Practical, Proven Tools for Leading and Empowering High-Performing Agile Teams A leader is like a farmer, who doesn’t grow crops by pulling them but instead creates the perfect environment for the crops to grow and thrive. If you lead in organizations that have adopted agile methods, you know it’s crucial to create the right environment for your agile teams. Traditional tools such as Gantt charts, detailed plans, and internal KPIs aren’t adequate for complex and fast-changing markets, but merely trusting employees and teams to self-manage is insufficient as well. In Agile Leadership Toolkit, longtime agile leader Peter Koning provides a practical and invaluable steering wheel for agile leaders and their teams. Drawing on his extensive experience helping leaders drive more value from agile, Koning offers a comprehensive toolkit for continuously improving your environment, including structures, metrics, meeting techniques, and governance for creating thriving teams that build disruptive products and services. Koning thoughtfully explains how to lead agile teams at large scale and how team members fit into both the team and the wider organization. Architect environments that help teams learn, grow, and flourish for the long term Get timely feedback everyone can use to improve Co-create goals focused on the customer, not the internal organization Help teams brainstorm and visualize the value of their work to the customer Facilitate team ownership and accelerate team learning Support culture change, and design healthier team habits Make bigger changes faster This actionable guide is for leaders at all levels—whether you’re supervising your first agile team, responsible for multiple teams, or lead the entire company. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

If you lead in organizations that have adopted agile methods, you know it's crucial to create the right environment for your agile teams. Traditional tools such as Gantt charts, detailed plans, and internal KPIs aren't adequate for complex and fast-changing markets, but merely trusting participants and teams to self-manage is insufficient as well. This book provides a practical and invaluable "steering wheel" for agile leaders and their teams; helping leaders drive more value from agile, offer a comprehensive toolkit for continuously improving your environment, including structures, metrics, meeting techniques, and governance for creating thriving teams that build disruptive products and services.

Hone Your Agile Leadership Skills to Help Your Organization Transform and Thrive To leverage the immense opportunities associated with accelerating change, organizations need teams capable of trying new ideas quickly, learning from their experiences, and adapting based on that learning. Helping these teams to grow and thrive requires agile leaders who support, inspire, and encourage, and who can leave behind the management skills of directing, monitoring, and rewarding or punishing. The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide, written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving--they show you how it's really done. Reignite once-successful organizations that have lost their way Form cross-functional teams and empower them with purpose Learn to let go, as your teams start taking more responsibility Overcome forces that want to reel you back into the "old rules" Realign the whole organization, since agile and traditional models can't coexist forever Achieve the most challenging goal of all: changing culture Great agile leaders aren't born that way--they're regular people who care deeply about helping others achieve shared goals and have discovered a better way to lead. Whatever your role in the organization, this guide will help you master those skills and mindsets a whole lot faster. "Drawing on vast experience, Ron, Kurt, and Laurens tease out practical tips and patterns for good leadership [and show] how a leader can help shape the environment for agile teams to succeed. . . . The narrative style of the book makes it easy to read, and I am sure there will be many times that you see yourself in it." --From the Foreword by Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit Adapting agile practices to your development organization Uncovering and eradicating waste throughout the software development lifecycle Practical techniques for every development manager, project manager, and technical leader Lean software development: applying agile principles to your organization In Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck identify seven fundamental "lean" principles, adapt them for the world of software development, and show how they can serve as the foundation for agile development approaches that work. Along the way, they introduce 22 "thinking tools" that can help you customize the right agile practices for any environment. Better, cheaper, faster software development. You can have all three–if you adopt the same lean principles that have already revolutionized manufacturing, logistics and product development. Iterating towards excellence: software development as an exercise in discovery Managing uncertainty: "decide as late as possible" by building change into the system. Compressing the value stream: rapid development, feedback, and improvement Empowering teams and individuals without compromising coordination Software with integrity: promoting coherence, usability, fitness, maintainability, and adaptability How to "see the whole"–even when your developers are scattered across multiple locations and contractors Simply put, Lean Software Development helps you refocus development on value, flow, and people–so you can achieve breakthrough quality, savings, speed, and business alignment.

Introduces a realistic approach to leading, managing, and growing your Agile team or organization. Written for current managers and developers moving into management, Appelo shares insights that are grounded in modern complex systems theory, reflecting the intense complexity of modern software development. Recognizes that today's organizations are living, networked systems; that you can't simply let them run themselves; and that management is primarily about people and relationships. Deepens your understanding of how organizations and Agile teams work, and gives you tools to solve your own problems. Identifies the most valuable elements of Agile management, and helps you improve each of them.

Have you ever thought about the fact that a craftsman has more and better tools to solve challenges on the job than the leader of a business or organization does? Leadership "tools" are usually defined as computers, spreadsheets, data, and even experience, but in reality, leaders need thinking tools that are hard to come by, so they find themselves hunting and pecking for answers in books, at seminars, through on-the-job training programs, from mentors, and at business schools, and still, they're left with gaps. Surely, most leaders are good at what they do, but the daily challenges of their jobs, like accelerating growth, increasing productivity, driving innovation, doing more with less, and balancing work with life don't come with some sort of leadership toolkit...until now. In Paid to Think, international consultant David Goldsmith presents his groundbreaking approach to leadership and management based on research revealing the twelve specific activities that all leaders perform on a daily basis, and he provides you with each activity's accompanying tools and instructions proven to boost your performance and that of your entire organization. Take the uncertainty out of everyday leading, convert ideas to realities, and maximize your intellectual value. Learn how decision makers at some of the world's most successful organizations have already used Paid to Think's universal and easily transferable tools—regardless of their industries, sectors, geographic locations, or management levels—as their greatest advantages in achieving more, earning more, and living more.