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.

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.

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'

Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation is an in-depth look at transforming businesses so they are fit for purpose in a digitally enabled world. It is a guide for all those needing to better understand, implement and lead digital transformation in the workplace. It sets aside traditional thinking and outdated strategies to explain what steps need to be taken for an organization to become truly agile. It addresses how to build organizational velocity and establish iterative working, remove unnecessary process, embed innovation, map strategy to motivation and develop talent to succeed. Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation provides guidance on how to set the pace and frequency for change and shows how to break old habits and reform the behaviours of a workforce to embed digital transformation, achieve organizational agility and ensure high performance. Full of practical advice, examples and real-life insights from organizational development professionals at the leading edge of digital transformation, this book is an essential guide to building an agile business.

A successful digital transformation must start with a conversational transformation. Today, software organizations are transforming the way work gets done through practices like Agile, Lean, and DevOps. But as commonly implemented as these methods are, many transformations still fail, largely because the organization misses a critical step: transforming their culture and the way people communicate. Agile Conversations brings a practical, step-by-step guide to using the human power of conversation to build effective, high-performing teams to achieve truly Agile results. Consultants Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick show readers how to utilize the Five Conversations to help teams build trust, alleviate fear, answer the “whys,” define commitments, and hold everyone accountable.These five conversations give teams everything they need to reach peak performance, and they are exactly what’s missing from too many teams today. Stop focusing on processes and practices that leave your organization stuck with culture-less rituals. Instead, unleash the unique human power of conversation.