Adaptive Leadership: Accelerating Enterprise Agility

Adaptive Leadership: Accelerating Enterprise Agility

by James Highsmith III
Released November 2013
Publisher(s): Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 9780133598667

Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial.

O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial

Book description

Lessons from Agile’s First Decade…Leadership for Agile’s Next Decade

The agile software movement has now been around for a full decade. As coauthor of the original Agile Manifesto, Jim Highsmith has been at its heart since the beginning. He’s spent the past decade helping hundreds of organizations transition to agile/lean. When it comes to agile, he’s seen it all–in a variety of industries, worldwide.

Now, in Adaptive Leadership, he has compiled, updated, and extended his best writings about agile and lean methods for a management audience. Highsmith doesn’t just reveal what’s working and what isn’t; he offers a powerful new vision for extending agility across the enterprise.

Drawing on what’s been learned in application development, this guide shows how to use adaptive leadership techniques to transform the way you deliver complete solutions, whatever form they take. You’ll learn how enterprise agility can enable the ambitious organizational missions that matter most; how leaders can deliver a continuous stream of value; how to think disruptively about opportunities, and how to respond quickly by creating more adaptive, innovative organizations.

Coverage includes

  • Discovering and executing new business opportunities far more quickly

  • Delivering complete business solutions earlier, and iterating them more often

  • Organizing for innovation, and systematically managing opportunity flow

  • Clarifying the degree of strategic, portfolio, and operational agility you need, and focusing on your highest-value transformations

  • Creating cultures that actually can adapt and learn

  • Reinvigorating the roots of agile value and values

  • Understanding IT’s changing value proposition, and retraining your people accordingly

  • Integrating economics, products, and social responsibility

  • Choosing metrics that guide agility, not counterproductive traditional metrics

  • Understanding the financial implications of technical debt

  • Optimizing business value by doing less–and guiding the process with ”NOT to do“ lists

  • Speculating intelligently when you can’t plan away uncertainty

  • Customizing management to each project’s needs (because not all projects should be equally agile)

    •

    Table of contents

    1. Title Page
    2. Copyright Page
    3. Contents
    4. Foreword by Gary Gruver
    5. Foreword by Christopher Murphy
    6. Foreword by John Crosby
    7. Preface
    8. About the Author
    9. Chapter 1. Enterprise Agility
      1. CEOs and CIOs Focus on Agility
      2. Why Agility?
      3. Business Agility Needed in Turbulent Times
      4. Responsiveness and Efficiency
      5. How Agile Do We Need to Be?
      6. Manage the Flow of Opportunities
      7. Organizing for Innovation
      8. The Strategic Impact of Continuous Delivery
      9. Levels of Agility: Strategic, Portfolio, Operational
      10. The Challenge of Adaptive Leadership
    10. Chapter 2. Adaptive Leadership Today
      1. Creating a Culture of Adaptation and Learning
      2. What Do Leaders Want from Agile?
      3. The Law of Raspberry Jam: Reflecting on Agile Progress
      4. Unorthodox, Unconventional, and the Next Decade of Agile
      5. Innovators, Imitators, and Idiots
      6. Iterative Delivery, Waterfall Governance
      7. IT’s Changing Value Proposition
      8. More Than Software: Integrating Economics, Product, and Social Responsibility
      9. Velocity Is Killing Agility
      10. You Can’t Plan Away Uncertainty
      11. The Ambidextrous Organization
    11. Chapter 3. Deliver a Continuous Flow of Value
      1. Speed-to-Value
      2. Beyond Scope, Schedule, and Cost: The Agile Triangle
      3. Constraints Drive Innovation
      4. Determining Business Value
      5. Beyond Project Plans
      6. Feature Folly
      7. Features or Quality? Selling Software Excellence to Business Partners
      8. All Projects Are Not the Same
      9. Scope Issues in an Agile Project
      10. Speed
      11. Reducing Cycle Time
      12. Cycles, Cycles, Cycles
      13. Shortening the Tail
      14. Quality Management
      15. The Financial Implications of Technical Debt
      16. Do Less
    12. Chapter 4. Create an Adaptive, Innovative Culture
      1. Adapting
      2. Exploring
      3. Engaging and Inspiring
      4. Riding Paradox
      5. Complexity and Leadership
    13. Chapter 5. Final Words
    14. Bibliography

    Product information

    • Title: Adaptive Leadership: Accelerating Enterprise Agility
    • Author(s): James Highsmith III
    • Release date: November 2013
    • Publisher(s): Addison-Wesley Professional
    • ISBN: 9780133598667