The Agile Culture

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

It is an organization's culture that provides the biggest challenge and at the same time, the biggest lever to form an agile organization. So how can we grasp the concept of organizational culture in an actionable way? What is the essence of an agile culture? What are the elements? How is this culture formed and developed? Where are the levers and pitfalls? What does work hands-on? Puckett's book delivers answers to those questions and explains how organizational culture can be created and formed. Insights from organizational psychology are translates into practical advice. Based on analysis of agile organizations and those in transition, the agile culture code is decoded. The core elements of agile organizational cultures are defined and elaborated. The book is filled with field-proven culture hacks, tips, tools and methods, and illustrated with many examples. Puckett provides a new perspective on organizational culture. For it is in our hands to shape the culture: As individual, as team, as leader. We are organizational culture. This atlas invites to experiment and create, and shows how organizations can master the agile transformation. “An extremely useful tool for anyone struggling to navigate the tricky world of cultural change in organizations.” Michael Wade, Professor at IMD, Director of the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. "This book uncovers what is needed to build agility and provides very valuable guidance." Audrey Clegg, Group Talent Director at Coca-Cola HBC.

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't

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.

Organizations around the globe are struggling to adapt to an increasingly complex and turbulent social, economic, technological, and business environment-whether they be banks, product development companies, or city councils. Many are responding by embracing agility as a way of working-some with a primary orientation around operational agility (Agile software development methods such as Scrum and SAFe), others focusing on customer development agility (e.g., Lean Startup), while others are embracing a broader business agility. In almost all of these cases, the prevailing notion of agility is concerned primarily with processes and practices, with systems and structures-a form of outer agility. But, as seasoned agilists (of whatever stripe) are finding, the biggest challenges with agility revolve not so much around its outer aspects-its processes, practices, deliverables, and business outcomes-but around the sensemaking, communication, and relationship intelligence of an organization's people-its inner aspects. This is where we find the characteristically human problems of resistance, conflict, communication breakdowns, broken promises, people going through the motions with little passion or conviction, deteriorating product quality, managers micro-managing-the world, that is, of mindset and culture-the world of inner agility.Many organizational leaders and managers take an objectivist approach to the growing of inner agility, treating mindset and culture as reified goals to be attained, rather than as holistic qualities to be cultivated. Mindset and culture are viewed as behavioral attributes which exist somewhere out there: In those people out there; in those behaviors out there; in those habits and beliefs out there. From such an objectivist perspective, the tendency is to think about and treat mindset and culture from the outside in-as those aspects of organizational reality which we can somehow fix or change from the outside; whether through inculcation, motivational inducement, reasoned argument, or training and mentoring.Evolvagility takes an alternative perspective-one in which we view mindset and culture not from the outside in, but from the inside out. From this perspective, we are interested in the inner capabilities which determine how people think; how they make sense of complex situations around them; the (often unexamined) beliefs and values they hold, both individually and collectively; people's ability (or inability) to hold perspectives that are different from their own; their ability (or lack thereof) to relate with others in ways that leave those others empowered and enabled. But, even more than this, we want to know how we might help ourselves and others grow those capabilities. Again, not from the outside in-the world of processes and structures or even behaviors; but rather from the inside out-from the world of sensemaking and consciousness, and from there out into the world of relationships and, beyond that, out into the world of organizational environments. Evolvagility synthesizes a human technology from a variety of fields that include adult developmental psychology, relationship systems, executive coaching, and organization development. In this synthesis, it leads us toward a deeper understanding of the very anatomy of human sensemaking, and how it impacts people's capacity for effective and creative action. And, perhaps more importantly, it provides a practical methodology with which we might increase the capacity of that inner sensemaking in order to help ourselves, and others, make sense of the complexity and ambiguity of the situations we increasingly find ourselves in as players in 21st Century organizational life.