Beliefs and values
Agile builds upon some core beliefs. These lie beneath the Agile Manifesto, Modern Agile, The Heart of Agile, and other artefacts and concepts.
Examples of values and beliefs:
- We work in a complex and unpredictable world
- Our way of doing things can always be improved or simplified
- Teams are stronger than individuals
- Motivation is intrinsic
- Short feedback loops are essential for learning
- The simpler the process/tool/structure, the better
Approach to work
These beliefs and values shape our approach to work. Given a clear vision, we iteratively learn what our customers and stakeholders love, incrementally deliver value and continuously learn how to adapt our product or service, as well how to improve the way we build and deliver it. Figuring out how to best do this is delegated to autonomous small teams.
Examples of principles for a team:
- Co-owns responsibility of work, process, quality, maintenance, etc.
- Visualises workflow and work
- Frequent planning (detailed short-term plans, rough long-term roadmaps)
- Delivers value often, and measures impact and changes of behaviours
- Together as a team, regularly inspects and adapts ways of working
- Pulls work (instead of work being pushed onto team)
- Updates forecasts (instead of measuring progress towards a plan)
Organisation and Culture
The agile approach shapes how we organise ourselves as an organisation to best support our teams. This includes the capability to continuously learn how to adapt and evolve structures, processes, leadership, habits and culture to best enable and support our people and teams on their missions.
Traits of an agile organisation:
- Safe-to-fail culture (failure recovery is more important than failure prevention)
- Transparency. Everyone needs access to information and data in order to act and decide fast and responsibly.
- Leaders and managers practice supportive coaching servant leadership
- Structures that support (rather than hierarchies that control)
- Optimises for flow, not resource efficiency
- Forums, platforms and channels for sharing of ideas and knowledge
- Rewards behaviours, not only results
Some videos
Summary of the agile approach to work.
How to transform to an agile organisation.
How to figure out what to build and deliver.
Book Recommendations
Agile & Lean
- Scrum & XP from the Trenches – Henrik Kniberg
- The Lean Startup
- Lean from the Trenches – Henrik Kniberg
- This is Lean – Niklas Modig, Par Ahlstrom
- Coaching Agile Teams – Lyssa Adkins
- Kanban and Scrum: Making the most of both – Henrik Kniberg
- Agile Software Development with Scrum – Ken Schwaber, Mike Beedle
- The Agile Fluency Model: A Brief Guide to Success with Agile – Diana Larsen, James Shore
- Succeeding With Agile – Mike Cohn
Teamwork & Product
- Teamwork is an Individual Skill – Christopher Avery
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Patrick Lencioni
- Gamestorming: A Playbook fro Innovators, Rulebreakers and Changemakers – Dave Gray
- Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great – Esther Derby
- Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration – Keith Sawyer
- Visualization Examples – Jimmy Janlén
- Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making – Sam Kaner
- The Phoenix Project – Gene Kim
- Creating Great Teams: How Self-Selection Lets People Excel – Sandy Mamoli, David Mole
- Impact Mapping – Gojko Adzic
- User Story Mapping – Jeff Patton
- BADASS: Making Users Awesome – Kathy Sierra
- Running Lean – Ash Maurya
- Inspired – Marty Cagan
Leadership, Organization and Culture
- Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us – Daniel H. Pink
- Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard – Chip Heath, Dan Heath
- Reinventing Organizations – Frederic Laloux
- Quit Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work – David Rock
- Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders – L. David Marquet
- Salvation: The Bungsy Story – Marcus Hammarberg
- The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Result – Stephen Bungay
- Management 3.0 – Jurgen Appelo
- The Leaders Guide to Radical Management – Denning Stephen Denning
- Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization – Dave Logan, John King & Hale Fischer-Wright