Enterprise Agility in Healthcare


Book Description

Enterprise Agility in Healthcare explains why agility is vital to organizational survival. It details the critical variables that only executive leaders can address in a way that ensures success. It uses the experiences of two major healthcare organizations in order to frame the situational context surrounding the variables and then explains why and how the leaders in those organizations made choices that proved to be extraordinarily successful ... in the real world! The common challenge shared by healthcare, aerospace, and information-centric industries of every type is the extraordinary complexity and uncertainty driven by the enormous number of individual, yet codependent factors, whether in humans and their cellular functioning, or vehicles and the interaction of materials and environment, requiring leaders and decision-makers at every level to connect, interact, and synthesize vital, fluctuating data, typically via technology-intermediated network structures with varying content and scale. The networks may be obvious, like the organizational structure, while others are more abstract or virtual, like social networks and ecosystems Despite healthcare’s amazing success in improving the quality and average lifespan of human beings, the maximum lifespan remains unchanged at no more than 125 years. Very few healthcare organizations live for much longer, with most disappearing before reaching one-third of that lifespan. How systems, people, and culture respond as organizational size changes is a challenge and also an opportunity in scaling for any information-centric industry. This book will use the actual, real-world experiences of two, very successful healthcare organizations to provide specific, actionable insights into the principles and practices that provoke success. Because scaling plays a determinative role in the successful design of everything from airplanes to skyscrapers, its impact on how effective and efficient an organization is remains a continuous challenge. Perhaps understanding scaling is of greater urgency due to the increasingly large and complex structures required for companies, institutions and governments to continuously evolve the complex adaptive systems they have become. This book focuses on organizational expansion in healthcare. By examining two organizations with similar, yet very different growth experiences, this book demonstrates very successful, very real outcomes while offering key insights into the principles and practices that drove them.




The Journey to Enterprise Agility


Book Description

This is the first book to seriously address the disconnection between nimble Agile teams and other groups in the enterprise, including enterprise architecture, the program management office (PMO), human resources, and even business executives. When an enterprise experiments with practice improvements, software development teams often jump on board with excitement, while other groups are left to wonder how they will fit in. We address how these groups can adapt to Agile teams. More importantly, we show how many Agile teams cause their own problems, damaging scalability and sustainability, by requiring special treatment, and by failing to bridge the gaps between themselves and other groups. We call this phenomenon “Agile illth.” Adopting a set of “best practices” is not enough. All of us, Agile teams and the corporate groups, must change our intentions and worldviews to be more compatible with the success of the enterprise. Join us on the journey to enterprise agility. It is a crooked path, fraught with danger, confusion and complexity. It is the only way to reach the pinnacles we hope to experience in the form of better business value delivered faster for less cost.




Lean-Agile Software Development


Book Description

Agile techniques have demonstrated immense potential for developing more effective, higher-quality software. However,scaling these techniques to the enterprise presents many challenges. The solution is to integrate the principles and practices of Lean Software Development with Agile’s ideology and methods. By doing so, software organizations leverage Lean’s powerful capabilities for “optimizing the whole” and managing complex enterprise projects. A combined “Lean-Agile” approach can dramatically improve both developer productivity and the software’s business value.In this book, three expert Lean software consultants draw from their unparalleled experience to gather all the insights, knowledge, and new skills you need to succeed with Lean-Agile development. Lean-Agile Software Development shows how to extend Scrum processes with an Enterprise view based on Lean principles. The authors present crucial technical insight into emergent design, and demonstrate how to apply it to make iterative development more effective. They also identify several common development “anti-patterns” that can work against your goals, and they offer actionable, proven alternatives. Lean-Agile Software Development shows how to Transition to Lean Software Development quickly and successfully Manage the initiation of product enhancements Help project managers work together to manage product portfolios more effectively Manage dependencies across the software development organization and with its partners and colleagues Integrate development and QA roles to improve quality and eliminate waste Determine best practices for different software development teams The book’s companion Web site, www.netobjectives.com/lasd, provides updates, links to related materials, and support for discussions of the book’s content.




The Agile Consultant


Book Description

Learn the agile philosophy of lean processes, incremental delivery, deep client participation, decentralized authority, and just-in-time planning to bring speed, creativity, empowerment and increased productivity to product development. This book is your guide to becoming the go-to advisor for the enterprise agile transition. Many organizations have brought in agile coaches and achieved great progress in software development productivity, only to find teams slipping back into old methods as they encounter enterprise resistance and dysfunction. The consultative skills required to engage at the enterprise level differ greatly from those needed to coach teams in agile practices. Agile coaches and consultants need to up their game to successfully partner with executives, managers, and PMOs to evolve from traditional methods to a lean, agile mindset. The Agile Consultant, by former Intel Worldwide Project Management Director and agile expert Rick Freedman, author of Amazon best-seller The IT Consultant, shows how to overcome transition challenges and move beyond team-level practice coaching to guide the entire organization to enterprise agility. Agile methods are displacing traditional, process-heavy project management techniques, and are poised to migrate from software development to the rest of IT, and to the entire enterprise. Agile’s rapid adoption proves a simple truth: agility works! Agile methods are here to stay, and will continue to expand within the organization. Enterprises are rapidly moving beyond agile development to agile IT, agile marketing, and agile strategic planning. Enterprises need agile coaches and consultants to guide them towards achieving the benefits of agility. What You'll Learn Instill effective agile practices across the enterprise Coach teams, managers, and executives in learning, adopting, and practicing lean and agile strategies Diagnose the roadblocks and obstacles most organizations encounter during the transition to agile Use recognized change-management techniques to guide the enterprise to agility while minimizing disruption and resistance Navigate the many challenges that can derail the transition to agility Demonstrate the critical mix of facilitation, interpersonal, and relationship skills to help organizations succeed with agile Guide the corporate culture toward agility from the top down and the bottom up Evolve from old school project management thinking to a lean, agile mindset Who This Book Is For Besides IT consultants, The Agile Consultant will also appeal to developer teams, internal IT staffers and their managers, and to executives leading the transition to agile development.




Agility Shift


Book Description

As contrary as it sounds, "planning" -- as we traditionally understand the term--can be the worst thing a company can do. Consider that volatile weather events disrupt trusted supply chains, markets, and promised delivery schedules. Ever-shifting geo-political tensions, as well as internal political upheaval within U.S. and global governments, derail long-planned new ventures. Technology failures block opportunities. Competitors suddenly change their product or release date; your team cannot meet the pace of innovations in your market niche, leaving you sidelined. There are myriad ways in the current business environment for a company's well-considered business plans to go awry. Most business schools continue to prepare managers to be effective in stable and predictable environments, conditions that, if they ever existed at all, are long gone. The Agility Shift shows business leaders exactly how to make the radical mindset and strategy shift necessary to create an agile, entrepreneurial organization that can innovate and thrive in complex, ever-changing contexts. As author Pamela Meyer explains, there is much more involved than a reconfiguration of the org chart and job descriptions. It requires relinquishing the illusion of control at the very foundation of most management training and business practice. Despite most leaders' approaches, "Agility is not simply accelerated planning." Unlike many agility books on the market, The Agility Shift provides specific, actionable strategies and tactics for leaders at all levels of the organization to put into practice immediately to improve agility and achieve results.




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.




Doing Agile Right


Book Description

Agile has the power to transform work--but only if it's implemented the right way. For decades business leaders have been painfully aware of a huge chasm: They aspire to create nimble, flexible enterprises. But their day-to-day reality is silos, sluggish processes, and stalled innovation. Today, agile is hailed as the essential bridge across this chasm, with the potential to transform a company and catapult it to the head of the pack. Not so fast. In this clear-eyed, indispensable book, Bain & Company thought leader Darrell Rigby and his colleagues Sarah Elk and Steve Berez provide a much-needed reality check. They dispel the myths and misconceptions that have accompanied agile's rise to prominence--the idea that it can reshape an organization all at once, for instance, or that it should be used in every function and for all types of work. They illustrate that agile teams can indeed be powerful, making people's jobs more rewarding and turbocharging innovation, but such results are possible only if the method is fully understood and implemented the right way. The key, they argue, is balance. Every organization must optimize and tightly control some of its operations, and at the same time innovate. Agile, done well, enables vigorous innovation without sacrificing the efficiency and reliability essential to traditional operations. The authors break down how agile really works, show what not to do, and explain the crucial importance of scaling agile properly in order to reap its full benefit. They then lay out a road map for leading the transition to a truly agile enterprise. Agile isn't a goal in itself; it's a means to becoming a high-performance operation. Doing Agile Right is a must-have guide for any company trying to make the transition--or trying to sustain high agility.




Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy


Book Description

Today, companies are expected to be flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change, which basically asks them to be agile. By combining Beyond Budgeting,Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile, this book provides a practical guide for companies that want to be agile company-wide. Notes to the 2nd edition: This second edition reflects such updates as: the new Agile Fluency Model, the renaming / rebranding of Statoil to Equinor, and some small additions to complexity. We also enhanced the description of Organizational Open Space and explain how it differs from Liberating Structures. Enjoy insights in the book shared by Jez Humble, Diana Larsen, James Shore, Johanna Rothman, and Bjarte Bogsnes. Find out what Spotify, ING, Ericsson, and Walmart say in the book. Quotes from early readers: “[This is] a very important book. My hopes are that it will be the missing link between agile for teams and the flexible, adaptive and humane organisations we want to build. It’s a great book. Thanks for writing it!” ~Sandy Mamoli, author of Creating Great Teams “Just as Spotify has worked hard to make all aspects of product development align well and work together - I see Jutta and John in this book exploring methods and processes that will work very well across the whole company.” ~ Anders Ivarsson, Spotify “I love how those practices [are] integrated and summarized into actionable recommendations.” ~ Yves Lin, Titansoft “Really wonderful balance of structure and space, rigor and creativity, that you're suggesting.” ~ Michael Herman, Openspaceworld.org “Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space and Sociocracy [...] makes an important case for companies to regard trust and autonomy the norm, rather than a privilege. [...] Overall a great overview of how leaders can reimagine the way power is distributed within their companies.” ~ Aimee Groth, Author of The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia This book invites you to take a new perspective that addresses the challenges of doing business in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.




Virtual and Mobile Healthcare: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice


Book Description

One of the primary topics at the center of discussion, and very often debate, between industry professionals, government officials, and the general public is the current healthcare system and the potential for an overhaul of its processes and services. Many organizations concerned for the long-term care of patients wish to see new strategies, practices, and organizational tools developed to optimize healthcare systems all over the world. One of the central engines of the current shift toward reorientation of healthcare services is virtual and mobile healthcare. Virtual and Mobile Healthcare: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice explores the trends, challenges, and issues related to the emergence of mobile and virtual healthcare. The book also examines how mobile technologies can best be used for the benefit of both doctors and their patients. Highlighting a range of topics such as smart healthcare, electronic health records, and m-health, this publication is an ideal reference source for medical professionals, healthcare administrators, doctors, nurses, practitioners, and researchers in all areas of the medical field.




Scaling Software Agility


Book Description

“Companies have been implementing large agile projects for a number of years, but the ‘stigma’ of ‘agile only works for small projects’ continues to be a frequent barrier for newcomers and a rallying cry for agile critics. What has been missing from the agile literature is a solid, practical book on the specifics of developing large projects in an agile way. Dean Leffingwell’s book Scaling Software Agility fills this gap admirably. It offers a practical guide to large project issues such as architecture, requirements development, multi-level release planning, and team organization. Leffingwell’s book is a necessary guide for large projects and large organizations making the transition to agile development.” —Jim Highsmith, director, Agile Practice, Cutter Consortium, author of Agile Project Management “There’s tension between building software fast and delivering software that lasts, between being ultra-responsive to changes in the market and maintaining a degree of stability. In his latest work, Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell shows how to achieve a pragmatic balance among these forces. Leffingwell’s observations of the problem, his advice on the solution, and his description of the resulting best practices come from experience: he’s been there, done that, and has seen what’s worked.” —Grady Booch, IBM Fellow Agile development practices, while still controversial in some circles, offer undeniable benefits: faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements, and higher quality. However, agile practices have been defined and recommended primarily to small teams. In Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell describes how agile methods can be applied to enterprise-class development. Part I provides an overview of the most common and effective agile methods. Part II describes seven best practices of agility that natively scale to the enterprise level. Part III describes an additional set of seven organizational capabilities that companies can master to achieve the full benefits of software agility on an enterprise scale. This book is invaluable to software developers, testers and QA personnel, managers and team leads, as well as to executives of software organizations whose objective is to increase the quality and productivity of the software development process but who are faced with all the challenges of developing software on an enterprise scale.