agile42 sponsored the Large Scale Scrum Conference 2016 in Amsterdam, a conference organized by the LeSS community to share insights and bring together the large-scale Scrum community.

Bas Vodde and Craig Larman, who built out the large-scale Scrum (LeSS) approach at Nokia, were both in attendance to share the history of LeSS and bring out new insights. You can read our 2009 case study on introducing Scrum at Nokia here. The talk by Craig Larman was especially close to our hearts, as he raised a topic agile42 has been adamant about: you need to own your agile knowledge, not rent it. Too often, companies at scale hire a horde of ScrumMasters to facilitate their agile transition, only to see the knowledge walk out the door when the contract ends.

Other highlights from the program included the case studies presented by Jurgen de Smet & Luc Schillebeeckx, “LeSS at Base,” and the case study “LeSS @ RBS” by Ben Maynard.

You can find the presentation material for the case studies here:

• “LeSS at Base” by Jurgen de Smet and Luc Schillebeeckx
• “Less @ RBS” by Ben Maynard

If you visit the program at the conference website, you will be able to access more presentation materials.

Of course, this being an agile conference, the activities outside the regular scheduled programming were also extremely valuable. The conference included some very ambitious attendee participation experiments to build out tools and insights to share with the agile community. Throughout the conference, various teams were formed to work on topics close to their hearts. Topics worked on included “A practical guide to engage middle management in an agile transition” and “How to truly inspire a team”. When results from these interest groups become available, we’ll report them.