Leading Self-Organising Teams

 What are self-organising teams? Why do we need them? How can we effectively lead in a self-organising environment?

This workbook provides practice-based answers to these questions. Focused on helping lean and agile professionals to improve, these answers offer a clear understanding of what self-organisation is about and why we need it to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

The author gives an overview on the cornerstones of so-called leadership as a team sport and wants to encourage you to make good use of the broad collection of proven tools he offers.

Title Leading Self-Organising Teams
Author(s) Siegfried Kaltenecker
Publisher: InfoQ (March 23, 2015)
Paperback PDF (149 pages, 3.7), ePub, and Mobi (Kindle)
Language: English
ISBN-10: N/A
ISBN-13: N/A
Download: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/leading-self-organising-teams

Kanban for Skeptics: Clear Answers to Kanban in Software Development

Kanban is becoming a popular way to visualize and limit work-in-progress in software development and information technology work. Teams around the world are adding kanban around their existing processes to catalyze cultural change and deliver better business agility. This book answers the questions: What is Kanban? Why would I want to use Kanban? How do I go about implementing Kanban? How do I recognize improvement opportunities and what should I do about them?

When Kanban is used in the field of software engineering, it is used in a much broader sense. Kanban is a change management approach that employs a WIP limited pull system. For me it is an approach to change your process into one that focuses on end to end value and reliably delivering stuff, with high quality. The limited set of rules and principles help people focus on customer value and avoid building up half finished work, which is still a common issue in the software industry.

Title Kanban for Skeptics: Clear Answers to Kanban in Software Development
Author(s) Nick Oostvogels
Publisher: Leanpub.com (2013)
Language: English
eBook: https://leanpub.com/kanbanforskeptics

The Culture Game: Tools for the Agile Manager

 THE CULTURE GAME is your tutorial and reference guide for creating lasting business agility in your organization. This is the handbook for managers who want to rapidly develop a culture of learning inside their teams. THE CULTURE GAME book provides you with specific tools and techniques to help your teams (and the entire enterprise) rapidly respond to change. THE CULTURE GAME describes 16 patterns of team-learning behavior, distilled from Agile software development. This book provides the tools to socialize these ideas throughout your organization. THE CULTURE GAME book is your tutorial and reference guide for scaling the Agile mindset from software teams to the wider enterprise.

Title The Culture Game: Tools for the Agile Manager
Author(s) Daniel Mezick
Publisher: FreeStanding Press (May 15, 2012); InfoQ (eBook, December 4, 2012)
Paperback 314 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0984875301
ISBN-13: 978-0984875306
eBook: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/Mezick-Culture-game

The Scrum Primer

This book is a a Lightweight Guide to the Theory and Practice of Scrum.

Traditional development with single-function groups, delayed or weak feedback loops, frontloaded predictive planning, and a sequential flow from analysis to test is not very successful in today’s volatile world. This approach delays feedback, learning, and potential return on investment due to an absence of real working software until late in the game, causing a lack of transparency, lack of ability to improve, reduction in flexibility, and an increase in business and technical risks. An alternative – cross-functional teams with iterative development – has also existed for decades, but was not as widely used as the traditional model.

Scrum packages proven product-development concepts in a simple framework, including: real teams, cross-functional teams, self-managing teams, short iterative full-cycle feedback loops, and lowering the cost of change. These concepts increase agility and feedback, enable earlier ROI, and reduce risk. Scrum is a development framework in which cross-functional teams develop products or projects in an iterative, incremental manner. It structures development in cycles of work called Sprints. At the end of the Sprint, the Team reviews the Sprint with stakeholders, and demonstrates what it has built. People obtain feedback that can be incorporated in the next Sprint. Scrum emphasizes working product at the end of the Sprint that is really "done"; in the case of software, this means a system that is integrated, fully tested, end-user documented, and potentially shippable. There are many concise descriptions of Scrum available online, and this primer aims to provide the next level of detail on the practices.

Title The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight Guide to the Theory and Practice of Scrum
Author(s) Pete Deemer, Gabrielle Benefield, Craig Larman and Bas Vodde
Publisher: InfoQ (December 17, 2012)
Language: English
eBook: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/Scrum_Primer