Purpose of This Book

I have been helping teams and organisations to adopt Agile ways of working for close to 10 years now, usually as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach. During this time, I have had the privilege of working with a lot of great teams. Being exposed to a lot of different environments has been a brilliant learning experience, as each organisation is unique and therefore forces you to try new things and approaches in your efforts to support change. This book is about sharing the toolkit I have developed during this time.

Many of these tools were developed incrementally within teams I worked with, some literally taking years and exposure to a variety of organisations to reach their current state.

Of course Agile is more a way of thinking than it is a particular tool or practice, but sometimes you simply have a problem you need to solve and getting a starting point will make a big difference. That is the purpose of this book.

Most of these tools are very simple and can be implemented in less time than it takes to read about them, but beware, the last thing you want to do is take all the things in this book and start doing them tomorrow. Some things will only help in a particular context, and everything requires that all individuals affected are on board with any change.

The first chapter in this book is about what I call “Experiment Driven Change”; you should consider this as the basis for the book and apply its principles when trying any of the other tools. This way of thinking has been instrumental to my career and has driven the creation of all the things that come after it in the book.