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Build Agile Cultures That Unleash Passion, Innovation, and Performance
What do you want? Delighted customers. How do you get them? By rapidly delivering innovative, exciting products and services your customers will love to use. How do you do this? By uniting talented people around shared ideas and purpose, trusting them, helping them take ownership, and getting out of their way. It sounds easy—but you know it isn’t. To make it happen, you must create an agile culture: one that’s open to change and can respond quickly to whatever your customers need and desire. The Agile Culture gives you proven models, pragmatic tools, and handy worksheets for doing just that. Building on their experience helping hundreds of companies, three world-class experts help you align and unleash the talents of everyone in your organization. Step by step, you’ll learn how to move toward a culture of trust, in which everyone knows, owns, and improves the results. You’ll learn practical ways to refocus on differentiators and value, resurrect energy and innovation, deal more honestly with ambiguity and risk, and overcome resistance, no matter where it comes from. This text will help you go beyond buzzwords to transform the way you deliver software—so you can delight customers, colleagues, and executives.
Coverage includes
• Creating cultures of trust and ownership, in which individuals, teams, and organizations can do amazing things
• Assessing where you stand, so you can move toward higher levels of performance, innovation, and motivation
• Leading as an enabler, not a controller
• Rebuilding trust where it’s been lost—or building it where it never existed
• Clarifying quickly the design goals of any project, product, or process
• Using iteration to reduce risk and make commitments you can keep
• Managing uncooperative people (and processes)
• Selecting metrics that focus on business value, foster trust, and don’t compromise ownership
Foreword xv
Preface xvii
Acknowledgments xix
Chapter 1: Unleashing Talent 1
The Big Ideas 1
Who Moved My World? 1
The Power of Trust and Ownership 2
Getting Started with Trust and Ownership 8
Book Conventions 11
References 11
Chapter 2: Trust and Ownership 13
The Big Ideas 13
Some Teams Do Better Than Others 13
The Trust-Ownership Model 15
Energy and Innovation 26
Why Purpose Matters 29
You Cannot Defy Gravity 32
A Foundation of Integrity and Honesty 39
In Summary 40
Chapter 3: Building Trust and Ownership 41
The Big Ideas 41
Getting to “Green” 41
Trust-Ownership Assessment 42
Getting to Trust and Ownership 46
Hitting the Walls 56
In Summary 57
Chapter 4: Trust Tools 59
The Big Ideas 59
Why Trust Matters 59
Trust Assessment 60
Broken Trust or Lack of Trust 62
Creating a Culture of Trust 64
Your Leadership Role 67
Making a Change 68
Decision Filters 69
In Summary 70
References 70
Chapter 5: Ownership Tools 71
The Big Ideas 71
Give or Take? 71
Taking Ownership 72
Don’t Take Away Ownership 72
Help Teams Take Ownership 75
Macro-Leadership Cube 81
In Summary 86
References 86
Chapter 6: Business Alignment Tools 87
The Big Ideas 87
Are We Aligned with the Company’s Business Goals? 87
Purpose-Based Alignment Model 88
Business Value Model 94
Product/Project Inception Planning 100
In Summary 110
References 111
Chapter 7: Dealing Honestly with Ambiguity 113
The Big Ideas 113
Easing the Need for Certainty 113
Proactive Risk Management 114
“Purchasing” Options to Reduce Risks 127
Making Proactive Risk Management Visible 130
Make Progress Visible 131
Ambiguity and Iterative Methods 133
In Summary 135
Chapter 8: Tools to Deal with Walls 137
The Big Ideas 137
It’s Hard 137
“I Need It by This Date! And I Need It All!” 138
Managing Up 141
Collaborating with Non-Collaborators 143
In Summary 161
References 162
Chapter 9: Metrics 163
The Big Ideas 163
Why Metrics Matter 163
Integrity 165
Measuring Culture Change 169
Metrics Walls 174
Getting Useful Metrics, Removing the Rest 176
Metrics Programs 183
Getting Started 184
In Summary 184
References 185
Chapter 10: Case Study 187
Appendix A: Quick Reference Guide 207
Appendix B: Trust-Ownership Assessment 209
Team Questions on Trust and Ambiguity 209
Team Questions on Ownership and Alignment 210
Leader Questions on Trust and Ambiguity 211
Leader Questions on Ownership and Alignment 212
Mark Your Positions 213
Discussion Points 213
Appendix C: Collaboration Process 215
What It Is 215
When to Use It 215
How to Use It 215
Appendix D: Collaborating with Non-Collaborators Worksheet 217
Think of a Non-Collaborator You Struggle With 217
What Are the Traits (Behaviors) of Your Non-Collaborator? 217
What Type Is Your Non-Collaborator? 217
What Makes Your Non-Collaborator Tick? 218
What Makes You Tick? 219
Where Are You Compared to Your Non-Collaborator? 220
Why Do You Want to Collaborate with This Non-Collaborator? 221
Manage Your Risks 221
Dealing with Non-Collaborators 222
Appendix E What to Do about Metrics 223
A Detailed Description 223
Internal Metrics 223
Organizational Metrics 224
External Metrics 226
Examples of Possible Metrics 227
About the Authors 231
Index 233