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There are many books that seek to explain Lean and Agile software that offer theory, techniques, and examples. Michael Levine’s first book, A Tale of Two Systems , is one of the best, synthesizing Lean manufacturing and product development with agile software concepts in an engaging business novel. However, there has been precious little practical guidance for those seeking to change existing organizations to become Lean and Agile, until now. Mr. Levine has followed the successful approach of A Tale of Two Systems , telling two simultaneous intertwined and contrasting stories, to bring organizational transformation to life.　 Mary O’Connell and James \"Wes\" Wesleyan, recently engaged to be married, share a commitment to Lean and Agile Software. They have recently become leaders in two very different companies – one, stuck in a slow-moving, unresponsive, process-driven quagmire of a software culture; the other, struggling through the chaos of a sales-driven, process-less swirl. Together with their wise mentor, Neville Roberts, they identify two approaches to making needed changes: Drive People (a top-down approach focused on processes and tools), and People Driven (an enablement approach focused on people and organizations). Mary and Wes evaluate their situations and choose approaches that best fit for them, and the transformations commence.　 A Tale of Two Transformations differs from many information technology books by grappling with all the complexities of our organizations: the people, the politics, the financials, the processes – in short, the culture from which our Lean and Agile journeys must begin. The change model presented in the flow of the stories is generally applicable, and can help anyone thinking about how to improve their organization.　 The story-telling approach, with a summary of the lessons and insights at the end of each chapter, is an engaging way to learn…. My hat is off to Mr. Levine for writing a book that both entertains and teaches. Not an easy task, but masterfully done in this case.　 —John G. Schmidt, Vice President for Enterprise Initiatives, Informatica & author of Lean Integration Finally! A book about Lean and Agile software development for the executives who want to make the transition - from someone who has been there … deals with a broad array of leadership problems, from discovering chief engineers, to dealing with demanding sales managers to pulling back from outsourcing. — Mary Poppendieck, Author of Lean Software Development , Implementing Lean Software Development , and Leading Lean Software Development Michael K. Levine has led a 26-year career primarily focused on how to profit through the application of information technology. He was educated in international relations and economics at Carleton College and Princeton University and began his career in international trade negotiation in Washington, D.C. He moved on to commercial lending and financial product management at First Bank System in Minneapolis. In each of his early jobs, he saw the promise of applying information technology to solve business problems; eventually, he moved his career more formally in that direction by joining Norwest Corporation as strategic technology planner and large-scale software project manager. Michael continued his immersion in technology leadership when he became chief technology officer of Moore Data/Vista Information Solutions, a leading provider of information technology solutions to the real estate field. For the last 6 years, Michael has been at Wells FargoHome Mortgage, leading Operations and Technology Groups. One of the constant elements in Michael’s work has been the innovative, business-driven application of information technology. The accomplishments of his teams range from the first system to calculate duties on unfair trade, to cross-business line customer information systems in two large banks, to an early Internet-based real estate search engine, to an image-based, straight-through/exception-based loan processing system. His continuing search for better ways to build complex business software drew him to the operations and product development approaches coming out of Toyota (Lean) and the Agile software development movement. Michael and his teams have used many of the Lean and Agile approaches over the last several years. This practical application experience, in addition to his extensive, successful career at the junction of business operations and software technology, gives Michael a unique, practical perspective on how business leaders can improve their results through better technology leadership. SETTING THE STAGE FOR CHANGE: FEBRUARY Wes’s Challenge at MCCA: February Narrator: Wes MCCA’s Past (in Microfilm) versus Its Future (in Information Management) MCCA’s Transformation Goal: Fix Operations and Build New Technology Products Wes’s New Role: New Product Development, Including Technology Wes’s New Organization and People Endnotes Mary’s Challenge at FinServia: February Narrator: Mary FinServia’s Troubles: Glacial, Unresponsive Product Development FinServia’s Transformation Goal: Faster and Cheaper Setting Initial Approaches for Both Companies: February Narrator: Wes Building a Lean and Agile Change Model Comparing the Two Opportunities, and Selecting an Approach Wes and Mary Make Their Initial Plans Endnotes UNDERSTANDING THE LANDSCAPE: MARCH Getting to Know the MCCA Team and Culture: March Narrator: Wes Meeting My Development Team Transforming Operations, Including the Relationship with Sales Wes Visits San Diego National Insurance Preparing to Meet SDNI Listening for Customer Value Understanding the Customer’s Needs Endnotes Reorienting FinServia’s Relationship with GRI: March Narrator: Mary GRI’s Death Grip on Finservia’s Technology Meeting with GRI: Being Clear about What FinServia Needs GRI Goals and the Win–Win Endnotes Solving the Chief Engineer Puzzle at MCCA: March Narrator: Wes Finding a Project Manager to Handle Part of the Chief Engineer Role Finding a Product Manager to Handle Part of the Chief Engineer Role Exploring Alternative Development Models: Powerful Individual Chief Engineers versus Development Teams of Peers Endnotes BEGINNING THE TRANSFORMATIONS: APRIL–MAY Six Weeks to Change the FinServia Organization: April Narrator: Mary Early Week One: Planning the FinServia Development Organization Option 1: A Functional Organization Option 2: A Divisional Organization Option 3: A Matrix Organization Option 4: Chief Engineers with Shared Support Later in Week One: Planning the Transition with GRI Week Four: Selecting the People Week Six: Announcement Day Endnotes Six Weeks to Start the MCCA Transformation: May Narrator: Wes Week One: Preparing for the Management Scrum Week Two: Assembling and Training the Team The Team Assembles: Overview Training MCCA Value Defined by Owners, Customers Lean Product Development Introduced Agile Software Development: An Implementation of Lean Product Development Agile Introduced Scrum Explained Next Steps Week Four: Creating the Management Backlog and the Release Plan Week Six: Lean Team Scrum Meeting Endnotes TRANSFORMATIONS TAKE HOLD: MAY–SEPTEMBER Making Delivery Commitments at FinServiea: May Narrator: Mary The Classic Struggle: Setting Dates and Costs The Date/Cost Commitment Struggle at FinServia Configuring Agile Releases: Distributing to and Managing Multiple Backlogs Endnotes MCCA Engages with Its Sales Force and Customers at DocWorld: Late July Narrator: Wes Wes’s Six-Month Retrospective User Conference Preparation: The Product Roadmap and Customer Engagement Planning Connie and Wes Agree on Sales Guidance Partnering with Customers and Prospects: Demos and Backlogs Endnotes Sprint 1 Demo at FinServia—Dealing with Disappointment: July Narrator: Mary Mary’s Six-Month Retrospective Tools Can Help, Tools Can Hurt Results of Sprint 1 Disappointing: The Sprint Demo Discord during the Sprint Ready or Not, Sprint and Demo Reviewing the Plan for Sprint 1 (Lack of) Accomplishments of Sprint 1 Code Demo for Sprint 1 Sprint 1 Retrospective Margaret Plans and Facilitates the Retrospective Endnotes Jack’s Gambit at MCCA Narrator: Wes Phillip Spills the Beans Getting Advice from Connie Jack’s Proposal Mary and Wes Consider Lynn’s Options Lynn Hollander Makes Her Choice LOOKING BACK AND LOOKING AHEAD: DECEMBER Sustaining Lean and Agile: December Narrator: Wes Comparing the MCCA and FinServia Experiences Sustaining a Lean and Agile Software Culture Building Towering Technical Competence Building and Sustaining Cultural Values Strategic Planning and Study Customer-Focused, Hands-On Leaders Lightweight Processes Endnotes SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS Transforming to Become Lean and Agile Summary of the People Driven Approach Summary of the Drive People Approach Vision and Leadership Set a Simple and Compelling Vision Build a Supporting Coalition Make a Plan, Specific to Your Reality Use Integrating Events Accelerate Delivery Find Outside Wisdom Encourage Engagement and Debate, within Limits Understand Your Boundaries It’s (Almost) Always about the Money People Give Existing Leaders a Chance Let Obstructionists Continue Their Careers Elsewhere Stir Up the Pot by Adding Some New Blood Get Them to Do It Themselves Build Chief Engineers, but Adapt to the Situation at Hand Teach to Lead, and Lead by Teaching Spreading Knowledge—Institutionalize Knowledge and Learning \"You Go to War with the Army You Have\" 2 or Build Your Capability before You Build Your Software Organization Customer Focus Demolish the Barriers: We Are All \"The Business\" Small Intact Teams Process Process Can Drive Lean/Agile Change, but It’s Not Enough by Itself Start Slow and Simple PDCA Yourself! Methods—Don’t Overprescribe But Do Insist on Some Basic Practices Tools Tools Can Help, but Be Careful! Vendor Partnerships Final Words Endnotes Index

This book is about improving and sustaining agility by focusing on people over process, as the first agile value advocates, and is the third and final book in the author's Lean and Agile Software trilogy. The first - A Tale of Two Systems: Lean and Agile Software Development for Business Leaders - describes what agile is and why we do it. The second - A Tale of Two Transformations: Bringing Lean and Agile Software Development to Life - guides leaders in transforming their organizations to adopt this approach. All three books mix description and elaboration of theory with practical demonstration in fictional companies and projects. This new, third book - People over Process: Leadership for Agility - presents a model of facilitative leadership for agility, which informs the entire book. It begins by describing the roots of the agile movement, which motivates the centrality of people and the need for leadership. The leadership model is then presented, very simply: rigor, alignment, efficiency, through frameworks. Leadership is considered for all team members, and then for the special case of the responsibilities of leaders in formal positions of organizational authority. With this strong background presented, the book proceeds to describe and demonstrate common and highly useful frameworks for agility. The fictional Pacifica Bank is introduced, and we see the Pacifica team work through architecture, project planning, team structure, governance, scrum meeting, and ultimately retrospectives, using frameworks that have been presented. An Appendix summarizes the most useful frameworks for future reference. Throughout the book concepts are illustrated with vignettes from my experience (in the didactic sections) and with the Pacifica fictional case study. The key benefits of the book are to make everyone involved in agile work more effective and fulfilled. Essentially, since agile was first introduced almost two decades ago, the primary focus in practice has been on process. The \"scrum\" methodology was developed and promulgated, and has been widely adopted. This has been on balance broadly positive, but as an industry we have progressed to the point where following the steps of a methodology, particularly one that seeks to implement concepts where the first value is \"People over Process,\" has reached its limits. The reader of this book: Gains a powerful, simple model of leadership that enables the \"People\" in \"People over Process;\" Sees these principles in action in a fictional company, making agile leadership understandable and engaging; Improves their ability to participate in and lead agility; Learns extraordinarily useful \"frameworks\" that help in the most important activities in agile software. In short, the reader will be better at delivering valuable software solutions, more valuable to their organizations, and more fulfilled in their work.

Highlighting a critical yet often overlooked aspect of Lean implementation, this book discusses how to transform an organization from its current state to the desired state. Following the popular organizational approach of the prequel, A Tale of Two Systems, it presents two contrasting transformations based on polar opposites on the development spectrum: process-driven, compliance focused groups and chaotic groups. Synthesizing Lean manufacturing and Lean product development, it places agile software development in the context of Lean and examines the relative benefits of the Drive People versus the People Driven approach.

Christmas in San Diego! A¡er spending almost my entire life living in the north (in Chicago and St. Paul), a holiday season in California just didn’t feel right. Of course, I had seen the holiday season in sunny climes. I had even spent one December cloistered in a foreigners’ enclave in Saudi Arabia. Somehow this felt stranger. It was supposed to be Christmastime here, unlike in Saudi, and the external trappings were here, like mall Santas, colored lights on the trees, and of course, the incessant advertising. But I couldn’t completely come to grips with Santas in shorts and colored lights on palm trees.

Finally, a¡er spending a ctional year in the capable hands of my ctional narrators, Wes and Mary, I (Michael Levine, the author) am writing this nal chapter, to summarize the ideas illustrated in our two tales. We’ve seen two di«erent leaders take on two di«erent organizations. Mary is highly expert in Lean and Agile so¡ware development, whereas Wes is less so. MCCA was a chaotic culture, driven by the latest sales commitment, with little process of any sort, whereas FinServia was a rigid, nonresponsive bureaucracy frozen in excessive process specication and compliance. –e two leaders reacted to di«erences in the situations of the two companies (as well as their own preferences), and they chose two di«erent approaches to making transformations toward a similar goal: implement Lean and Agile so¡ware development.

Several weeks ago at Neville’s house, I made my list of priorities. Sitting right on top of the list was dealing with the GRI contract-taking development responsibility away from the company I called (to myself) Glacial Resources, and getting it back into the business where it belonged. Today was the day on which our planning and preparation would be tested, and the die cast for our movement ahead. Would Finservia succeed in our goals, would the companies reach an uneasy but workable accommodation, or would we be stuck in a stalemate?

I am now several weeks into my new job at MCCA, gradually getting to know the place. I found an apartment, but it won’t be ready until the rst week in April, so I’m still at the Shelter Island Hotel. Not having a real place of my own has led me to work a lot-it’s either work, spend time at Mary’s, or hang out in a hotel room. Mary and I have chosen to limit our time together with her children, so they can get used to me gradually. As a result, even though we are now living just a few miles apart, I see her only two or three times a week. –e good point about that is we would both like it to be more o¡en, and we’ve started to talk about setting a date to tie the knot. –e downside is I’m working almost all the time.

I was feeling a little better about being able to deal with the sales force a¡er my joint visit to San Diego National Insurance (SDNI) with Jack last week and because of the alliance I had formed with Connie. –e next major item on my priority list was to deal with the space between Sales and Development. In Lean Product Development, as practiced at Toyota, that space was lled by the Chief Engineer (CE), who worked to understand customer value and drive programs to engineer solutions that delivered that value better than competitors. In what I had read and otherwise learned, the Chief Engineer sounded like a superman-starting as an outstanding engineer, with innate leadership abilities, organizational talents, and an ability to empathize with customers. I had no one at MCCA who even approached that prole, and I was sure it would take years to develop someone who could ll those shoes. What was I to do in the meantime? I decided to look for other models that might work. But rst, I wanted to see what raw material I had to work with.

It’s been two months since I wrote a chapter. It’s a lot more fun to write about making great plans, executing on change, and beating back ignorant and unreasonable demands from Marketing than about the failures of my own development and team, and by inference, me. I’m hoping the setbacks we’ve been su«ering are temporary growing pains and not foreshadows of terminal illness. Wes tells me I have to keep the faith; a¡er all, he says, I chose a high-risk, high-gain transformation approach. However, given who I am and the situation I found myself in, I prefer to think that the drive people approach found me.