Toolkit voor agile leiders

The Professional Scrum Series #3

by Peter Koning

Practical, Proven Tools for Leading and Empowering High-Performing Agile Teams
A leader is like a farmer, who doesn’t grow crops by pulling them but instead creates the perfect environment for the crops to grow and thrive. If you lead in organizations that have adopted agile methods, you know it’s crucial to create the right environment for your agile teams. Traditional tools such as Gantt charts, detailed plans, and internal KPIs aren’t adequate for complex and fast-changing markets, but merely trusting employees and teams to self-manage is insufficient as well.

In Agile Leadership Toolkit, longtime agile leader Peter Koning provides a practical and invaluable steering wheel for agile leaders and their teams. Drawing on his extensive experience helping leaders drive more value from agile, Koning offers a comprehensive toolkit for continuously improving your environment, including structures, metrics, meeting techniques, and governance for creating thriving teams that build disruptive products and services. Koning thoughtfully explains how to lead agile teams at large scale and how team members fit into both the team and the wider organization.
Architect environments that help teams learn, grow, and flourish for the long term Get timely feedback everyone can use to improve Co-create goals focused on the customer, not the internal organization Help teams brainstorm and visualize the value of their work to the customer Facilitate team ownership and accelerate team learning Support culture change, and design healthier team habits Make bigger changes faster This actionable guide is for leaders at all levels—whether you’re supervising your first agile team, responsible for multiple teams, or lead the entire company.
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Genres: Leadership, Management, Business

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Katrusya Chernikova · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful toolkit for Agile Leaders or the ones who want to become alike.

On top of 8 practical instruments I found a couple of valuable parts for me: 1) explaining "why" this or that choice can lead to (in)desirable outcomes; 2) examples resonating to my personal 'do nots' I can learn and test now; 3) focus on Agile culture and it's importance.

I'd recommend reading James Clear's "Atomic habits" as an addition to this book to better understand how habits work. Peter Koning describes this topic quite generally.

And surely, I'm interested in his reco of "The fifth discipline" he makes a reference to a few times in the book.

[Damien ALAWIYE · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked reading this book and found it fun for some practices to experiment with (had the chance to test the impact ladder and found that quite useful combining 5 whys thinking with customer and product impact. Although some practices were a bit a variation of management 3.0 practices, The last part about cultural change and habit tracking drew me the most as the most interesting part of the book, the rest felt less pragmatic from my end . Great book to read nevertheless

[Jan Mikkelsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Must-read for Agile Leadership

Excellent book for starter and experienced Agile Leadership. Great tools that can move your teams and organization. I think this book cannot stand alone - a new agile leader will have to read more about agile frameworks to be able to coach/support an agile transformation.

[Arjan De · Rating 2 out of 5]

For a book that promises actionable tools, I found the tools to be lacking the punch that would have made this book good. All in all, there was nothing in the book that I haven't found elsewhere.

[Nathaniel Inman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mostly concise book armed with tools that allow for increasing a team's maturity, react to the industry and grow culture. Bookmarks on pages: 16, 65, 74, 103, 111 & 176.

[Jan Kamstra]

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jankam...

[Nathalie Karasek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok-ish little book that I could recommend to agile leaders. Easy to read with quite useful content. Some of the examples/tools felt a little bit ... hmm, „shallow“ to me, also some resemble other existing tools very much ... still ok. Not the comprehensive handbook that i was searching for.

[Javier Rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

75 % of employees lack motivation and only 15 % of all teams are able to realise their full potential. As a result, 60% to 80% of all change projects fail. There are many reasons for this: lack of transparency, weak change management, lack of feedback loops, but not least the obsessive idea that successful change can be ensured by detailed project plans. The often empty rituals of planning, commanding and the stifling bureaucracy of control systems nip many improvement initiatives in the bud. These are just some of the symptoms of traditional management.

However, emerging trends in technology, society and politics are changing the market situation faster and faster. Change is becoming mandatory for organizations. It is time to develop organizational forms that learn faster, communicate more transparently, are more personally satisfying and increase motivation and fun. The agile manifesto even claims; "The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organized teams". This claim raises some questions: What do such teams look like? What form of leadership do they need? And how can this be implemented in a way that promotes self-organization?

This book offers practical answers to all these questions. Peter Koning describes how leadership works in a self-organizing environment and gives many tips on how to develop one's own leadership competences. Using concrete case studies from the lean and agile world, he then describes in detail the core competencies that guide action. For each competence, he has concrete tools at hand with which the reader can understand the implementation in practice.

In this book, you will learn how interdisciplinary leadership and shared management responsibility can be applied in practice, and you will also receive many suggestions to specifically expand your own skills.

[Dejan Vukmirovic]

I simply didn't "click" with this book. On a surface it looks promising, but I had problems with actually connecting that to the real-life situations I'm facing at my work. Maybe I just stumble upon it in a wrong moment.