Yes, I hesitate to continue writing on agile and agile methods as most is said elsewhere. Yet I have to claim that many people still don’t get the core concepts and values as crisp and sharp as needed.
It is also to be repeated again: It is not a method for developers or tech teams, it is a business method to create or adopt services and increase value for customers – and leadership needs drive the mind sets needed.
If agile don’t work out for you, it is an alarm sign on the healthiness of your organisation. I recommend you to analyse the root causes – not for the sake to implement agile, as it is still just a methodology – but for the sake to understand the issues of your organisation that are present independent on any method applied.
Why trying to explain the method for repetition myself, when there is excellent materials present? Hence I decided to point you to three excellent crafted materials as a must read recommendation – indepent on your role or level within any business.
All examples have an emphasis on IT, but it is easy transfer to your daily problems, whether you are a COO, business lead, team lead or staff member on
- how to improve throughput of your organisation, department or team and
- how to adopt to change of circumstances
- by managing work via priorisation
- keeping level of service or product quality
- and to allow transparent planning and communication
- foster good understanding of responsibilities and roles by individuals and teams
- and furthermore: how to drive self confidence, trust in others by giving the right level of autonomy to staff members and teams – and addition to have a clear focus and and undertanding on how things are getting decided.
Videos I recommend as starters:
- Henrik Kniberg has produced excellent and easy2understand video as a starter. Please see his awesome video on “P(roduct) O(wner) in a Nutshell: https://youtu.be/502ILHjX9EE
- If you want to understand how it can be scaled out into larger organisations, I recommend as step 2 to check on his videos on the Spotify model: https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/
To deepen your understanding on principles and history, my recommendation is:
- An excellent background from a management and cultural point of view, but also introducing the powerful guiding principles behind agile can be read in the excellent book from Jez Humble, Barry O’Reilly, Joanne Molesky in the Lean Enterprise – Book published at O’Reilly.
