The Agile Agency
Free!
With Membership
$7.99
Minimum paid price

The Agile Agency

How Lean and Agile Will Transform Your Creative Agency

About the Book

You can't manage projects in creative agencies the same way as 10 years ago. This book tells you where it goes wrong, offers alternative approaches, and illustrates them with a number of case studies. Next to agile, lean, scrum and kanban, you will also read about gamestorming, John Cleese, Ai Weiwei, Dan Pink and rock bands.

About the Author

Bart Vermijlen
Bart Vermijlen

Bart Vermijlen is an independent Agile Coach, Product Owner and Design Thinking Consultant. He evolved from a digital project manager managing projects to an operations director managing teams and organisations. From Scrum and Agile to Sociocracy 3.0 and Design Thinking. Currently he is COO at Wieni, a digital agency based in Leuven.


His goal is to learn people and organisations to learn. Learn about themselves, their users, their products, … But also the other way around, he wants to continuously keep learning from people and organisations.


Bart teaches Agile project management or Design Thinking at Vlerick Business School, Ehsal Management School, Belgian Ad School, PXL Hasselt, Thomas More, Erasmus University College Brussels and Devine (Howest). He is a regular speaker at FeWeb, Pacemaker.io, Idealabs, Flanders DC, iLean, Innovatiecentrum Vlaanderen, ...


Feel free to follow his blog on bartvermijlen.com.

Table of Contents

  • 1 Introduction
    • Why Is This Book Relevant?
    • Why Did I Write This Book?
    • About the Title
    • How Did I Write This Book?
    • What Is the Structure of This Book?
    • Acknowledgments
  • 2 What Is Agile?
    • The Roots of Agile
    • Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
    • Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation
    • Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation
    • Responding to Change over Following a Plan
  • 3 Interlude: Complexity and What Art Can Teach Us about Agile
    • Coincidence?
  • 4 Say Goodbye to the Masterpiece Mentality
    • Nec Plus Ultra
    • Installing the Sink
    • Waterfall Thinking
    • The 3 Week Fail
  • 5 User Stories. Defining Scope in an Agile Way
    • Enter: User Stories
    • The Client Brief vs. User Stories
    • Conclusion
  • 6 What Is Scrum?
    • Roles
    • Timeboxes
    • Artefacts
    • The Boot and Shoe Repair Shop
    • Scrum vs. Waterfall
  • 7 Scrum Principles and Practices
    • Transparency
    • Inspection
    • Adaptation
    • Trust
    • Planning Poker
    • Definition of Done
    • Demo or Die
  • 8 Applying Agile and Scrum in an Agency Environment
    • The Daily Scrum
    • Demo or Die
    • The Scrum Board
    • The Burndown Chart
    • Budget and Backlog Prioritization. Scope Can Change over Time
    • Retrospectives
    • The Role Threesome
    • Why Account Managers Are Pigs
  • 9 What Is Lean?
    • Optimize the Whole
    • Focus on Customers
    • Eliminate Waste and Create Flow
    • Build Fast, Learn Fast
    • Keep Learning
  • 10 The Lean Bicycle Factory
    • It’s Not Working
    • Traffic Jam
    • Visualization
    • Work in Progress Limits
    • Pull vs. Push
    • Slack
    • Cycle Time
    • Stop Starting, Start Finishing
  • 11 What is Kanban?
  • 12 Applying Lean and Kanban in an Agency Environment
    • The Lean Startup
    • Business Model Canvas and Lean Canvas
    • Work in Progress Limits and Lead Time
  • 13 Case Study: Using the Agile Manifesto as a Tool
    • Where Are the Problems?
    • Where Are the Solutions?
    • In Practice
    • How?
    • The Results?
  • 14 Case Study: Scrum for Rock Bands. How to Measure Progress When Recording
    • The Band Splits
    • Building a Backlog
    • Estimating the Weight: Planning Poker
    • Prioritizing the Backlog and Scope Creep
    • Measuring Progress with the Burndown Chart
    • The Result
  • 15 Case Study: Using Scrum with a Hyper Fixed Deadline
    • The War Room
    • Bring In the Customer
    • The Result
  • 16 Case Study: How to Mix Scrum and Kanban
    • Why Was This a Perfect Project to Test-Drive?
    • How Did We Get Started?
    • Did This Kanban Board Do the Trick?
    • What Was the Result?
  • 17 Case Study: Using a Visual Control System to Manage a Portfolio
    • A Visual System
    • Side Effects
    • Next Steps
  • 18 Case Study: Why You Should Play Games at Work. Gamestorming for Retrospectives
    • Bad retrospectives
    • Good Retrospectives and Gamestorming
    • Actions for Retrospectives
    • What Happens When You Start Gamestorming
  • 19 Case Study: Why Stop with Production?
    • Mapping Iterative Working on the Whole Value Chain
    • Google and Their Agile Creativity
    • Mindtunes. Agile Creativity Applied.
  • 20 Case Study: Culture Hacking. Why Agile and Lean Actually Work in an Agency Environment
    • What is a Culture Hack?
    • The Pop-up Inspiration Session
    • The Digital Production Checklist
  • 21 Conclusion
  • Epilogue
  • Bibliography

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase

We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earnedover $13 millionwriting, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Free Updates. DRM Free.

If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).

Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.

Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.

Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub