The Epic Guide to Agile


Book Description

Tired of out-of-touch Scrum training that doesn't work? Discover practical agile delivery techniques to make your software shine. Has your excitement over Scrum led to nothing but disappointment? Have months of agile training still left your company far short of optimal efficiency? Do you feel like your leaders and developers are speaking a completely different language? Ascendle CEO Dave Todaro has lived and breathed software development for over three decades. After running successful agile teams on a daily basis, he's ready to share his insights and techniques to help your company reap the benefits of his experience. The Epic Guide to Agile: More Business Value on a Predictable Schedule with Scrum is a comprehensive guide to software-based team dynamics that both leaders and developers can understand. Unlike most agile training that doesn't work in practice, Todaro's step-by-step playbook rises above theory to save you time and money. Perfect for any sized business or level of experience, you'll get to the crux of each Scrum issue to have your team running sprints more efficiently than ever. In The Epic Guide to Agile, you'll discover: Personal examples and anecdotes to tackle problems at their source Effective ways to introduce agile and Scrum into your organization with the right pilot team The exact system to achieve productive sprint planning sessions The typical issues that can doom your product and how to conquer them The best technical environment setups to support your software project groups and much, much, more! The Epic Guide to Agile is a powerhouse manual to help any ScrumMaster or Project Manager find productivity and success. If you like real-world examples, no-nonsense teaching, and clear communication, then you'll love Dave Todaro's extraordinary and practical guidebook. Buy The Epic Guide to Agile to take your team into the Scrum age today!




Choose Your WoW!


Book Description

"Hundreds of organizations around the world have already benefited from Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). Disciplined Agile (DA) is the only comprehensive tool kit available for guidance on building high-performance agile teams and optimizing your way of working (WoW). As a hybrid of all the leading agile and lean approaches, it provides hundreds of strategies to help you make better decisions within your agile teams, balancing self-organization with the realities and constraints of your unique enterprise context. The highlights of this handbook include: #1. As the official source of knowledge on DAD, it includes greatly improved and enhanced strategies with a revised set of goal diagrams based upon learnings from applying DAD in the field. #2 It is an essential handbook to help coaches and teams make better decisions in their daily work, providing a wealth of ideas for experimenting with agile and lean techniques while providing specific guidance and trade-offs for those "it depends" questions. #3 It makes a perfect study guide for Disciplined Agile certification. Why "fail fast" (as our industry likes to recommend) when you can learn quickly on your journey to high performance? With this handbook, you can make better decisions based upon proven, context-based strategies, leading to earlier success and better outcomes"--




Outcomes Over Output


Book Description

"A project has to have a goal, otherwise, how do you know you're done? In the old days of engineering, setting project goals wasn't that hard. But when you're making software products, done is less obvious. When is Microsoft Word done? When is Google done? Or Facebook? In reality, software systems are never done. So then how do we give teams a goal that they can work on? Mostly, we simply ask teams to build features-but features are the wrong way to go. We often build features that create no value. Instead, we need to give teams an outcome to achieve. Setting goals as outcomes sounds simple, but it can be hard to do in practice. This book is a practical guide to using outcomes to guide the work of your team"--Publisher's website.




Agile Estimating and Planning


Book Description

Agile Estimating and Planning is the definitive, practical guide to estimating and planning agile projects. In this book, Agile Alliance cofounder Mike Cohn discusses the philosophy of agile estimating and planning and shows you exactly how to get the job done, with real-world examples and case studies. Concepts are clearly illustrated and readers are guided, step by step, toward how to answer the following questions: What will we build? How big will it be? When must it be done? How much can I really complete by then? You will first learn what makes a good plan-and then what makes it agile. Using the techniques in Agile Estimating and Planning, you can stay agile from start to finish, saving time, conserving resources, and accomplishing more. Highlights include: Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days–and when to use each How and when to re-estimate How to prioritize features using both financial and nonfinancial approaches How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones How to plan iterations and predict your team's initial rate of progress How to schedule projects that have unusually high uncertainty or schedule-related risk How to estimate projects that will be worked on by multiple teams Agile Estimating and Planning supports any agile, semiagile, or iterative process, including Scrum, XP, Feature-Driven Development, Crystal, Adaptive Software Development, DSDM, Unified Process, and many more. It will be an indispensable resource for every development manager, team leader, and team member.




Testing Business Ideas


Book Description

A practical guide to effective business model testing 7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder’s global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas. Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments. Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to: Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.




Introduction to Disciplined Agile Delivery


Book Description

Introduction to Disciplined Agile Delivery provides a quick overview of how agile software development works from beginning-to-end. It describes the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process decision framework and then works through a case study describing a typical agile team's experiences adopting a disciplined agile approach. The book describes how the team develops the first release of a mission-critical application while working in a legacy enterprise environment. It describes their experiences from beginning-to-end, starting with their initial team initiation efforts through construction and finally to deploying the solution into production. It also describes how the team stays together for future releases, overviewing their process improvement efforts from their Scrum-based beginnings through to a lean continuous delivery approach that fits in with their organization's evolving DevOps strategy.The DAD framework is a hybrid of existing methods such as Scrum, Kanban, Agile Modeling, SAFe, Extreme Programming, Agile Data, Unified Process and many others. DAD provides the flexibility to use various approaches and plugs the gaps not addressed by mainstream agile methods. In a nutshell, DAD is "pragmatic agile." DAD describes proven strategies to adapt and scale your agile initiatives to suit the unique realities of your enterprise without having to figure it all out by yourself.Here's an overview of what each chapter covers:* Chapter 1: Introduction. This chapter provides a quick overview of the book and a brief history of Disciplined Agile.* Chapter 2: Reality over Rhetoric. This chapter explores several common myths about DAD and more importantly disproves them.* Chapter 3: Disciplined Agile Delivery in a Nutshell. This chapter provides a brief yet comprehensive overview of the DAD framework. * Chapter 4: Introduction to the Case Study. This chapter introduces us to the team, describes the market opportunity that they hope to address, and describes the environment in which they're working.* Chapter 5: Inception. The team's initiation effort includes initial requirements modeling and planning with their stakeholders in a streamlined manner, initial architecture modeling, setting up their physical work environment, setting up the start of their tooling infrastructure, initial risk identification, and finally securing stakeholder support and funding for the rest of the first release.* Chapters 6 through 10: Construction. These chapters each describe a single Construction iteration, sharing the team's experiences during each of those two-week timeboxes. * Chapter 11: Transition. The two-week transition phase focuses on final testing and fixing, training the support/help-desk staff, finishing a few short end-user "how to" videos, and deploying the solution into production.* Chapter 12: Future Releases. This chapter overviews the team's improvement efforts over the next few releases, describing how they evolve from the agile Scrum-based lifecycle to a leaner approach and eventually to continuous delivery.* Chapter 13: Closing Thoughts. This chapter overviews the disciplined agile resources that are available to you.* Appendix: The Disciplined Agile IT Department. This short appendix overviews our ongoing work on the Disciplined Agile framework to address the full scope of an IT department. At 102 pages, you should find this book to be a quick, informative read.




The IT4ITTM Standard, Version 3.0


Book Description

This publication is the specification of The Open Group IT4IT Standard, Version 3.0, a standard of The Open Group. It describes a reference architecture that can be used to manage the business of Information Technology (IT) and the associated end-to-end lifecycle management of Digital Products. It is intended to provide a prescriptive Target Architecture and clear guidance for the transformation of existing technology management practices for a faster, scalable, automated, and practical approach to deploying product-based investment models and providing an unprecedented level of operational control and measurable value. This foundational IT4IT Reference Architecture is independent of specific technologies, vendors, organization structures, process models, and methodologies. It can be mapped to any existing technology landscape. It is flexible enough to accommodate the continuing evolution of operational and management paradigms for technology. It addresses every Digital Product lifecycle phase from investment decision-making to end-of-life. The IT4IT Standard addresses a critical gap in the Digital Transformation toolkit: the need for a unifying architectural model that describes and connects the capabilities, value streams, functions, and operational data needed to manage a Digital Product Portfolio at scale. The IT4IT Standard provides an approach to making digital investment decisions and managing digital outcomes that is particularly useful for: • C-level executives responsible for Digital Transformation, as a top-down view of digital value creation • Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers whose portfolios include significant digital content, as a way to integrate marketing priorities with product delivery practices • Governance, risk, and compliance practitioners, as a guide to controlling a modern digital landscape • Enterprise and IT Architects, as a template for IT tool rationalization and for governing end-to-end technology management architectures • Technology buyers, as the basis for Requests for Information (RFIs) and Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and as a template for evaluating product completeness • Consultants and assessors, as a guide for evaluating current practice against a well-defined standard • Technology vendors, as a guide for product design and customer integrations • Technical support staff, as a guide for automating and scaling up support services to deal with modern technology deployment velocity




Fit for Growth


Book Description

A practical approach to business transformation Fit for Growth* is a unique approach to business transformation that explicitly connects growth strategy with cost management and organization restructuring. Drawing on 70-plus years of strategy consulting experience and in-depth research, the experts at PwC’s Strategy& lay out a winning framework that helps CEOs and senior executives transform their organizations for sustainable, profitable growth. This approach gives structure to strategy while promoting lasting change. Examples from Strategy&’s hundreds of clients illustrate successful transformation on the ground, and illuminate how senior and middle managers are able to take ownership and even thrive during difficult periods of transition. Throughout the Fit for Growth process, the focus is on maintaining consistent high-value performance while enabling fundamental change. Strategy& has helped major clients around the globe achieve significant and sustained results with its research-backed approach to restructuring and cost reduction. This book provides practical guidance for leveraging that expertise to make the choices that allow companies to: Achieve growth while reducing costs Manage transformation and transition productively Create lasting competitive advantage Deliver reliable, high-value performance Sustainable success is founded on efficiency and high performance. Companies are always looking to do more with less, but their efforts often work against them in the long run. Total business transformation requires total buy-in, and it entails a series of decisions that must not be made lightly. The Fit for Growth approach provides a clear strategy and practical framework for growth-oriented change, with expert guidance on getting it right. *Fit for Growth is a registered service mark of PwC Strategy& Inc. in the United States




Business Model Generation


Book Description

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition. Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!"




Driving Digital Strategy


Book Description

Digital transformation is no longer news--it's a necessity. Despite the widespread threat of disruption, many large companies in traditional industries have succeeded at digitizing their businesses in truly transformative ways. The New York Times, formerly a bastion of traditional media, has created a thriving digital product behind a carefully designed paywall. Best Buy has transformed its business in the face of Amazon's threat. John Deere has formed a data-analysis arm to complement its farm-equipment business. And Goldman Sachs and many others are using digital technologies to reimagine their businesses. In Driving Digital Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta provides an actionable framework for following their lead. For over a decade, Gupta has studied digital transformation at Fortune 500 companies. He knows what works and what doesn't. Merely dabbling in digital or launching a small independent unit, which many companies do, will not bring success. Instead you need to fundamentally change the core of your business and ensure that your digital strategy touches all aspects of your organization: your business model, value chain, customer relationships, and company culture. Gupta covers each aspect in vivid detail while providing navigation tips and best practices along the way. Filled with rich and illuminating case studies of companies at the forefront of digital transformation, Driving Digital Strategy is the comprehensive guide you need to take full advantage of the limitless opportunities the digital age provides.