Paperback is available on Amazon!

Notes to the 2nd edition:

This second edition reflects such updates as: the new Agile Fluency Model, the renaming / rebranding of Statoil to Equinor, and some small additions to complexity. We also enhanced the description of Organizational Open Space and explain how it differs from Liberating Structures.

Enjoy insights in the book shared by Jez Humble, Diana Larsen, James Shore, Johanna Rothman, and Bjarte Bogsnes. Find out what Spotify, ING, Ericsson, and Walmart say in the book.

Quotes from early readers:

• “[This is] a very important book. My hopes are that it will be the missing link between agile for teams and the flexible, adaptive and humane organisations we want to build. It’s a great book. Thanks for writing it!” ~Sandy Mamoli, author of Creating Great Teams
• “Just as Spotify has worked hard to make all aspects of product development align well and work together - I see Jutta and John in this book exploring methods and processes that will work very well across the whole company.” ~ Anders Ivarsson, Spotify
• “I love how those practices [are] integrated and summarized into actionable recommendations.” ~ Yves Lin, Titansoft
• “Really wonderful balance of structure and space, rigor and creativity, that you're suggesting.” ~ Michael Herman, Openspaceworld.org
• “Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space and Sociocracy [...] makes an important case for companies to regard trust and autonomy the norm, rather than a privilege. [...] Overall a great overview of how leaders can reimagine the way power is distributed within their companies.” ~ Aimee Groth, Author of The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia

This book invites you to take a new perspective that addresses the challenges of doing business in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.

Paperback is available on Amazon!

In this book, Jutta Eckstein examines how retrospectives –originally a kind of a facilitated workshop for gaining feedback– can be applied conceptually to initiate and implement organizational change. Technically, retrospectives were an instrument for a group to examine a past joint period of time and learn from that. The participants of a Retrospective for Organizational Change do not share a joint past, yet they learn from their different individual experiences and use this as a basis to form a shared future. The main strength is to leverage the experiences of a diverse group. Especially if the change is dynamic, which means the approach toward the goal is unclear or if it is complex, where the goal itself is in-determinate, Retrospectives for Organizational Change can provide a way to support the change. This book covers the conceptual idea of using Retrospectives for Organizational Change and additionally reports on the feedback and experiences of its practical application.

Agile processes have revolutionized the software development industry. They're faster and more efficient than traditional software development processes. They enable developers to embrace requirement changes during the project, deliver working software in frequent iterations, and focus on the human factor in software development. Unfortunately, agile processes are either designed for small or mid-sized software development teams or rigid frameworks are provided for large-sized teams. Yet, also large teams have to deal with rapid changes - so rigidity is not helpful for them!

With Agile Software Development in the Large, Jutta Eckstein--a leading speaker and consultant in the agile community--shows how to scale agile processes to teams of 1 to 300. In fact, the same techniques are also relevant to teams of ten or more developers, especially within large organizations.

Topics include:

• the agile value system as used in large teams
• the impact of a switch to agile processes
• the agile coordination of several sub-teams
• the way project size and team size influence the underlying architecture

Stop getting frustrated with inflexible processes that cripple your large endeavors! Use this book to harness the efficiency and adaptability of agile software development.

All software projects face the challenges of diverse distances – temporal, geographical, cultural, lingual, political, historical, and more. Many forms of distance even affect developers in the same room. The goal of this book is to reconcile two mainstays of modern agility: the close collaboration agility relies on, and project teams distributed across different cities, countries, and continents.

In Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Jutta Eckstein asserts that, in fact, agile methods and the constant communication they require are uniquely capable of solving the challenges of distributed projects. Agility is responsiveness to change -- in other words, agile practitioners maintain flexibility to accommodate changing circumstances and results. Iterative development serves the learning curve that global project teams must scale.

This book is not about how to outsource and forget your problems. Rather, Eckstein details how to carefully select development partners and integrate efforts and processes to form a better product than any single contributor could deliver on his or her own. The author de-emphasizes templates and charts and favors topical discussion and exploration. Practitioners share experiences in their own words in short stories throughout the book. Eckstein trains readers to be change agents, to creatively apply the concepts in this book to form a customized distributed project plan for success.

Topics include:

• The Productivity Myth
• Ensuring Conceptual Integrity
• Trust and Mutual Respect
• Virtual Retrospectives