Xanpan is… a cross between XP and Kanban… is an example of a roll-your-own method… is team centric agile software development... is distilled from Allan Kelly’s own experiences running development teams and then helping multiple teams adopt Agile working methods and practices.  Xanpan draws ideas from Kanban and Lean, XP and Scrum, Product Management and Business Analysis, and many other places.

Allan tells the Xanpan story through a series of boards which tell the story of different teams.  In between he fills in the principles, practices and thinking which together constitutes Xanpan.

In a digital world business must develop software, the business must grow and the software must grow. The project model doesn't reflect this world because projects end. In the digital world both software and business are continual. So management needs a new model.

This books sets out the Continuous model of software development based on continuous work streams. Continuous Digital is a logical continuation of agile software development which enables continuous delivery.

The #NoProjects movement has successfully set out the problems with project thinking over the last three years but has rightly been criticised for not elaborating on what should replace the project model. This volume sets out to address that problem. This book focused on describing an alternative to projects and for completeness contains a critique of the project model.

This volume is divided four parts:

Part 1: An alternative

1. Omni present software

2. Software as an Asset

3. Higher purpose

4. Team-centric development

5. Work to be done

6. Value

7. Summarizing the alternative model

Part 2: Interlude

8. Diseconomies of scale

9. Diseconomies and risk

10. Living with diseconomies

11. Schedules

12. Time-value profiles and elastic deadlines

13. I need it yesterday!

14. Theory X,Theory Y and strategy

15. Planning

16. Piecemeal growth

Part 3: Teams

17. Devolved decision-making

18. Team strategy

19. Stable teams

20. Team life cycle

21. Team life cycle – another example

Part 4: Money

22. Real options and venture capital

23. Continuous governance

24 Budgetting

25. Assets and accounting

26. Money trouble

The individual parts of Continuous Digital are (or will soon be) available as individual publications.

Update: Project Myopia is now on Amazon.

Project Myopia is no long available on LeanPub.

Electronic and physical version of Project Myopia are now on Amazon. (That link is to Amazon UK, Project Myopia is also available on Amazon USA, Germany, Japan, etc. etc.)

About Project Myopia #NoProjects

Consider the well known success troika for projects:

- On schedule delivery

- On budget delivery

- On quality delivery

Think about this list of criteria, can you see identify a problem with these criteria?

This particular project success troika dominates project thinking. But something is missing: value. These “success” criteria do not consider the importance of the value created by the project.

User Stories and more - well, a bit about requirements and backlogs actually.

Chapters include:

• How to Write Small Stories That Still Have Value
• They Can Help You Write Better User Stories
• Are systems systems role?
• Stories, Epics, and Tasks: Organizing Agile Requirements
• Defining Acceptance Criteria for Agile Requirements
• Acceptance criteria, Specifications and tests
• Definition of Done
• Non-functional requirements and what we can learn from them
• Managing dependencies between stories
• Assigning value

And maybe....

• Forward planning
• Backlog management
• Estimation

OKRs are about goals bigger than the next story.

OKRs prioritise purpose and strategy over backlogs. Objectives are big goals; key results are constraints, success criteria, maybe small pieces of the bigger thing.

Does your agile team get lead astray by burning fires? Do you struggle to keep your agile team focused?

Do you feel the need for more than just doing the top of the backlog every two weeks?

Are you using, or want to use, OKRs with an agile team?

Then this is the book for you. Acclaimed author Allan Kelly has written a short guide to OKRs, writing them, organizing to deliver and the pitfalls.

Download a free sample

Allan is the author of multiple books on agile and has given advice and training for over 10 years. Now he turns his attention to OKRs.

In this book he doesn't try to sell OKRs - others can tell you why OKRs are great. Allan describes his practical experience working with an agile team adopting OKRs, day-by-day, quarter-by-quarter.

Allan’s advice includes: be really specific in setting goals, involve the whole team in setting OKRs, think broad when setting then execute narrowly, set analogue not binary OKRs and, most controversially, throw away your backlog and let OKRs drive everything you do.

Initially sceptical about OKRs Allan found them a good fit with agile; OKRs became an effective means of focus teams, exposing problems, communicating with senior managers and a powerful means of asking bigger questions about product strategy and value.

OKRs and agile work well together because they are both outcome oriented and results focused. When used right OKRs give power and authority to teams - one could even say OKRs create test first management.

Yet OKR can be a double edge-sword, used poorly they can re-introduce command-and-control and hinder agile working. Allan addresses problems with predictability, aspirations, culture, targets and annual reviews.