The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck


Book Description

In The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck, Em and Adrienne share their "trade secrets" for launching and operating powerful and effective Agile Release Trains. There's a lot at stake when launching an Agile Release Train. When taking on an Enterprise Lean-Agile Transformation you only get one shot at a first impression. Runaway trains are expensive. Money gets wasted, time gets lost and the reputational damage can take years to repair.Going well beyond the standard SAFe training, this book deep dives into the practical tips and tricks that only over 15 years of combined real world experience can teach. Peppered with innumerable war stories, this book provides plenty of entertainment (as well as education) in the form of personal anecdotes, cautionary tales and pro-tips for both the colocated Agile Release Train and its more complicated globally distributed cousins.You will learn how to get a ticket on the SAFe railway, load the cargo on your train, set the timetable, SAFely board and stay on the tracks. No matter your context, you are sure to find plenty of actionable ideas for launching and operating Agile Release Trains. Let's face it, any train can derail, so let The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck be the coach in your pocket, warning you of the obstacles on the tracks ahead before you train wreck.




Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck


Book Description

Why can't we look away? Whether we admit it or not, we're fascinated by evil. Dark fantasies, morbid curiosities, Schadenfreude: As conventional wisdom has it, these are the symptoms of our wicked side, and we succumb to them at our own peril. But we're still compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and there's no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. What makes these spectacles so irresistible? In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the scholar Eric G. Wilson sets out to discover the source of our attraction to the caustic, drawing on the findings of biologists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and artists. A professor of English literature and a lifelong student of the macabre, Wilson believes there's something nourishing in darkness. "To repress death is to lose the feeling of life," he writes. "A closeness to death discloses our most fertile energies." His examples are legion, and startling in their diversity. Citing everything from elephant graveyards and Susan Sontag's On Photography to the Tiger Woods sex scandal and Steel Magnolias, Wilson finds heartening truths wherever he confronts death. In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the perverse is never far from the sublime. The result is a powerful and delightfully provocative defense of what it means to be human—for better and for worse.




Tribal Unity (paperback)


Book Description

Are you ready to create a one team culture? Tribal Unity is a real world, practical guide for leaders committed to making their organisation a great place to work. Based in the true story of how one inspiring leader transformed a highly toxic organisational culture, into an internationally recognised case study of success. Tribal Unity shares proven patterns that are revolutionising the way teams of teams connect and perform. Em Campbell-Pretty is an internationally acclaimed business strategist, speaker and one of Australia's leading Enterprise Agile consultants. After 20 years in senior business roles within multinational blue chip corporations, Em discovered Agile and became passionate about the chance it provides to align business and IT around the delivery of value. Today Em is instrumental in empowering Australia's largest enterprises in improving the effectiveness of their teams.




SAFe 5.0 Distilled


Book Description

SAFe® 5.0: The World's Leading Framework for Business Agility "Those who master large-scale software delivery will define the economic landscape of the twenty-first century. SAFe 5.0 is a monumental release that I am convinced will be key in helping countless enterprise organizations succeed in their shift from project to product." –Dr. Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop and author of the book Project to Product Business agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to unprecedented market changes, threats, and emerging opportunities with innovative business solutions. SAFe® 5.0 Distilled: Achieving Business Agility with Scaled Agile Framework® explains how adopting SAFe helps enterprises use the power of Agile, Lean, and DevOps to outflank the competition and deliver complex, technology-based business solutions in the shortest possible time. This book will help you Understand the business case for SAFe: its benefits, and the problems it solves Learn the technical, organizational and leadership competencies needed for business agility Refocus on customer centricity with design thinking Better align strategy and execution with Lean Portfolio Management Learn the leadership skills needed to thrive in the digital age Increase the flow of value to customers with value stream networks Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.




Train Wreck


Book Description

Trains are massive—with some weighing 15,000 tons or more. When these metal monsters collide or go off the rails, their destructive power becomes clear. In this book, George Bibel presents riveting tales of trains gone wrong, the detective work of finding out why, and the safety improvements that were born of tragedy. Train Wreck details 17 crashes in which more than 200 people were killed. Readers follow investigators as they sift through the rubble and work with computerized event recorders to figure out what happened. Using a mix of eyewitness accounts and scientific explanations, Bibel draws us into a world of forensics and human drama. Train Wreck is a fascinating exploration of• runaway trains• bearing failures• metal fatigue• crash testing • collision dynamics• bad rails




The Art of Crash Landing


Book Description

From a bright new talent comes this debut novel about a young woman who travels for the first time to her mother’s hometown, and gets sucked into the mystery that changed her family forever Mattie Wallace has really screwed up this time. Broke and knocked up, she’s got all her worldly possessions crammed into six giant trash bags, and nowhere to go. Try as she might, Mattie can no longer deny that she really is turning into her mother, a broken alcoholic who never met a bad choice she didn’t make. When Mattie gets news of a possible inheritance left by a grandmother she’s never met, she jumps at this one last chance to turn things around. Leaving the Florida Panhandle, she drives eight hundred miles to her mother’s birthplace—the tiny town of Gandy, Oklahoma. There, she soon learns that her mother remains a local mystery—a happy, talented teenager who inexplicably skipped town thirty-five years ago with nothing but the clothes on her back. But the girl they describe bears little resemblance to the damaged woman Mattie knew, and before long it becomes clear that something terrible happened to her mother, and it happened here. The harder Mattie digs for answers, the more obstacles she encounters. Giving up, however, isn’t an option. Uncovering what started her mother’s downward spiral might be the only way to stop her own. Hilarious, gripping, and unexpectedly wise, The Art of Crash Landing is a poignant novel from an assured new voice.




Crash and Burn


Book Description

In this follow-up to his memoir Too fat to fish, the comedian and radio personality focuses on his drug addiction and life-threatening depression with an unflinching eye and his signature wit. A veteran comedian and radio personality, Lange was addicted to heroin and prescription drugs. He details his very public meltdown, and explains how he turned his life and career around.




Steam Train, Dream Train 1-2-3


Book Description

Cuddle up with the beloved animal friends from the bestselling Steam Train, Dream Train and count on lots of fun! Little train enthusiasts will love counting from one to ten along with the dreamy train cars!




Agile Software Requirements


Book Description

“We need better approaches to understanding and managing software requirements, and Dean provides them in this book. He draws ideas from three very useful intellectual pools: classical management practices, Agile methods, and lean product development. By combining the strengths of these three approaches, he has produced something that works better than any one in isolation.” –From the Foreword by Don Reinertsen, President of Reinertsen & Associates; author of Managing the Design Factory; and leading expert on rapid product development Effective requirements discovery and analysis is a critical best practice for serious application development. Until now, however, requirements and Agile methods have rarely coexisted peacefully. For many enterprises considering Agile approaches, the absence of effective and scalable Agile requirements processes has been a showstopper for Agile adoption. In Agile Software Requirements, Dean Leffingwell shows exactly how to create effective requirements in Agile environments. Part I presents the “big picture” of Agile requirements in the enterprise, and describes an overall process model for Agile requirements at the project team, program, and portfolio levels Part II describes a simple and lightweight, yet comprehensive model that Agile project teams can use to manage requirements Part III shows how to develop Agile requirements for complex systems that require the cooperation of multiple teams Part IV guides enterprises in developing Agile requirements for ever-larger “systems of systems,” application suites, and product portfolios This book will help you leverage the benefits of Agile without sacrificing the value of effective requirements discovery and analysis. You’ll find proven solutions you can apply right now–whether you’re a software developer or tester, executive, project/program manager, architect, or team leader.