In this presentation, Pollyanna Pixton talks about leadership, especially leading Agile teams, but more importantly what senior leaders do to help support their Agile teams in their organizations. She focuses on how leaders that are command and control can stay out of the way, step back and let teams and everyone below them make their own decisions and take ownership and deliver.

As the usage of lean in software development matures, expect specific and actionable ideas.

If you can’t wait to get the book, just buy it now.

If you have any ounce of patience, you can read the table of content, and the book sysnopsis.

Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point

Building on their breakthrough bestsellers Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s latest book shows software leaders and team members exactly how to drive high-value change throughout a software organization—and make it stick. They go far beyond generic implementation guidelines, demonstrating exactly how to make lean work in real projects, environments, and companies.

The Poppendiecks organize this book around the crucial concept of frames, the unspoken mental constructs that shape our perspectives and control our behavior in ways we rarely notice. For software leaders and team members, some frames lead to long-term failure, while others offer a strong foundation for success. Drawing on decades of experience, the authors present twenty-four frames that offer a coherent, complete framework for leading lean software development. You’ll discover powerful new ways to act as competency leader, product champion, improvement mentor, front-line leader, and even visionary.

• Systems thinking: focusing on customers, bringing predictability to demand, and revamping policies that cause inefficiency
• Technical excellence: implementing low-dependency architectures, TDD, and evolutionary development processes, and promoting deeper developer expertise
• Reliable delivery: managing your biggest risks more effectively, and optimizing both workflow and schedules
• Relentless improvement: seeing problems, solving problems, sharing the knowledge
• Great people: finding and growing professionals with purpose, passion, persistence, and pride
• Aligned leaders: getting your entire leadership team on the same page

The CIO Forum is specifically designed to provide senior level IT executives from mid-to-large enterprises the opportunity to take a step back from the day to day to network and learn from their peers, as well as investigate new ways to meet their current projects and demands with senior representatives from a select group of forward thinking vendors and service providers.

The venue of the Norwegian Dawn Ocean Liner provides a unique focused environment to promote maximum time-efficiency for two days and three nights.

Through small workshops and round tables attendees are able to share best practices, successful case studies, and receive opinions and suggestions from your peers. The entire conference is built around helping everyone become a more effective executive and opening doors to new perspectives and points of view.

I’ll be speaking at agile workshop on the role of leadership in transitioning the whole enterprise to agile, and the common pitfalls of management in the endeavor.

Conference program

I’ll be presenting with Jean Tabaka…

Agile Leadership Recipes for the 21st Century
Speaker: Jean Tabaka (Agile Fellow, Rally Software Development)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 11, 2009)   10:15am — 11:45am
Track: Agile Processes, People & Methods
Presentation Format: 90-minute Class
Audience level: Intermediate

Presentation Abstract
Christophe Louvion, CTO of Gorilla Nation and Jean Tabaka, Agile Fellow with Rally Software, bring their direct experiences in rolling out Agile adoptions in two different organizations. Our recipes for success reveal what worked in our two separate cases. Agile is growing and prescriptions can be dangerous, so don’t come looking for a prescription or a silver bullet! Still, we’ll share our challenges and audacious results of two 21st Century complex Agile adoptions. We’ll also warn you of 12 adoption modes we guarantee will bring you only failure. Mostly, we’ll provide straightforward practices and metrics to support our audacious claims for success from two different perspectives: a CTO and an Agile consultant.

Watch the video here.

Other panelists:

• Esther Derby
• Michael Spayd

Topic:

In this panel session, a group of industry experts will respond to questions relating to the challenges teams and organizations that are moving to Agile practices are experiencing related to functional roles and managers and individual growth and compensation.

Sample questions (final list is still being determined):

• What factors have most impacted individual growth in your organization or organizations you have worked with since the introduction of Agile practices?
• How has the adoption of Agile practices affected functional leadership within organizations?
• How do managers’ behaviors change to support with Agile practices?
• How do compensation models need to change to support Agile practices?

I have submitted a session as co-presenter with Jean Tabaka for the agile 2008 conference:

Leadership Success Recipes for Agile in the 21st Century

Agile was originally based on a simple recipe for success: a small team, co-located, self-organizing applying engineering practices. As a leader of such an adoption, you might think of your role as similar to a restauranteur/owner/head chef of a small restaurant: small staff, some simple recipes, able to quickly address the problems/challenges that might arise.

But now we are in the 21st Century and moving into more complex and demanding recipes for Agile. We still need success but we have moved the Agile recipe into a much bigger menu and venue. And, despite these complexities in our restaurant and recipes, we still need to be able to address the problems/challenges that might (will?) arise in this much more complex environment. Now, in your role as Executive Chef of this high-end operation, what will your recipe for success be?

Christophe Louvion of Gorilla Nation and Jean Tabaka of Rally Software present you with their cookbook of Agile for the 21st century Executive Chef. In this upbeat real-life experiences presentation, we offer the recipes that succeed; how they succeeded; and, what the amazing results were. Additionally, we intend to arm you with warning signs that your recipes for agile adoption may produce very unsatisfactory results and even flop. Think of it this way: do you want your large, resort-level operation to succeed with greater and greater complexity of Agile recipes and more demanding clientele? And, will you be prepared to face the challenges that could sabotage your efforts even before you get started? Or are you going to stay stuck in your little cafe and small staff as the only way to succeed?

The scrum model doesn’t ask for managers. 1 product owner, 1 scrum master, a cross functional delivery team. That’s it.
On the other side of the spectrum, lean thinking praises for strong functional manager (rather than process leaders). A lot has been written on the subject; I won’t go into it here. Check out Mary Poppendieck’s books for more on the subject.

Here’s a radical new idea about why new scrum teams need managers: to limit their self-organization.

In his book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less“ Barry Schwartz provides a stunning vision that increasing choices flood our brains, increase stress and ultimately restrict our ability to make decisions.

Inexperienced scrum teams are often overwhelmed by the new “freedom” provided to them the self-organizing aspect of agility. I am formulating the idea from Schwartz research that managers could enable such teams succeed faster by actively reducing the huge number of things to do to a small number of good ones. Any choice would be successful and rewarding. In such an environment, it would be easier for the manager to teaching the team how to make more difficult decisions (introducing less desirable choices).

Is letting a newbie scrum team totally self-organize itself really the best way to show respect and creating the best environment for its success? Or is reducing choices a strong coaching technique with the fastest path to high performance? Worth trying, isn’t it?

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Video: the paradox of choice by Barry Schwartz.