Agile Leadership in Practice

This book is a comprehensive experience report, describing the agile transformation journey we at NovaTec, a 200-person strong consulting organization, have taken to date and continue to endeavor upon. Leaders and agile coaches who read it will benefit from both our success and our failure stories. Revolving around nine main chapters, each one focuses on specific aspects of our change. These include establishing values in business, holistic people recruitment and retention, innovation of performance appraisals, re-thinking organizational structure, re-design of leadership roles, streamlining measurement and reward systems, and enhancing career paths. The ninth chapter takes you deeper into some specific processes we changed, such as company decision-making, SMILE (company improvement budget at the discretion of employees), project selection, holiday leave and career coaching. In changing all this, we relied heavily on Management 3.0, a collection of management principles and practices which fit perfectly in an agile world. If you want to move beyond the theory and learn from other organizations on how they are approaching their agile transformation, then this book is for you. It is very hands on throughout and allows you to derive your own change experiments directly from it. This includes experiments that you might be best off avoiding.