Agile Resources

Written By Andrei Postolache

Books, articles, videos and so on, for beginners and advanced, large and small, doing or trying to do agile.

The briefest of "big picture” descriptions

Agile is a set of principles and ways of working. Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban are specific methodologies that implement these agile principles. The principles should be followed in any agile methodology, but they are sometimes followed in different ways. Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban are team level methodologies. SAFe is a way of organizing more agile teams together to deliver large projects. Some of the teams will do Scrum, some Kanban, and so on, but together they are part of the same SAFe project. On a day to day basis, a typical team member will need to be proficient in Scrum (or Kanban/Scrumban, whatever her team is doing), and less so in SAFe. Everybody needs to be aware of SAFe, and especially some of the key points of safe (the PI Planning, the System Demo, the Inspect & Adapt), but detailed understanding of the details of SAFe is not required for the typical team member.

The main difference between Scrum and Kanban, other than the specifics is that Scrum is detailed and prescriptive, and Kanban is not. Scrum insists that you adopt its roles and follow its processes strictly and completely. Kanban makes no such claim, doesn’t even have specific roles, and therefore allows you a much higher degree of flexibility, which can be good or bad, depending in your team and your situation. Experienced teams tend to do very well with Kanban, while beginner teams (beginner from the agile point of view) usually benefit more from the structure Scrum provides.

Scrumban, as a mix of two, has no strict definition everyone agrees on, but it’s usually a Kanban board with a Product Owner and a Scrum(Kanban) Master added to it. Or, looked at it from the other side, it’s like Scrum, but without the sprints, the sprint backlog, the sprint planning, and all the other sprint based ceremonies. The team works directly from the team/product backlog, and the PO is engaged in a kind of continuous, formal and informal, backlog refinement. Sometimes the Scrumban team will keep the habit of having a retrospective and/or demo every two weeks, but it’s more of a convention rather than a necessity, as is it would be in Scrum.

After the foundations are set, further development and study can be done in one of many directions:

  • Lean, which is one of the "parents” of agile, and greatly increases one's understanding of why some things like small iterations, JIT, jidoka, WIP limits and so on matter so much. Required for anyone that wants to be a complete agile/lean delivery leader

  • SAFe, required for all SAFe program and solution level leadership positions (RTEs, STEs, PMs, SMs, BOs etc)

  • General leadership & people skills, required for all leaders, especially SM's/RTEs/STEs

Resources for all of these below.

Resources

Starter Kit

Start here if you’re new with agile

Advanced study

LEAN

If Agile has two parents, then one is Lean, and the other is the psychological/sociological understanding of how people and teams work. Some degree of lean understanding is a must for anyone that wants to call themselves a manager, and especially for agile leaders.

I have a 20 minute video giving you a complete Lean Overview around a factory example.

For further study, two book stand out. The earliest roots of Lean come from automotive, from Toyota, which is why The Toyota Way book is one of the best books for the aspiring lean leader. A different perspective on Lean, at a business wide level (not a project level), can be found in the excellent The Lean Startup book. When it comes to advanced study, don’t expect these books to be directly and precisely about the job of an RTE in SAFe for example, or about how to do a backlog in JIRA. They are not. You will have to understand the ideas, translate them, adapt them, but that is what advanced study is.

SCRUM

A couple of good Scrum books:

KANBAN

Kanban is in many ways a much purer implementation of (a simplified version of) Lean than Scrum. Kanban is almost all all Lean, so if you truly understand Lean, Kanban should feel like common sense to you. Still, one can also read about Kanban, and a great book for that is Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban.

SAFE

The SAFe website has a lot of information and is pretty good for advanced study as well, but more than that, you can read the official reference guide book. The 5.0 version is not out yet, but the 4.5 version is close enough, no need to wait if you need it now.

LEADERSHIP, COMMUNICATION & PEOPLE

Just like any other kind of leadership position, and maybe more, because agile in general is all about autonomy and self organization, every team member, and particularly every leader, of any kind, needs leadership and soft skills.

Particularly in this section, but in all others, when it comes to advanced study, you will find a series of books and resources that teach ideas and techniques that can not be all applied at the same time. There are no more recipes at this level. You will have to adapt, try, experiment, understand, contextualize and adapt.

RADICAL INNOVATION

One of the most fundamental kind of criticism brought to agile is the fact that it’s not good with radical innovation. Yes, it works well with incrementally improving the quality of your products, but what about the big leaps? What good is it to keep making your Nokia better if the iPhone comes along?

This is to some degree true. Agile and Lean are, through everything they say and preach, risk adverse. They’re all about small steps, validating the need very well before you invest in something moving carefully and testing all the time. The fundamental mantra of all agile is do you your customer wants you do do, no more, no less, and be in constant communication with your customer. But what about when your customer doesn’t know what’s best for themselves?

I have two books to recommend here:


Andrei Postolache
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Template for a Good Scrum Retrospective