It's long overdue, but I am finally getting started in writing my next book on Agile transition. It's been about 5 years since I wrote my last book on this topic of Agile transition, titled The Lean Change Method. The book was largely meant to help solidify my thoughts around how to structure Agile transition away from the traditional approach we often we when big consulting firms partner with senior execs to drive big bang changes that frequently become bane of sane people who actually care about their work and the value it brings. The book served as a great way to introduce myself and my consultancy to potential clients who were serious about improving the agility of their organizations. Inadvertently the book was also picked up by various coaches, consultants, and change enthusiasts around the world, and I continue to hear stories about how folks have used the Lean Change Method to guide their organizations movement along the agile journey.
The Lean Change book tended to more about managing change in an agile way, and less about the practices, pitfalls, patterns, and poisons specific to guiding an organization along the agile journey.
This book, aptly titled Agile By Design, promises to be a lot more grounded in how my team and I have been assisting enterprise leaders along the never ending transition from where they are now to one with better collaboration, more frequent feedback, and higher trust and safety.
This book will be written in an extremely open way, Ill be placing all contents on a public space, accessible through this blog. I am hoping this will generate early feedback which will help me to write a book that provides a better advice to other who are part of this journey and like me, want to continue to do better.
Topics covered in this book will include how to facilitate an agile transition, how to design and improve a more agile operating model (at scale), and how to observe where further improvements can be made.
All assets relating to putting the book will go here. A public scratch pad where anyone can take a look at the thinking behind the book, and observe it take shape
Before getting started on any discussion of Agile Transition, its important to provide a description of what the authors mean by this thing called Agile. Hopefully we will have framed Agile in such a way that you can co-create your own description. We will also provide examples of what Agile can look like at various stages along the journey, as well as how to apply the mindset in a way that is fit for your context
This section will focus on how to prepare for an operate an agile transition, getting leaders organized to guide both larger changes and more incremental improvement.
Enable Leadership at all Levels of the Organization
When dealing with complexity, you never have enough leaders. This section will go through the key principles and some corresponding methods to enable safe self organization at scale
Setting up Self Organizing Structure
Setting up Agile team structure so as to minimize hand offs and maximize self organization is seldom done well. The goal of this section will be to arm your leaders with design skills and management methods required to define, operate, and improve organizing structures that increase collaboration and feedback
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So In a nutshell, this book will attempt to be a handbook for anyone in a larger, more traditional organization to one typified by flow, self organizing teams, feedback and continuous improvement. The path is a long (infinite) and complex one, but the results are very tangible. I plan to pack the Agile By Design book with as many patterns, methods, and other building blocks that our team has used help others take the journey.
