Agile Culture

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

The Scrum Culture

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.

THE AGILE CULTURE GUIDE