Hi, this is Alan Shalloway. I'm writing this book and am making it available while I am writing it for two reasons. First, you may find it useful, even in this preliminary state. Second, I am hoping that some of you will want to help me with it by giving me feedback and new ideas during its writing. I invite questions and comments about the book at the Improving Collaboration Planning User Group which I set up for this purpose. I am mostly looking for comments from potential readers - see the introduction for who that is. I am always happy to have any statements challenged for accuracy. And, of course, if you see ways to improve the methods I'm talking about, I'd be delighted to hear of them.

We have had great success with helping our clients solve many of the common challenges I hear many teams face in the Agile world. I've wanted to document these since, until now, many of these methods have only been discussed in our seminars and webinars. Some of the ideas in the book have been expressed in earlier blogs. Given the current on-line nature of the book, I may point to these blogs prior to getting the chapters written. In fact, I've been toying with the idea of on-line and hardcopy versions of the same book and may fool around with some ideas on this here.

As chapters are written I'll be adding links to them via the table of contents: chapters available for reading).

Introduction

Section I: The Business Case for Agility

• Delivering in Stages
  
• Why Product Portfolio Management Must be Across Products
• Incremental Discovery of Value
  

Section II: The Value Stream

• Why Looking at Time Is So Important
• Value Stream Mapping
• Why You must Look at the Whole

Section III: Enterprise Agility

• Enterprise Agility Requires a Different Perspective
  
• Laws Support Innovation Not Constrain It
• High Level Release Planning: Pareto Vs Parkinson's
  

Section IV: Team Organization for Enterprise Agility

• The Value of Cross-functional Teams
• Coordinating Teams With Backlog Management
• Dynamic Feature Teams
  
• 'Assigning' Projects to Teams With Pull
• Managing Work Flow from Multiple Business Stakeholders to Multiple Teams
  

Section V: Beginning Your Agile Transition

• Where to Start Your Agile Transition
• When to use Scrum, When to Use Kanban, When to use Something Else

Appendices

• Lean In a Nutshell
• Quick start Kanban
  
• Why Estimates Are So Bad and What to do About It
• The principles, values and practices of Lean-Kanban
• Creating a Kanban Board From a Value Stream Map
• Using Kanban Boards as Alternatives to Value Stream Mapping