A New Series

A New Series

This podcast kicks off a new series for Lean Agile Straight Talk. We have been busy finishing several books focused on Lean-Agile. One is called the Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams and another is Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility. We are proud of both of these books and wanted to introduce them to you. In this show, Alan Shalloway and I talk about the motivations behind these books, what is going in in the world of Lean and Agile software development and why they are needed. The next show will give a rundown of the pocket guide. After that, we will talk through each of the chapters in Lean-Agile Software Development. Each of these chapters has good, core concepts that we want you to know and this approach gives us a game plan for covering all of them.

Each of the books Net Objectives offers aims to address the question, "What do people need to know to succed in their role to do product development?" In a nutshell, we describe Lean-Agile with the phrase, Make-Value-Flow-Sustainably.

Make. How do developers create software at the team-level. In the past, "making" was where the challenges were.
Value. What does the business need? How do we get them to drive what really needs to get done?
Flow. How do you get what multiple teams create to flow through the organization. Learning to work together, coordinating work.
Sustainably. How do keep writing code so that it is always of sufficient quality? So that we do not keep incurring technical debt. And ow do keep the organization growing in a healty way so that it can continue to do the work.

Even if you find a technique, such as Scrum, that works well at a team-level, it does not always work in every context. And, we have learned that trying to "scale" Scrum to the enterprise is not the correct approach to achieve enterprise agility. Understanding the principles helps you know what to do when confronting situations you have not yet encountered. And that leads to proficiency in this field.