Doing Agile Right

Agile has the power to transform work--but only if it's implemented the right way. For decades business leaders have been painfully aware of a huge chasm: They aspire to create nimble, flexible enterprises. But their day-to-day reality is silos, sluggish processes, and stalled innovation. Today, agile is hailed as the essential bridge across this chasm, with the potential to transform a company and catapult it to the head of the pack. Not so fast. In this clear-eyed, indispensable book, Bain & Company thought leader Darrell Rigby and his colleagues Sarah Elk and Steve Berez provide a much-needed reality check. They dispel the myths and misconceptions that have accompanied agile's rise to prominence--the idea that it can reshape an organization all at once, for instance, or that it should be used in every function and for all types of work. They illustrate that agile teams can indeed be powerful, making people's jobs more rewarding and turbocharging innovation, but such results are possible only if the method is fully understood and implemented the right way. The key, they argue, is balance. Every organization must optimize and tightly control some of its operations, and at the same time innovate. Agile, done well, enables vigorous innovation without sacrificing the efficiency and reliability essential to traditional operations. The authors break down how agile really works, show what not to do, and explain the crucial importance of scaling agile properly in order to reap its full benefit. They then lay out a road map for leading the transition to a truly agile enterprise. Agile isn't a goal in itself; it's a means to becoming a high-performance operation. Doing Agile Right is a must-have guide for any company trying to make the transition--or trying to sustain high agility.

Introduction: The unbalanced company -- How agile works -- Scaling agile -- How agile do you want to be? -- Leadership -- Planning, budgeting, and reviewing -- Organization, structures, and people management -- Process and technology -- Doing agile right.

Ever feel like you and your team are stretched across multiple demands or that the goal posts change constantly? Never before have businesses felt so acutely this constant need to adapt, pivot and change tack. This book will teach you how you can not only survive in the context of digital transformation, but also thrive and grow, by adopting a powerful agile leadership model. This new and revised edition of The Agile Leader lays out clearly in eight steps how agile leaders empower their team to make decision quickly, evaluate correctly where the biggest opportunities are and mould their strategies around market dynamics and ever-changing needs. If there's one leadership skill that successful businesses have in spades, it's the ability to enable teams to adapt and grow within complex eco-systems of clients, partners and suppliers. By focusing on teamwork and collaboration, as well as promoting shared decision making and ruthless prioritizing, leaders can transform the way they work as well as how their teams function to make them more malleable. Simon Hayward is an agile leadership expert. In this new edition of this successful book, he distills years of leadership and agile research into an actionable 8 step plan, brought to life with examples of agile digital businesses. Learn how to become agile and make digital transformation and delivery part of your business as usual.

A guide to the Agile Results system, a systematic way to achieve both short- and long-term results that can be applied to all aspects of life.

Ten skills for agile leadership Complex challenges are all around us—they impact our companies, our communities, and our planet. This complexity and the emergence of networks is changing the practice of strategic management. Today’s leaders need to understand how to design and guide complex collaborations to accelerate innovation and change—collaborations that cross boundaries both inside and outside organizations. Strategic Doing introduces you to the new disciplines of agile strategy and collaborative leadership. You’ll learn how to design and guide complex collaborations by following a discipline of simple rules that you won’t find anywhere else. • Unleash the power of true collaboration • Learn and master the 10 skills of agile leadership • Apply individual skills to targeted situations • Introduces a new discipline of leadership strategy Filled with compelling case studies, Strategic Doing outlines a new discipline of leadership strategy specifically designed for open, loosely-connected networks.

Printed in full color. Faced with a software project of epic proportions? Tired of over-committing and under-delivering? Enter the dojo of the agile samurai, where agile expert Jonathan Rasmusson shows you how to kick-start, execute, and deliver your agile projects. Combining cutting-edge tools with classic agile practices, The Agile Samurai gives you everything you need to deliver something of value every week and make rolling your software into production a non-event. Get ready to kick some software project butt. By learning the ways of the agile samurai you will discover: how to create plans and schedules your customer and your team can believe in what characteristics make a good agile team and how to form your own how to gather requirements in a fraction of the time using agile user stories what to do when you discover your schedule is wrong, and how to look like a pro correcting it how to execute fiercely by leveraging the power of agile software engineering practices By the end of this book you will know everything you need to set up, execute, and successfully deliver agile projects, and have fun along the way. If you're a project lead, this book gives you the tools to set up and lead your agile project from start to finish. If you are an analyst, programmer, tester, usability designer, or project manager, this book gives you the insight and foundation necessary to become a valuable agile team member. The Agile Samurai slices away the fluff and theory that make other books less-than-agile. It's packed with best practices, war stories, plenty of humor and hands-on tutorial exercises that will get you doing the right things, the right way. This book will make a difference.

"This book should be required reading for leaders looking to implement Agile in their organizations." - Sam Brilliant, Sr. Program Manager, Navy Federal Credit Union. Agile transformation is hard to achieve. It is especially difficult when the common notion of what that means is misconstrued. What many are calling Agile is not Agile, and they don't even know it. This misunderstanding leads to misapplication. The result is that true Agile transformation remains elusive. It's time to rethink your approach! What you do matters, but why you do it matters more. This book will help you learn from the mistakes of the "common wisdom" and discover a proven path to organizational agility where Mindset Transcends Methodology. "Jimmie has a knack for challenging the common wisdom and helping teams think differently about what success looks like." - John Laub, President, Gray Leaf Technology Consultants. To solve a problem, you must first understand the problem. The first half of the book contrasts the true meaning and intent of Agile with what most organizations are actually doing in order to help you understand where your organization sits within that spectrum. Armed with an understanding of the problem, the latter half of the book provides a tried and proven approach to moving teams and organizations toward a genuine Agile transformation, and ultimately a Timeless Agility. Timeless Agility is the outcome of a mindset that transcends methodology. It consistently allows you to effectively and efficiently identify, produce, and deliver the next right thing, regardless of methodology trends. To attain Timeless Agility, to reach for that elusive organizational agility, your entire organization needs to think differently. Agile transformation, therefore, is going to be more about transforming minds than practices. Your understanding impacts what you do and how you do it. What you believe and value is the foundation from which all else derives. How you do your work will change over time as you learn and grow, but why you do what you do transcends all of those changes. Very few organizations have actually achieved organization-wide transformation. Many are on the wrong path altogether. Perhaps the common approaches and thought processes taught are not necessarily what you should emulate. To get over that proverbial hump, it is time to look at this from a different perspective. This book will show you Agile from a different lens than you may be wearing right now. Embrace it and evaluate for yourself.

Agile Estimating and Planning is the definitive, practical guide to estimating and planning agile projects. In this book, Agile Alliance cofounder Mike Cohn discusses the philosophy of agile estimating and planning and shows you exactly how to get the job done, with real-world examples and case studies. Concepts are clearly illustrated and readers are guided, step by step, toward how to answer the following questions: What will we build? How big will it be? When must it be done? How much can I really complete by then? You will first learn what makes a good plan-and then what makes it agile. Using the techniques in Agile Estimating and Planning, you can stay agile from start to finish, saving time, conserving resources, and accomplishing more. Highlights include: Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days–and when to use each How and when to re-estimate How to prioritize features using both financial and nonfinancial approaches How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones How to plan iterations and predict your team's initial rate of progress How to schedule projects that have unusually high uncertainty or schedule-related risk How to estimate projects that will be worked on by multiple teams Agile Estimating and Planning supports any agile, semiagile, or iterative process, including Scrum, XP, Feature-Driven Development, Crystal, Adaptive Software Development, DSDM, Unified Process, and many more. It will be an indispensable resource for every development manager, team leader, and team member.