Bob’s Top Agile Reads

“There’s this amazing book by ______ Have you read it? No? OK, I’ll send you a link after class” I repeat this so often in trainings that I sometimes feel like a broken record.

I’m a bit of a bookish nerd and I usually get very excited about whatever I’m reading at the moment (right now that’s Sex at Dawn – which, oddly, has quite a bit to say about Agile, more on that after I finish the book). In this post I want to share with you the resources I find foundational to any Agile transition.

If you are well into a transition or just taking some halting first steps (like reading a blog on the topic) these are essential resources. They are especially well suited to managers and executives and those of you on the product side of the house, though IT and delivery team members will also find them incredibly useful. Let me know what you think!

THE LINKS:

Dan Pink wrote an excellent book on motivation and management called Drive. There’s a 10 minute video that captures the main points on RSAnimate. The book is excellent, however you can get plenty of useful ideas and inspiration from his talks I recommend you start there and then get the book if you want more.

One of my favorite books on Agile and Management is Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo. I also highly recommend his blog. Jurgen is thorough and concise – two virtues that seldom cohabitate. He presents a foundation for action that is academic and pragmatic. If you have to start somewhere, start here.

Chad Holdorf the Scaled Agile Coach at John Deere has done some great work on team organization at the enterprise level.

Dean Leffingwell is the author of 4 books on software requirements and Agile at scale (he also worked with Chad at John Deere). He has an excellent (if a tad busy) model for a Scaled Agile Framework – it’s an excellent vision of what’s possible. Read his blog, buy his books (and read them too).

Story Mapping – a methodology developed by Jeff Patton – is an excellent way to visually represent an entire product. It helps avoid some of the pitfalls of a flat backlog and envision clearly what a Minimum Viable Product might be. A PDF of his original 2005 article on the topic is here. And there has been much written on the topic since, Google will show you the way.

Eric Ries has done some excellent work combining Steven Blank‘s work on Customer Development with Agile. He is working to put scientific rigor behind the process of achieving Product-Market Fit. This is crucial to startups of course, but this kind of entrepreneurial thinking is also important in larger organizations and will only get more so in coming years. Start with their respective blogs (linked above), Steve’s foundational book Four Steps to the Epiphany or Eric’s new book The Lean Startup.

And finally one resource I find essential is the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. We Agilists are in the business of Transformation and this means we need to have a clear understanding of how change actually occurs in complex human systems. The Heath brothers have broken a very complex set of social science and brain research into a set of simple, usable steps. Their work is especially aplicable if you feel you want to increase your influence but have limited authority. They also do a series of excellent podcasts and pdfs which are free to those who register on their site (also free).

What are your go-to books, blogs and videos for inspiration and information?

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Photo by: accent on eclectic

2 Comments to Bob’s Top Agile Reads

1. 

   Bob,

   Thanks for providing good information in this blog! Found it very useful.

   Raja
Raja Bavani on September 8th, 2011
2. 

   Bob,
   Thanks for ur info on books, it’s really resourceful for a beginner.
Prasanna Basavaraju on September 20th, 2011

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