Doing Agile RIght

Four decades business leaders have been painfully aware of a huge chasm: They aspire to create a nimble, flexible enterprises. But their day-to-day reality is silos, sluggish processes, and stalled innovation. Today, agile is hailed as the essential bridge across this chasm, with the potential to transform a company and catapult it to the head of the pack.

Not so fast. In this clear-eyed, indispensable book, Bain & Company thought leader Darrel Rigby and his colleagues Sarah Elk and Steve Berez provide a much-needed reality check.

They dispel the myths and misconceptions that have accompanied agile's raise to prominence — the idea that it can reshape an organization all at once, for instance, or that it should be used in every function or for all types of work.

They illustrate that agile teams can indeed be powerful, making people's jobs more rewarding and turbocharging innovation, but such results are possible only if the method is fully understood and implemented the right way.

They key, they argue, is balance. Every organization must optimize and tightly control some of its operations, and at the same time innovate. Agile, done well, enables vigorous innovation without sacrificing the efficiency and reliability essential to traditional operations.The authors break down how agile really works, shows what not to do, and explain the crucial importance of scaling agile properly in order to reap its full benefit. They then lay out a road map for leading the transition to a truly agile enterprise.

Agile isn't a goal in itself; it's a mean to becoming a high-performance operation. Doing Agile Right is a must-have guide for any company trying to sustain high agility.

• Introduction: The Unbalanced Company

1. How Agile Really Works
2. Scaling Agile
3. How Agile Do You Want to Be?
4. Agile Leadership
5. Agile Planning, Budgeting, and Reviewing
6. Agile Organization, Structures, and People Management
7. Agile Processes and Technology
8. Doing Agile Right

1. A Leadership Team's Agile Manifesto
2. Definitions of Operating Model Components
3. Research Notes Summary

Wow, one of the very few serious books about Agile, that considers it outside Software Development and manages to put it into a management context and discusses the good and the bad of different implementations.

I am really impressed, and would recommend this as mandatory reading, regardless if you're an Agilista or not, as it addresses a lot modern concepts with a realistic outlook.