Great Big Agile: An OS for Agile Leaders

Great Big Agile: An OS for Agile Leaders

by Jeff Dalton
Released December 2018
Publisher(s): Apress
ISBN: 9781484242063

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Book description

Big Agile leaders need an empirical, "high-trust" model that provides guidance for scaling and sustaining agility and capability throughout a modern technology organization. This book presents the Agile Performance Holarchy (APH)—a "how-ability" model that provides agile leaders and teams with an operating system to build, evaluate, and sustain great agile habits and behaviors. The APH is an organizational operating system based on a set of interdependent, self-organizing circles, or holons, that reflect the empirical, object-oriented nature of agility.

As more companies seek the benefits of Agile within and beyond IT, agile leaders need to build and sustain capability while scaling agility—no easy task—and they need to succeed without introducing unnecessary process and overhead. The APH is drawn from lessons learned while observing and assessing hundreds of agile companies and teams.

It is not a process or a hierarchy, but a holarchy, a series of performance circles with embedded and interdependent holons that reflect the behaviors of high-performing agile organizations. Great Big Agile provides implementation guidance in the areas of leadership, values, teaming, visioning, governing, building, supporting, and engaging within an all-agile organization.


What You’ll Learn

  • Model the behaviors of a high-performance agile organization
  • Benefit from lessons learned by other organizations that have succeeded with Big Agile
  • Assess your level of agility with the Agile Performance Holarchy
  • Apply the APH model to your business
  • Understand the APH performance circles, holons, objectives, and actions
  • Obtain certification for your company, organization, or agency


Who This Book Is For

Professionals leading, or seeking to lead, an agile organization who wish to use an innovative model to raise their organization's agile performance from one level to the next, all the way to mastery

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Front Matter
  3. Part I. The Agile Performance Holarchy
    1. 1. The API Is Broken
  4. Part II. The Performance Circles
    1. 2. Performance Circle: Leading
    2. 3. Performance Circle: Providing
    3. 4. Performance Circle: Envisioning
    4. 5. Performance Circle: Crafting
    5. 6. Performance Circle: Affirming
    6. 7. Performance Circle: Teaming
  5. Part III. Ceremonies and Techniques
    1. 8. Acceptance Testing
    2. 9. Agile Agreement
    3. 10. Agile Digs
    4. 11. Agile Partner Assessment
    5. 12. All Hands Raised
    6. 13. Arc of Conversation
    7. 14. Automated Build
    8. 15. Backlog Grooming
    9. 16. Best Practices Board
    10. 17. Big Room Planning / Release Zero
    11. 18. Brainstorming
    12. 19. Burn Down Chart
    13. 20. Confirmation
    14. 21. Continuous Deployment
    15. 22. Continuous Integration
    16. 23. Class, Responsibilities, Collaborators (CRC) Cards
    17. 24. Daily Stand-Up
    18. 25. Definition of Done
    19. 26. Definition of Ready
    20. 27. Dot Voting
    21. 28. Epics
    22. 29. Evaluation
    23. 30. Frequent Releases
    24. 31. Gemba Walks
    25. 32. Gemba Kaizen
    26. 33. Goal, Question, Metric (GQM)
    27. 34. Incremental Development
    28. 35. Kamishibai (Board and Cards)
    29. 36. Kanban Board
    30. 37. Kano Model
    31. 38. Lean Coffee
    32. 39. Mob Programming
    33. 40. Obeya Room
    34. 41. Open Space Technology
    35. 42. Pair Programming
    36. 43. Peer Reviews
    37. 44. Planning Poker
    38. 45. Product Backlogs
    39. 46. Product Scenarios
    40. 47. Project (Team) Chartering
    41. 48. Prototyping/Spike
    42. 49. Release Planning
    43. 50. Retrospectives
    44. 51. Review
    45. 52. Roles and Accountabilities Game
    46. 53. Scrum of Scrums
    47. 54. Scrum Wall/Scrum Board
    48. 55. Self-Selection/Self-Subscription
    49. 56. Spike (Design Spike)
    50. 57. Sprint
    51. 58. Sprint Demo
    52. 59. Sprint Planning
    53. 60. Stakeholder Identification and Management
    54. 61. State of the Team
    55. 62. SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
    56. 63. Team Agreement
    57. 64. Team Estimation Game
    58. 65. Team Room Set-Up
    59. 66. Technical Debt
    60. 67. Test-Driven Development
    61. 68. Three Diverse Humans
    62. 69. Training
    63. 70. Unit Testing
    64. 71. Velocity
    65. 72. Visual Information Management
  6. Part IV. Next Steps for Leaders
    1. 73. Using the Agile Performance Holarchy
  7. Back Matter

Product information

  • Title: Great Big Agile: An OS for Agile Leaders
  • Author(s): Jeff Dalton
  • Release date: December 2018
  • Publisher(s): Apress
  • ISBN: 9781484242063