Certified LeSS Basics – Overview of LeSS
The Certified LeSS Basics course is a brief introduction into the LeSS Framework. It provides a 1-day overview of the framework and some of the essential concepts that it uses. It will help determining whether LeSS is for you but for LeSS adoptions, we’d recommend to follow it up with a LeSS Practitioner course.
This course can be taught by a LeSS-Friendly Scrum Trainer or by Certified LeSS Trainers, which is a Certified Scrum trainer with extensive LeSS knowledge.
The Certified LeSS basics course is for anyone who is involved in a LeSS effort. Basic Scrum knowledge is expected and can be achieved by attending a Certified Scrum Master or a Professional Scrum Master course, or thoroughly reading Scrum introduction material such as the Scrum Primer and practicing Scrum. The Certified LeSS Basics course is often combined with a Scrum course where this will be the last day of a longer Scrum-focused training.
Course content
The following topics will be covered in the Certified LeSS Basics course:
- Why LeSS?
- LeSS Overview and introduction to LeSS Huge
- LeSS Rules and Principles
- Feature Teams
For more info on the course content, check out the LeSS Basics Learning Objectives
After course completion all participants will be receiving a Certified LeSS Basics certificate and an account on less.works. The LeSS Basics Certificate will not expire.
Certified LeSS Practitioner – Principles to Practices
The Certified LeSS Practitioner course is an in-depth course covering the LeSS principles, framework and rules, and guides. It provides essential information for adopting and improving LeSS to your product development group. The course contains an overview of LeSS, stories on LeSS adoptions, exercises and extensive LeSS Q&A to ensure we discuss the topics most of interest to the participants.
The Certified LeSS Practitioner course is for anyone who is involved in a LeSS effort. Basic Scrum knowledge is expected and can be achieved by attending a Certified Scrum Master or a Professional Scrum Master course, or thoroughly reading Scrum introduction material such as the Scrum Primer and practicing Scrum.
Course content
The following topics will be covered in the Certified LeSS Practitioner course:
- Why LeSS?
- Scrum, LeSS and LeSS Huge Overview
- LeSS Rules and Principles
- Organizing around Customer Value and Feature Teams
- What is your product?
- Definition of Done and its impacts
- Product Owner and Product Backlog
- Role of Management
- Organizational impacts and typical LeSS organizational structure
- LeSS Product Backlog Refinement, Sprint Planning, Review and Retrospective
- Consideration on technical practices when scaling
- Integration & Coordination
- Adopting LeSS in your organization
- Scrum Master role within LeSS
All participants will be a Certified LeSS Practitioner and will get an account on less.works. Here they can find additional information about LeSS, share course information and stay in contact with the other course participants.
After course completion all participants get access to digital versions of the three LeSS books.
The LeSS Practitioner Certification will expire after 2 years and will require a renewal fee.
Provisional Certified LeSS Practitioner – Principles to Practices
The provisional Certified LeSS Practitioner has a similar content as the in-person Certified LeSS Practitioner and for content, we’d like to refer to that page instead of duplicating it here.
A provisional Certified LeSS Pracitioner course will be at least 3-full days of content spread over minimal 5 days and has a maximum class size of 12 participants. The days do not have to be consecutive.
Differences between provisional and in-person Certified LeSS Practitioner
The main differences between the provisional Certified LeSS Practitioner and the in-person Certified LeSS Practitioner is this:
- The provisional is online and the in-person one
- Thus typical drawbacks of online events such as harder to keep attention, more domestic interruption, technical problems, etc.
- While also having the advantages of online, such as not having to travel, allowing it to be spread in multiple sessions, etc.
- Some group exercises will be different as informal in-person discussion around physical whiteboards won’t happen.
- Some demonstration of facilitation techniques relevant to in-person LeSS events won’t happen. Instead some techniques for facilitating online LeSS events are included.
- The informal cross-participant discussion tends to be less effective leading to less experience sharing between students.
In this course we focus on delivering and sharing LeSS knowledge similar to the in-person Certified LeSS Practitioner course. Thus this course is useful for people who want to learn more in-depth about LeSS, especially people currently in a LeSS adoption. As it is not the same experience as a in-person Certified LeSS Practitioner course, due to the above mentioned differences, we will not provide a Certified LeSS Practitioner certificate. Instead, you will become a provisional Certified LeSS Practitioner (pCLP), which can become a Certfied LeSS Practitioner certificate by visiting an in person LeSS course such as a LeSS and Learn workshop in-person.
When you attend a provisional Certified LeSS Practitioner, you will receive an account on the LeSS site, access to the LeSS books and other learning material that was traditionally only accessible for Certified LeSS Practitioners and Certified LeSS for Executives. You will be able to renew that every two years, exactly the same as a Certified LeSS Practitioners.
Transforming your provisional Certified LeSS Practitioner to a Certified LeSS Practitioner
Your provisional Certified LeSS Practitioner will transform into a normal Certified LeSS Pracitioner when:
- You joined an in-person LeSS & Learn session, or
- You join an in-person Certified LeSS Practitioner or Certified LeSS for Executives course.
Certified LeSS for Executives: Principles, Organization, & Change
Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) is a framework for scaling agile development to multiple teams. LeSS builds on top of the Scrum principles such as empiricism, cross-functional self-managing teams of multi-skilled people, and provides a framework for applying that at scale. It provides simple structural rules and guidelines on how to adopt Scrum in large product development.
What’s a key insight for senior managers to understand about LeSS? That it is not a practice or process. Rather, LeSS implies an organizational design change, which impacts group structures, hierarchy, team formation, roles, positions, processes, and basic policies (such as career path).
The Certified LeSS for Executives course is an in-depth course covering the (1) LeSS principles, (2) adoption, (3) the role of management, and (4) broadly, what a senior manager needs to know and do to help. The course includes stories on LeSS adoptions, exercises, and extensive Q&A to ensure we discuss the topics most of interest to the participants.
The Certified LeSS for Executives course is for people in manager roles that support a LeSS effort. And since a change to LeSS involves both Product Management and R&D (or “business” and “IT”) together, senior representatives of both groups will want to attend together.
Course content
The following topics will be covered in the Certified LeSS for Executives course:
- Why LeSS: Benefits to Your Company?
- Systems Thinking, Organizational Design, and the Contract Game
- Principles & Management Implications
- Empirical Process Control for the Entire Organization
- Lean Thinking in LeSS: Across All Functions
- Systems Thinking: From Local to Global Optimization
- Whole-Product Focus: Group and Role Impacts
- Customer Centric: Process and Group Impacts
- Adoption
- The 3 Key LeSS Adoption Principles
- Getting Started
- Growing Your Adoption
- Culture Follows Structure
- Job Safety, but not Role Safety
- From Smallish to Huge
- Multisite Adoption
- LeSS Structure & Roles
- What is your product? A LeSS perspective
- Organizing around Customer Value and Feature Teams
- Role of Managers
- The Business-Driven Product Owner
- Typical Organizational Structures and Patterns
- Multisite Implications
All participants will be a Certified LeSS for Executives and will get an account on less.works. Here they can find additional information about LeSS, share course information and stay in contact with the other course participants.
After course completion all participants get access to an electronic copy of all three Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) Books.
Certification
The LeSS Executive Certification will expire after 2 years and will require a renewal fee.