The Agile Culture: Leading through Trust and Ownership

The Agile Culture: Leading through Trust and Ownership

by Pollyanna Pixton, Paul Gibson, Niel Nickolaisen
Released February 2014
Publisher(s): Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 9780133463187

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Book description

Build Agile Cultures That Unleash Passion, Innovation, and Performance

What do you want? Delighted customers. How do you get them? By rapidly delivering innovative, exciting products and services your customers will love to use. How do you do this? By uniting talented people around shared ideas and purpose, trusting them, helping them take ownership, and getting out of their way. It sounds easy—but you know it isn’t. To make it happen, you must create an agile culture: one that’s open to change and can respond quickly to whatever your customers need and desire. The Agile Culture gives you proven models, pragmatic tools, and handy worksheets for doing just that. Building on their experience helping hundreds of companies, three world-class experts help you align and unleash the talents of everyone in your organization. Step by step, you’ll learn how to move toward a culture of trust, in which everyone knows, owns, and improves the results. You’ll learn practical ways to refocus on differentiators and value, resurrect energy and innovation, deal more honestly with ambiguity and risk, and overcome resistance, no matter where it comes from. This text will help you go beyond buzzwords to transform the way you deliver software—so you can delight customers, colleagues, and executives.

Coverage includes

• Creating cultures of trust and ownership, in which individuals, teams, and organizations can do amazing things

• Assessing where you stand, so you can move toward higher levels of performance, innovation, and motivation

• Leading as an enabler, not a controller

• Rebuilding trust where it’s been lost—or building it where it never existed

• Clarifying quickly the design goals of any project, product, or process

• Using iteration to reduce risk and make commitments you can keep

• Managing uncooperative people (and processes)

• Selecting metrics that focus on business value, foster trust, and don’t compromise ownership

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. About This eBook
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Praise for The Agile Culture
  5. Dedication Page
  6. Contents
  7. Foreword
  8. Preface
    1. Value Proposition
  9. Acknowledgments
    1. Group Acknowledgments
    2. Pollyanna Pixton
    3. Paul Gibson
    4. Niel Nickolaisen
  10. Chapter 1. Unleashing Talent
    1. The Big Ideas
    2. Who Moved My World?
    3. The Power of Trust and Ownership
    4. Getting Started with Trust and Ownership
    5. Book Conventions
    6. References
  11. Chapter 2. Trust and Ownership
    1. The Big Ideas
    2. Some Teams Do Better Than Others
    3. The Trust-Ownership Model
    4. Why Purpose Matters
    5. You Cannot Defy Gravity
    6. A Foundation of Integrity and Honesty
    7. In Summary
  12. Chapter 3. Building Trust and Ownership
    1. The Big Ideas
    2. Getting to “Green”
    3. Trust-Ownership Assessment
    4. Getting to Trust and Ownership
    5. Hitting the Walls
    6. In Summary
  13. Chapter 4. Trust Tools
    1. The Big Ideas
    2. Why Trust Matters
    3. Trust Assessment
    4. Broken Trust or Lack of Trust
    5. Creating a Culture of Trust
    6. Your Leadership Role
    7. Making a Change
    8. Decision Filters
    9. In Summary
    10. References
  14. Chapter 5. Ownership Tools
    1. The Big Ideas
    2. Give or Take?
    3. Taking Ownership
    4. Don’t Take Away Ownership
    5. Help Teams Take Ownership
    6. Macro-Leadership Cube
    7. In Summary
    8. References
  15. Chapter 6. Business Alignment Tools
    1. The Big Ideas
    2. Are We Aligned with the Company’s Business Goals?
    3. Purpose-Based Alignment Model
    4. Business Value Model
    5. Product/Project Inception Planning
    6. In Summary
    7. References
  16. Chapter 7. Dealing Honestly with Ambiguity
    1. The Big Ideas
    2. Easing the Need for Certainty
    3. Proactive Risk Management
    4. Make Progress Visible
    5. Ambiguity and Iterative Methods
    6. In Summary
  17. Chapter 8. Tools to Deal with Walls
    1. The Big Ideas
    2. It’s Hard
    3. “I Need It by This Date! And I Need It All!”
    4. Managing Up
    5. Collaborating with Non-Collaborators
    6. In Summary
    7. References
  18. Chapter 9. Metrics
    1. The Big Ideas
    2. Why Metrics Matter
    3. Integrity
    4. Measuring Culture Change
    5. Metrics Walls
    6. Getting Useful Metrics, Removing the Rest
    7. Metrics Programs
    8. Getting Started
    9. In Summary
    10. References
  19. Chapter 10. Case Study
  20. Appendix A. Quick Reference Guide
  21. Appendix B. Trust-Ownership Assessment
    1. Team Questions on Trust and Ambiguity
    2. Team Questions on Ownership and Alignment
    3. Leader Questions on Trust and Ambiguity
    4. Leader Questions on Ownership and Alignment
    5. Mark Your Positions
    6. Discussion Points
  22. Appendix C. Collaboration Process
    1. What It Is
    2. When to Use It
    3. How to Use It
  23. Appendix D. Collaborating with Non-Collaborators Worksheet
    1. Think of a Non-Collaborator You Struggle With
    2. What Are the Traits (Behaviors) of Your Non-Collaborator?
    3. What Type Is Your Non-Collaborator?
    4. What Makes Your Non-Collaborator Tick?
    5. What Makes You Tick?
    6. Where Are You Compared to Your Non-Collaborator?
    7. Why Do You Want to Collaborate with This Non-Collaborator?
    8. Manage Your Risks
    9. Dealing with Non-Collaborators
  24. Appendix E. What to Do about Metrics
    1. A Detailed Description
    2. Internal Metrics
    3. Organizational Metrics
    4. External Metrics
    5. Examples of Possible Metrics
  25. About the Authors
  26. Index

Product information

  • Title: The Agile Culture: Leading through Trust and Ownership
  • Author(s): Pollyanna Pixton, Paul Gibson, Niel Nickolaisen
  • Release date: February 2014
  • Publisher(s): Addison-Wesley Professional
  • ISBN: 9780133463187