS class, not only to explore very deeply why, but maybe to take advantage of Craig’s experience and suggestions based upon the patterns of what seems to work or what doesn’t, to make it more likely that you’ll be successful in your adoption of LeSS. If you interested, we’d like to invite you to take a LeSS course with us here in Southern California. Or if you live out of the area, you can find Large Scale Scrum classes at LeSS.works. Looking forward to seeing you.

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Who ever Heard of an Agile Manager ???

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Who ever Heard of an Agile Manager ???

There is no role of Agile Manager in Scrum.

What would you choose for the management and leadership involved with your company’s agile adoption?

1. Get extended time with an expert
2. Go get trained in agile
3. Hear someone share their story of how they changed as an IT executive when their company went agile

Well, you can get all three at our upcoming Certified Agile Leadership class led by Pete Behrens of Trail Ridge Consulting.

Management is consistently a top-problem with agile adoptions, and it’s clear to see why in the graph below from VersionOne’s latest State of Agile survey.

state-of-agile-survey-leading-causes-of-failure Who ever heard of an Agile Manager

 

Again, there is no role of Agile Manager in Scrum.

I’m not saying management doesn’t exist, but I’m saying Scrum doesn’t speak to it. The ambiguity can be painful, and without guidance on how to change, it’s understandable that people keep behaving the way they have.

Yet management and leadership play a crucial role. They help and support the development of teams and team members into problem solvers who swarm on problems, pull work and create the best designs and architectures. My experience is that most teams don’t do these things well. This causes problems with delivery of a quality product on time. Soooo…management gets MORE involved to solve those problems. They add more meetings and processes and overhead to try and HELP!

It’s a downward spiral because the more management solves problems, the more the team feels a lack of ownership and empowerment. This leads to even more problems.

My Experience

scott-dunn-agile-coach-and-trainer7 Who ever heard of an Agile ManagerI’ve been the manager who couldn’t take time off during crucial times or holidays. I’ve been the guy to come back from time away to find team members waiting for my return to ask a question that’s blocking the work. … They knew even though more about the problem and possible solutions than I did!

But I trained them to be that way! I was not a self-organizing agile manager. Every time there was a problem, *I* solved it. Every question, I would have an answer for. But the truth is, they almost always had solutions and answers, too. I just didn’t ask them…

In the end, for Scrum to work its best, especially with multiple teams in approaches like SAFe and LeSS, the managers and leadership need to grow. The goal is not being experts but rather to empower, teach and expect problem solving by the teams.

This leads to more team ownership and empowerment, and thus better and faster decisions, and because of that, a better product.

Who should take the LeSS class?

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Who should take the LeSS class?

Craig Larman has made it his mission to reduce suffering in product development. Craig Larman and Bas Vodde co-founded Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) as a comprehensive approach to scaling Scrum. In this video, Craig answers, “Who should take the LeSS class?”

Top Down

Sometimes people ask Craig, “Who should consider taking the LeSS course?” In LeSS, one of the principles for adoption is top down and bottom up. This means that we need more senior managers at the training. These are people who have the authority to actually be involved in changing the organizational design: changing policies, groups, roles and so forth.

Bottom Up

At the same time, Large Scale Scrum can’t just be pushed from the top, because then you get people who are prisoners of the change. This will result in people having no sense of engagement and, of course, it’s ultimately the real, hands-on workers that are going to experience this new way of doing work.

Conversely, a LeSS transformation needs to be bottom up, as well, which means it needs to be people like hands-on developers and middle managers, and basically, everybody involved in the change.

Heavy on Leaders

LeSS Large Scale Scrum Who should take the LeSS class?Without a doubt, a Large Scale Scrum training needs to include more senior folks, because we’re talking not about a practice, but in LeSS, we’re talking about a change in the organizational design, and that must involve more senior folks.

Craig and Bas look forward to people hungry for real change joining them in a LeSS course sometime in the future. Take a look at LeSS.works for a set of course listings.

For other articles about Large Scale Scrum, please see:

Agile Adoption Preparation Signals Future Success

Large Scale Scrum Training (LeSS) in SoCal

Scaled Agile Framework – SAFe and Large Scale Scrum – LeSS

5 Quick Wins from our Student Coaching Calls

 

For More Reading:

Check out Craig’s latest book on Large Scale Scrum: More with LeSS.

 

Agile Training throughout Southern California

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Agile Scrum Methodology meets Engaged Learning

No death by PowerPoint. Future ScrumMasters and Product Owners in our Certified Scrum classes learn hands-on via teams, a half day release planning simulation…

Find a class

 

You can find our current class listings for Certified ScrumMaster training, Certified Scrum Product Owner training, Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) on our event registration page.

You can find out more about our Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) workshop here.

See details on our Certified Scrum Developer.

Our 1 1/2 hour Introduction to Agile and Scrum training video is available on Mike Cohn’s Front Row Agile.

Additional short, informative videos and interviews are on our Rocket Nine Solutions Youtube Channel.

For information on team coaching, leadership coaching, private agile classes or assessments, please contact us.

Don’t Make the Same Leadership Mistake I did…

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Don’t Make the Same Leadership Mistake I did…

“Don’t make the same leadership mistake I did,” he told me. “Make sure spending time with your people is your number one priority.”

I had just taken over as manager for a 20+ person group. My colleague was on his way out of the company, under less-than-ideal circumstances.

I repeated his mistake, and a made a number of others that I didn’t realize then, but I realize now.

Surveys routinely show that about 70% of employees report the most stressful aspect of their jobs is the interaction with their immediate boss. Or, as I’ve heard, “People come to a company for many different reasons: benefits, growth opportunity, name recognition, etc. But they stay based on their relationship with their manager.”

leadership mistake
Scott Dunn, CST, is an agile coach and trainer who is passionate about helping people and organizations find and take their next steps.

Companies tend to promote the best technical person, but those skills aren’t always the best for leading and drawing the best out of their team. In fact, those skills might be counter-productive to leadership! Add to that, the fact that almost half of all leaders will continue to rely on their technical expertise for success, rather than continuing to grow and progress through higher levels of leadership (there are five stages). This is a sure recipe for a leadership mistake.

Makes sense, though, right?

Even though I’m now a newly minted manager, I should keep relying on my technical knowledge because that’s what got me here, that’s what I’m good at, and, truthfully, stepping out into something I don’t know (and therefore, how could I be good at?) doesn’t make sense and isn’t all that comfortable. But as they say, what got you here won’t get you there. The manager will hit the ceiling of effectiveness, limited to how well he can direct and how fact he can make decisions on behalf of the team. More of a supervisor than a leader.  And if that experience doesn’t go…awesome…he or she will now be stuck because there’s nothing amazing going on with this team worth promoting up, and he or she is not liking this role that they’re obviously not great at (but they WERE great at their old technical position!!).

So, what do we do?

Learn about leadership! This is no different than a programmer continuing to learn and grow after he or she got the job.

I’ve spoken and written a few times about leadership, and there are certain books and sources that really helped me. Take a look at those and see if you find something interesting.

Even better – take a look at our three day deep dive Certified Agile Leadership workshop in January. Pete Behrens, the trainer, has been in executive roles, and in the agile community for almost two decades. Pete has worked with GE, Google, Salesforce, along with others. He speaks on this topic of leadership development at numerous international conferences.