Being Agile: Your Roadmap to Successful Adoption of Agile

I have something of a love-hate relationship with Agile.

On the one hand, I love the values and simplicity of the approach, which has a lot of overlap with concepts from the manufacturing industry such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Kanban, and Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, and much that aligns with my ideas of leadership and empowerment of teams.

On the other, I find that adherents tend to be almost religious about it, rather than recognizing it as just one of a number of tools and techniques that can be used in the right situation to drive improvement in an organization. In addition, what’s often referred to as “Agile” is really just a lack of planning and process – which is NOT what Agile is all about.

This book tends towards the religious approach, but generally does a good job of laying out the concepts and values, many of which are simply common sense. I would recommend this as baseline reading to ensure that you are level-set on the basics.