Agile People

Corporate cultures, global mindsets, and employee priorities are changing, which means management and human resources departments must also evolve. To ensure teams are well crafted, motivated, and successful, managers and HR professionals must step outside their comfort zone and adapt to younger, newer ways of thinking-they must become Agile. In Agile People, management consultant Pia-Maria Thoren outlines how managers, human resources professionals, company decision-makers, and employees can adopt the flexible, fluid, customer-focused mindset of modern tech companies to inspire their workers and strengthen their organizations. This essential handbook explains both the theories and practical applications behind the Agile framework, showing how companies can do the following: -Create a structure and culture for an organization to meet future challenges -Give management and HR the changed mindset and the tools to facilitate employee drive and performance -Empower employees to become motivated stakeholders -Adopt hiring practices that value attitude, behavior, and competence -Create a passionate, loyal, and accomplished workforce No matter the size of a company, it can benefit from an Agile mindset and launch into a future filled with successful leadership and motivated employees.

In the new world of work, agility is a business imperative. Agile HR is a practical guide written specifically for people professionals on how the HR function can develop agile processes and practices that save time, boost performance and support overall business goals. From small tech start-ups or large traditional companies, organizations need to be fast, flexible and digitally empowered to succeed. However, too many companies are stuck with siloed, compliance-driven HR processes that work in opposition to the business rather than supporting it. This results in the view that HR is slow and out of touch. However, Agile HR shows that this doesn't need to be the case. Covering every aspect of the HR function from people processes, ways of working and HR services to organization design, operating models and HR teams, Agile HR is an essential guide for all HR practitioners wanting to make their HR practices agile and drive business performance but don't know where to start. As well as guidance on how to deal with resistance, manage a backlog and deal with constraints, there is also invaluable guidance on how HR can prioritize effectively and assess which activities to pursue, which to develop, which to rework and which to abandon in order to achieve continuous business improvement. Supported by case studies from organizations who have seen the benefits of an agile approach to HR including Sky Betting & Gaming and MUJI, this is critical reading for all HR professionals in organizations of any size needing to adopt fast, flexible and evolving agile approaches to effectively compete in the new world of work.

Understand how to continuously organize people, skills and resources to meet changing business needs and forecast for future workforce supply and demand.

For those considering Extreme Programming, this book provides no-nonsense advice on agile planning, development, delivery, and management taken from the authors' many years of experience. While plenty of books address the what and why of agile development, very few offer the information users can apply directly.

Given today's context of tough change, organizations need to be able to innovate as well as develop and implement strategy quickly and efficiently. The key to this is agility - a set of capabilities that can help organizations to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances. At the same time, resilience is also essential if benefits are going to endure over the longer term and if employees are to be kept on board. The Agile Organization focuses on how to build both agility and resilience at individual, team and organizational levels. It draws on a wealth of research, including the lived experience and learning of managers and HR and organization development (OD) professionals to show how it is possible to 'square the circle', becoming more sustainably agile while also enhancing employee engagement and resilience. The Agile Organization showcases the latest thinking - new organizational models, ground-breaking themes and case studies - that illustrate how organizations are addressing the challenge of developing organizational agility. Packed with helpful checklists and practice pointers, this book is a 'go to' guide for senior leaders and managers, HR and OD specialists who want to help bring about organizational transformation and create the new resiliently agile 'business as usual'.

Designing agile organizations fit for a dynamic, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world has become a necessary skill for successful 21st century leaders. This book provides a summary of many classical strategic management techniques, before introducing the reader to emergent concepts that are more in tune with the VUCA environment. It explains how the culture defines an environment that either enables or inhibits the creation of new knowledge which translates into innovation and fast, effective decision-making. The name of the game here is speed. As such, this book provides a practical framework for leaders or managers to build agile organizations designed to accelerate innovation and adaptability. Successful executives must rapidly identify many “unseen, and rarely discussed” interferences that creep into the culture of an organization that disrupt the flow of critical knowledge. Executives worldwide must quickly identify those unseen viruses within their organizations so they can take targeted action to fix the root problem rather than just try a “flavor of the month” approach. They need a way to diagnose underlying root causes of cultural infections, and the diagnostic mentoring methodology described here provides a practical way for executives to do just that.

Agility is no longer a buzzword, it's now a business imperative. Apply agile thinking, tools and processes to the learning function with this expert guide written specifically for learning and organizational development (OD) professionals. Written by an author at the forefront of agility in the people profession, Agile L&D explains how to develop an agile approach to workplace learning. The business context has dramatically changed, so the way you approach specialisms like learning and OD must also change. Based on five design principles: Product-led, Human-centric design, T-shaped people in T-shaped teams, Experimentation and Deliver with impact, Agile L&D provides a dedicated toolkit to help you design learning and OD solutions that solve workplace challenges and impact business performance. How we design work, upskill people and deploy teams is now intrinsically linked with modern business strategy. To continuously adapt to a complex business environment, companies need a more fluid movement of people and skills across the organization to better reflect customer needs, market opportunities and capability requirements. This book has the answer. Full of tools, tips and frameworks as well as real world examples from global organizations including Macmillan Cancer Support, TomTom, Diageo, Arup and Citizens Advice, this is essential reading for all learning and development, OD and people professionals in this constantly changing world of work.

Software is the essential enabler for the new economy and science. It creates new markets and new directions for a more reliable, flexible, and robust society. It empowers the exploration of our world in ever more depth. However, software often falls short behind our expectations. Current software methodologies, tools, and techniques remain expensive and not yet reliable for a highly changeable and evolutionary market. Many approaches have been proven only as case-by-case oriented methods. This book presents a number of new trends and theories in the direction in which we believe software science and engineering may develop to transform the role of software and science in tomorrow’s information society. This publication is an attempt to capture the essence of a new state of art in software science and its supporting technology. Is also aims at identifying the challenges such a technology has to master.