Here’s a list of books, podcasts, conferences, frameworks, methodologies, models, and other resources related to designing and building great organizations that I think are worth checking out.
If you have any recommended additions, please email or send me a tweet.
Defines Agile Scrum implementation, including relevant ceremonies (meetings), roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Team Member), and information radiators (tools)
David Anderson gave a great keynote at the CMMI Capability Counts 2017 conference — Kanban is often over-simplified for people who don’t appreciate the whole concept
The Amazon reviews complain about the Kindle version of this, but I’m guessing they’re using the traditional Kindle — the figures look great on my Kindle Fire
Framework for scaling Agile practices to teams of over 50 people
Combines best practices from several other sources (e.g. Lean, DevOps, Scrum, Kanban) along with some good tactical recommendations, such as investing in a 2 day, in-person planning events every quarter for the whole team (Program Increment Planning)
The SAFe framework website is great — you can click on each icon to read articles explaining how SAFe works
Map (analyze) your operation, find the worst bottleneck, resolve it, and repeat
Optimize the system, not locally (don’t try to keep each individual machine or person “busy” or productive; instead focus on optimizing the whole system)
This is a classic book, written as a fictional story to teach the concepts of the Theory of Constraints
Note: A graphic novel version of this was recently released, which sounds interesting
Teaches the mindset and concepts of DevOps and why DevOps is so critical to increasing organizational agility
Great, easy read; uses a similar writing approach as “The Goal”
Quality Management standard, originally focused for manufacturing organizations, that provide a template on how to define best practices related to ensuring Quality in your organization’s operations, leveraging concepts such as formalized surveys asking your customers how you’re doing
Significant overlap with CMMI PPQA, but has some unique practices
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Additional References, Summaries, Notes
Fascinating podcast by Reid Hoffman, where he interviews leaders who have scaled their organizations
