Agile Reference Materials

Esther Derby’s book 7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change outlines seven practical guidelines for achieving organizational change by attraction rather than coercion, focusing on engaging people positively to embrace and own the change process. The book emphasizes concepts like honoring the past, assessing the current reality, experimenting with small changes, and using personal skills like empathy and curiosity to foster effective, sustainable transformation in complex environments.

The First Guide to Scrum-Based Agile Product Management
In Agile Product Management with Scrum, leading Scrum consultant Roman Pichler uses real-world examples to demonstrate how product owners can create successful products with Scrum. He describes a broad range of agile product management practices, including making agile product discovery work, taking advantage of emergent requirements, creating the minimal marketable product, leveraging early customer feedback, and working closely with the development team.

In an uncertain and complex world, learning is more important than ever before. In fact, it can be a competitive advantage. Teams and organizations that learn rapidly deliver greater customer value faster and more reliably. Furthermore, those teams are more engaged, more productive, and more satisfied. The most effective way to enable teams to learn is by holding regular retrospectives. Unfortunately, many teams only get shallow results from their retrospectives. This book is filled with practical advice, techniques, and real-life examples that will take retrospectives to the next level--whether your team is co-located, hybrid, or remote. This book will help team leads, scrum masters, and coaches engage their teams to learn, improve, and deliver greater results.

"Agile Software Development with Scrum" by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle is a foundational book that introduces Scrum as a practical and efficient Agile methodology for managing complex software projects through iterative, sprint-based cycles. It emphasizes roles, transparency, focus, and commitment to deliver working software quickly while adapting to changing requirements, making it easier for teams to implement eXtreme Programming incrementally and maintain high productivity levels.

As an agile coach, you can help project teams become outstanding at agile, creating products that make them proud and helping organizations reap the powerful benefits of teams that deliver both innovation and excellence.

Creating Agile Organizations presents a systemic approach to organizational agility that aligns strategy, structures, processes, and people practices to enable successful large-scale Agile transformations. Drawing on extensive experience in scaling Scrum, the book offers practical tools and leadership guidance to design adaptable organizations that can effectively respond to change and deliver continuous value.

Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money - the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction - at work, at school, and at home - is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does - and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation - autonomy, mastery, and purpose - and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.

Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems is a hands-on guide for Scrum Masters seeking to identify and correct flawed Scrum practices that limit team agility and productivity. Through practical tools, real-world insights, and coaching techniques, Ripley and coauthor Todd Miller show how to strengthen servant leadership, remove organizational obstacles, and help teams deliver meaningful value using the true spirit of Scrum.

Richard Sheridan’s Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love recounts how his company, Menlo Innovations, transformed the traditional office by making joy the primary goal of its culture. Through real-world examples, Sheridan illustrates how prioritizing collaboration, transparency, and human connection can eliminate fear and disengagement, leading to happier employees and more innovative results.

Creativity is crucial to business success. But too often, even the most innovative organization quickly becomes a "giant hairball"--a tangled, impenetrable mass of rules, traditions, and systems, all based on what worked in the past--that exercises an inexorable pull into mediocrity. Gordon McKenzie worked at Hallmark Cards for thirty years, many of which he spent inspiring his colleagues to slip the bonds of Corporate Normalcy and rise to orbit--to a mode of dreaming, daring and doing above and beyond the rubber-stamp confines of the administrative mind-set. In his deeply funny book, exuberantly illustrated in full color, he shares the story of his own professional evolution, together with lessons on awakening and fostering creative genius.

The Home of the Scrum Pattern Community

Most people have experienced--at least once in their lives--the incomparable thrill of being part of a great team effort. They can remember the unity of purpose they experienced, the powerful passion that inspired them, and the incredible results they achieved. People who have been on a great team can attest that the difference between being on a team with a shared vision and being on a team without one is the difference between joy and misery.

John Kotter’s book That’s Not How We Do It Here! uses a fable about a clan of meerkats to illustrate how organizations rise, fall, and adapt to change through the balance of strong management and inspiring leadership. Through the story of Nadia’s journey to find better ways for her struggling clan to survive, Kotter and coauthor Holger Rathgeber reveal lessons on innovation, teamwork, and the importance of embracing both structure and agility in times of transformation.

With rapidly evolving consumer needs and technology that is being updated quicker than ever before, businesses are recognizing how essential it is to adapt quickly. The Agile movement enables a team, unit, or enterprise to nimbly acclimate and upgrade products and services to meet these constantly changing needs.

The third edition of this ground-breaking book continues to advance its mission to support groups to do their best thinking. It demonstrates that meetings can be much more than merely an occasion for solving a problem or creating a plan. Every well-facilitated meeting is also an opportunity to stretch and develop the perspectives of the individual members, thereby building the strength and capacity of the group as a whole.

After her first two weeks observing the problems at DecisionTech, Kathryn Petersen, its new CEO, had more than a few moments when she wondered if she should have taken the job. But Kathryn knew there was little chance she would have turned it down. After all, retirement had made her antsy, and nothing excited her more than a challenge. What she could not have known when she accepted the job, however, was just how dysfunctional her team was, and how team members would challenge her in ways that no one ever had before.

The graphic novel version of Eliyahu M. Goldratt's The Goal follows Alex Rogo, a stressed plant manager given 90 days to save his failing factory from closure, as he meets Jonah, a former professor who helps him break conventional thinking to identify and solve production bottlenecks. This visual and engaging adaptation presents the core concepts of the Theory of Constraints in an accessible and fun way, making the influential business novel's powerful ideas easier to understand and apply.

ProKanban Uses this definition of Kanban

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

You need to get value from your software project. You need it "free, now, and perfect." We can't get you there, but we can help you get to "cheaper, sooner, and better." This book leads you from the desire for value down to the specific activities that help good Agile projects deliver better software sooner, and at a lower cost. Using simple sketches and a few words, the author invites you to follow his path of learning and understanding from a half century of software development and from his engagement with Agile methods from their very beginning.

Bill, an IT manager at Parts Unlimited, has been tasked with taking on a project critical to the future of the business, code named Phoenix Project. But the project is massively over budget and behind schedule. The CEO demands Bill must fix the mess in 90 days, or else Bill�s entire department will be outsourced.

Scrum is a framework for developing and sustaining complex products. This Guide contains the definition of Scrum. This definition consists of Scrum’s roles, events, artifacts, and the rules that bind them together. Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland developed Scrum; the Scrum Guide is written and provided by them. Together, they stand behind the Scrum Guide.

The Skilled Facilitator: A Comprehensive Resource for Consultants, Facilitators, Trainers, and Coaches, Third Edition is a fundamental resource for consultants, facilitators, coaches, trainers, and anyone who helps groups realize their creative and problem-solving potential. This new edition includes updated content based on the latest research and revised models of group effectiveness and mutual learning. Roger M. Schwarz shows how to use the Skilled Facilitator approach to: boost improvement processes such as Six Sigma and Lean, create a psychologically safe learning environment for training, and help coaches work with teams and individuals in real-time. This edition features a new chapter that explains how to facilitate virtual teams using conferencing technology.

Since Turn the Ship Around! was published in 2013, hundreds of thousands of readers have been inspired by former Navy captain David Marquet�s true story. Many have applied his insights to their own organizations, creating workplaces where everyone takes responsibility for his or her actions, where followers grow to become leaders, and where happier teams drive dramatically better results.

As long-time competitive advantages disappear, astute executives and change agents know they must achieve true agile transformation. In Unlocking Agility, Jorgen Hesselberg reveals what works, what doesn�t, and how to overcome the daunting obstacles.