From the course: Enterprise Agile: Growing Scrum

The foundation of LeSS

From the course: Enterprise Agile: Growing Scrum

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The foundation of LeSS

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- Like many other enterprise agile frameworks, LeSS has its own foundation layer. The LeSS creators don't just come right out and say, "Here's why you should use large-scale Scrum," instead they talk about an enterprise agile mindset and a core set of beliefs, principles, and ideas in the foundation layer. The foundation layer is the way you should approach your agile transformation. You should think of it as an enterprise agile mindset. If you're printing out the diagram for the course, you might want to look at the PDF called LeSS the Complete Picture. They lay out a series of practical steps that can help you embrace these beliefs. The first belief is that Scrum is a terrific way for individual teams to deliver products. LeSS is based on Scrum so you should avoid using other team approaches such as extreme programming or Kanban. Your team should know how to work in small Scrum teams. They should be able to deliver a minimum viable product. If you want to review Scrum, there's a great course by Kelly O'Connell already in the video library. The second belief is that the LeSS framework is really only part of using agile on enterprise-level products. The LeSS creators viewed the framework is more of a starting point, a way to help establish your enterprise agile mindset. It doesn't pretend to give you all the answers. Instead, it just wants to help your teams ask the right questions. Some other enterprise agile frameworks are much more prescriptive. They want you to follow their processes as closely as possible. It's almost like rules to a board game. You have to follow the rules to play the game. LeSS is much more like a map to an amusement park. It will show you some of the best places, but it's really up to you to create your own agile adventure. Finally, large-scale Scrum encourages teams to experiment with their process. Once you've accepted these beliefs, you can start to think of all the different parts that make up large-scale Scrum. At the very core of large-scale Scrum, you also have something called the LeSS principles. This is a part of the organizational mindset you should have before starting out with enterprise agile. Many of these ideas are just an up-sized version of the agile mindset. Your teams need to be transparent about their work. They need to focus on the customer and inspect and adapt based on what they've learned. So you can see that LeSS wraps together a bunch of core ideas, principles and beliefs into a larger enterprise agile mindset. These ideas will help you up-size Scrum to work with these larger products.

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