Agile Management: Leadership in an Agile Environment

If you have tried to implement Agile in your organization, you have probably learned a lot about development practices, teamwork, processes and tools, but too little about how to manage such an organization. Yet managerial support is often the biggest impediment to successfully adopting Agile, and limiting your Agile efforts to those of the development teams while doing the same old-style management will dramatically limit the ability of your organization to reach the next Agile level. Ángel Medinilla will provide you with a comprehensive understanding of what Agile means to an organization and the manager’s role in such an environment, i.e., how to manage, lead and motivate self-organizing teams and how to create an Agile corporate culture. Based on his background as a “veteran” Agile consultant for companies of all sizes, he delivers insights and experiences, points out possible pitfalls, presents practical approaches and possible scenarios, also including detailed suggestions for further reading. If you are a manager, team leader, evangelist, change agent (or whatever nice title) and if you want to push Agile further in your organization, then this is your book. You will read how to change the paradigm of what management is about: it is not about arbitrary decisions, constant supervision and progress control, and the negotiation of changing requirements. It is about motivation, self-organization, responsibility, and the exploitation of all project stakeholders’ knowledge. We live in a different world than the one that most management experts of the 20th century describe, and companies that strive for success and excellence will need a new kind of manager – Agile managers.

Table of Contents

Part I: The Agile Manager
Chapter 1: A Brief History of Management
Chapter 2: Lean and Agile in a Nutshell
Chapter 3: The Agile Manager´s Role

Part II: Agile Management
Chapter 4: Motivating the Agile Workforce
Chapter 5: Self-Organization
Chapter 6: Agile Structures: Scaling Agility
Chapter 7: Managing Capacity and Workload
Chapter 8: Agile Culture and Driving Change
Chapter 9: Final Thoughts