Build Agile Cultures That Unleash Passion, Innovation, and Performance What do you want? Delighted customers. How do you get them? By rapidly delivering innovative, exciting products and services your customers will love to use. How do you do this? By uniting talented people around shared ideas and purpose, trusting them, helping them take ownership, and getting out of their way. It sounds easy—but you know it isn’t. To make it happen, you must create an agile culture: one that’s open to change and can respond quickly to whatever your customers need and desire. The Agile Culture gives you proven models, pragmatic tools, and handy worksheets for doing just that. Building on their experience helping hundreds of companies, three world-class experts help you align and unleash the talents of everyone in your organization. Step by step, you’ll learn how to move toward a culture of trust, in which everyone knows, owns, and improves the results. You’ll learn practical ways to refocus on differentiators and value, resurrect energy and innovation, deal more honestly with ambiguity and risk, and overcome resistance, no matter where it comes from. This text will help you go beyond buzzwords to transform the way you deliver software—so you can delight customers, colleagues, and executives. Coverage includes • Creating cultures of trust and ownership, in which individuals, teams, and organizations can do amazing things • Assessing where you stand, so you can move toward higher levels of performance, innovation, and motivation • Leading as an enabler, not a controller • Rebuilding trust where it’s been lost—or building it where it never existed • Clarifying quickly the design goals of any project, product, or process • Using iteration to reduce risk and make commitments you can keep • Managing uncooperative people (and processes) • Selecting metrics that focus on business value, foster trust, and don’t compromise ownership

This book is a guide for managers, Scrum Masters and agile coaches who are interested in agile organizational methods and who are planning to introduce Scrum at their own company. Scrum is not only a product development framework but can also be used to structure activities for agile and lean organizational development. Divided into five major parts, the book first introduces and defines the Scrum Culture. It explains its relevance, highlights a number of pain points typical for first encounters with Scrum, and embeds it in an introduction to organizational change. This is complemented with many real-life examples that help to apply the concepts to readers’ own specific contexts. The second part describes the principles of introducing Scrum in detail, while the third part embarks on the practical application of these principles, drawing on a wealth of experience gathered in many successful introduction projects. Part four focuses on a detailed case study of a Scrum transformation before part five provides, in closing, a number of appendices offering extensive information on Scrum and its principles.

This book provides a set of essential thinking tools for understanding Agile adoption and transformation: how they differ and what you need to know to avoid being another statistic in the widespread adoption failure. In particular, you will learn how to use culture to work more effectively with your organization. It is called a survival guide since so many people have found the concepts to be invaluable in understanding their experiences when working with Agile. This book includes: Identification of causes of the widespread Agile adoption failure A model for understanding Agile, Kanban, and Software Craftsmanship culture An outline of key adoption and transformation approaches A framework to help guide when to use these these approaches with your organization Real-life case studies of what has worked and what hasn'

Achieve unprecedented business value by fostering true employee engagement Many organizations fail to realize and harness the power of their most valuable asset—their employees. Though they can be developed into a true competitive advantage, engagement isn't attainable if the employee isn't invested in the company's overall success. Agile Engagement offers business leaders a concrete strategy for building, maintaining, and utilizing employee engagement to achieve the highest level of business success. The key? Employees must feel like they are a part of their company's culture instead of having it handed down to them. Stories of failed employee engagement initiatives abound, and they all have one thing in common: they begin from the premise of "initiative" rather than "employee." True engagement occurs when an employee's heart and mind are activated in a way that leads to their motivation and commitment to positively impact the company's goals and vision. This book shows you how to create an environment that stresses a culture of unity at all levels by showing you how to: Create a clear, compelling vision and corresponding engagement strategy through the Engagement Canvas Communicate your unique culture strategy throughout all levels of your company Foster grassroots, employee-led engagement initiatives Improve engagement continuously with the Emplify Score tool Agile Engagement provides a deeper look into real engagement, helping you foster a work environment that's rewarded with unsurpassed productivity, innovation, and competitive advantage, as well as employees who feel valued, respected, and heard.

Helps you align and unleash talents of everyone in your organization. Learn how to move toward a culture of trust. Practical ways to refocus on differentiators and value, resurrect energy and innovation, deal more honestly with ambiguity and risk, overcome resistance. Transform the way you deliver software so you can delight customers, colleagues, and executives.

A clear, practical approach to making your organization more responsive to change Response Ability: The Language, Structure, and Culture of the Agile Enterprise helps companies keep up with an ever-changing business environment driven by the explosion and rapid application of new knowledge and increasing connectivity and communication. This twenty-first-century business primer identifies corporate characteristics that facilitate change and shows managers how to instill these competencies in every part of any organization. This user's manual for the new economy shows companies how to reconfigure themselves to respond quickly when a business situation demands rapid changes in organization, distribution logistics, production capability, innovation capability, resource procurement, product design, service strategy, or any other activity or competency. It provides a strategic context for lean operating practices, puts knowledge management and the learning organization in perspective, and offers a framework within which to apply today's best advice on new business practices and strategic focus. This timely guide is the ultimate resource for enterprises struggling to adjust to rapidly changing economic conditions and for managers at any level who must introduce agility into a department, division, or entire organization. It is also an excellent supporting reference and tutorial for all others who will take part in the transformation.