Baker takes on eight dysfunctional people management practices originating from the scientific management and offers practical solutions for changing these practices and increasing organizational agility. Agile is the new black. Every business now has to be adaptive, nimble and ready to pivot – managers have to be comfortable with ambiguity and constantly ready for change. And yet... While agility is regarded as essential for competitive advantage, most organizations are still unthinkingly applying people management practices, rooted in Frederick Taylor’s scientific management philosophy of the early 20th century, designed to ensure consistency and efficiency on production lines but which actively prevent the sort of creativity and flexibility needed in the modern workplace. 100 years of scientific management has led to the creation of eight performance myths. Myths that impede the agility necessary to compete in the age of the knowledge worker but which are so instinctively embedded in management psyche that they go unchallenged despite the fact that the changing world of work has rendered them dysfunctional and counterproductive. Through case studies and examples Baker demonstrates how the right workplace culture for promoting and applying agile decision-making consists of eight values shared by employer and employee – values that are polar opposite of the values and assumptions of traditional management styles. A new psychological contract that enables the collaborative working relationship necessary for agility to flourish.

This book demonstrates, in detail, why annual performance appraisals might still work in hierarchical environments, but largely fail in agile ones. The annual performance appraisal is one of the world’s most widely used management tools. For many years, it was indeed seen as a pre-requisite for successful leadership and professional management. While most managers and employees have always been sceptical in this respect, those at a strategic level are now also realising it causes more harm than good, and a growing number of leading companies have similarly abolished this approach. One key reason lies in the changing working world, and the quest for greater organisational agility. Companies are moving away from rigid structuring. The arguments are presented objectively but with practical relevance, coherently illustrating the available alternatives for achieving what annual performance appraisals largely have not.

As contrary as it sounds, "planning" -- as we traditionally understand the term--can be the worst thing a company can do. Consider that volatile weather events disrupt trusted supply chains, markets, and promised delivery schedules. Ever-shifting geo-political tensions, as well as internal political upheaval within U.S. and global governments, derail long-planned new ventures. Technology failures block opportunities. Competitors suddenly change their product or release date; your team cannot meet the pace of innovations in your market niche, leaving you sidelined. There are myriad ways in the current business environment for a company's well-considered business plans to go awry. Most business schools continue to prepare managers to be effective in stable and predictable environments, conditions that, if they ever existed at all, are long gone. The Agility Shift shows business leaders exactly how to make the radical mindset and strategy shift necessary to create an agile, entrepreneurial organization that can innovate and thrive in complex, ever-changing contexts. As author Pamela Meyer explains, there is much more involved than a reconfiguration of the org chart and job descriptions. It requires relinquishing the illusion of control at the very foundation of most management training and business practice. Despite most leaders' approaches, "Agility is not simply accelerated planning." Unlike many agility books on the market, The Agility Shift provides specific, actionable strategies and tactics for leaders at all levels of the organization to put into practice immediately to improve agility and achieve results.

Digital Transformation Management for Agile Organizations highlights and explores new dynamics regarding how current digital developments globally scale, by examining the threats, as well as the opportunities these innovations offer to organizations of all kinds.

Agile Practice Guide – First Edition has been developed as a resource to understand, evaluate, and use agile and hybrid agile approaches. This practice guide provides guidance on when, where, and how to apply agile approaches and provides practical tools for practitioners and organizations wanting to increase agility. This practice guide is aligned with other PMI standards, including A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) – Sixth Edition, and was developed as the result of collaboration between the Project Management Institute and the Agile Alliance.

Many organizations that have improved process maturity through Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®) now also want greater agility. Conversely, many organizations that are succeeding with Agile methods now want the benefits of more mature processes. The solution is to integrate CMMI and Agile. Integrating CMMI® and Agile Development offers broad guidance for melding these process improvement methodologies. It presents six detailed case studies, along with essential real-world lessons, big-picture insights, and mistakes to avoid. Drawing on decades of process improvement experience, author Paul McMahon explains how combining an Agile approach with the CMMI process improvement framework is the fastest, most effective way to achieve your business objectives. He offers practical, proven techniques for CMMI and Agile integration, including new ways to extend Agile into system engineering and project management and to optimize performance by focusing on your organization’s unique, culture-related weaknesses.

Big Agile leaders need an empirical, "high-trust" model that provides guidance for scaling and sustaining agility and capability throughout a modern technology organization. This book presents the Agile Performance Holarchy (APH)—a "how-ability" model that provides agile leaders and teams with an operating system to build, evaluate, and sustain great agile habits and behaviors. The APH is an organizational operating system based on a set of interdependent, self-organizing circles, or holons, that reflect the empirical, object-oriented nature of agility. As more companies seek the benefits of Agile within and beyond IT, agile leaders need to build and sustain capability while scaling agility—no easy task—and they need to succeed without introducing unnecessary process and overhead. The APH is drawn from lessons learned while observing and assessing hundreds of agile companies and teams. It is not a process or a hierarchy, but a holarchy, a series of performance circles with embedded and interdependent holons that reflect the behaviors of high-performing agile organizations. Great Big Agile provides implementation guidance in the areas of leadership, values, teaming, visioning, governing, building, supporting, and engaging within an all-agile organization. What You’ll Learn Model the behaviors of a high-performance agile organizationBenefit from lessons learned by other organizations that have succeeded with Big AgileAssess your level of agility with the Agile Performance Holarchy Apply the APH model to your business Understand the APH performance circles, holons, objectives, and actions Obtain certification for your company, organization, or agency Who This Book Is For Professionals leading, or seeking to lead, an agile organization who wish to use an innovative model to raise their organization's agile performance from one level to the next, all the way to mastery