Leading agile teams
(Book)

This book will show you how to align agile methods to your organization. At the same time, you'll see how to stay true to the agile values. It is a practical guide for your bottom-up organizational change. This book takes the team's perspective of starting agile. It is written specifically for the developers, project managers, product owners, and ScrumMasters who struggle with shoehorning agile into a traditional organization. These are the people who will do most of the legwork in getting agile up and running. Even teams with executive support still have to drive grassroots efforts to make agile fit. The way your team works today may not be the same way it works in a few years. Some decisions will have long-term consequences and others are a good compromise in order to find a more agile way of working. This book will help you identify these forks and make suggestions on the best course to follow. You'll see a similar pattern throughout the chapters. Each agile practice will follow three steps. You'll see how you do it, then why you do it. Finally there's a tie into how this practice fits into a larger organization change. Included in this book are many of the files you'll need for the meetings. There's an introduction to the agile slide deck. You'll have spreadsheets for your first product backlog. There is a sample chart for reporting. There's even an example agile project charter. These will be your tools to convince your coworkers. These slides and reports will help show why agile is an improvement over the status quo. One theme you'll see throughout this book is that transforming to agile is hard but doable. What's tricky is the strategy and tricks for changing your mindset. Agile really is a new way of thinking about your work.