Brief Summary of Escaping the Build Trap

“Escaping the Build Trap – How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value” by Melissa Perri, is a wonderful book on Product management – a must read for Product managers. With lots of great examples, the book takes you through various concepts of Product management, the importance of Outcomes over Outputs, the need for organizations to be Product-led instead of being Sales-led how to make the Product manager effective, having a vision, strategy and initiatives for an organization and a focus on customer centricity.

The book ends with these 6 questions which help you to ensure that the company will support and encourage you to do everything you can do to succeed
* Who came up with the last feature or product idea you built?
* What was the last product you decided to kill?
* When was the last time you talked to your customers?
* What is your goal?
* What are you currently working on?
* What are your product managers like?

Here is a brief summary of the book –>

Brief Summary of Escaping the Build TrapDownload

Brief Summary of Creating Intelligent Teams

Creating Intelligent Teams by Anne Rod and Marita Fridjhon, is great read on how to   manage and lead effective and positive change for teams and organisations. Unlike books on Coaching which focus on one to one, the focus here is on teams, relationships and Relational System Intelligence (RSI)

The 5 principles of RSI

• Each relationship system has its own unique identify
• Every member of a relationship system is a Voice of the System (VOS)
• Relationship Systems are naturally intelligent, generative and creative
• Relationship systems rely on roles for their organization and execution of its functions. Roles belong to the system not to the individuals who inhabit the system
• Relationship systems are in a constant state of emergence, always in the process of expressing their potential

It  goes on explain ways and means to enhance team performance and skills needed increase productivity and build intelligent teams.

Here is a brief summary of the book –> Brief Summary of Creating Intelligent Teams

Brief Summary of “Leadership is Language”

“Leadership is Language” by David Marquet, is a follow up to his earlier book “Turn the Ship Around”.  In this book he talks about how as a leader, he changed the way he talked to people and the words that were used and the impact it had on others. According to Marquet, the language changed in three ways

• from a reactive language of “Convince, Coerce, Comply and Conform” to a proactive language of “Intent and Commitment” to action
• from a language of “Prove and Perform” to a language of “Improve and Learn”
• from a language of Invulnerability and Certainty to a language of Vulnerability and Curiosity.

David bases his new leadership playbook on an incident in 2015 , when a container ship, El Faro, with all the modern radios and navigation equipment sailed directly into a hurricane and sank. With the transcripts available of all the conversations on board the ship, he came to a conclusion that had the captain acted differently or played a different leadership playbook, the ship could have been saved.

The new Leadership playbook which consists of 6 plays – based on a specific use of language, forms the core of the book. They are

• Control the clock instead of obeying the clock
• Collaborate instead of coercing
• Commitment rather than compliance
• Complete defined goals instead of continued work indefinitely
• Improve outcomes rather than prove ability
• Connect with people instead of conforming to your role

Here is a brief summary of the book –>Brief Summary of Leadership is Language

Brief Summary of “How to Lead in Product Management”

I have been following books by Roman Pichler – having read his two earlier books Agile Product Management with Scrum and Strategize.  I feel his latest book “How to Lead in Product Management”  is more about coaching the Product Management – where he talks about the various challenges that the Product Leadership faces, and how to deal with them. And then goes into details into the Interations that the Product management needs to get into, the goals that he needs to set, the conversations he should have, managing conflicts, making effective decisions and self leadership.

I love the way he has weaved in a lot of aspects of coaching – active listening, empathy, mindfulness, non violent communication,  negotiation etc. into the book.

I found it an excellent read – here is a brief summary of the book –> Brief Summary of How to Lead in Product Management

 

Brief Summary of 7 Rules for Positive Productive Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results

Esther Derby, in her book, 7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change : Micro Shifts, Macro results, comes out with seven practical rules for organizational change. The 7 Rules are

1. Strive for Congruence
2. Honor the past, present and people
3. Assess what is
4. Attend to networks
5. Experiment
6. Guide and allow for variation
7. Use your self

Esther Derby provides a lot of examples which provides clarity to these rules. Easy to read book – great book to have on Change Management on your bookshelf.
Here is a link to the summary –> Brief Summary of 7 Rules for Positive Productive Change

Key Capabilities to drive improvements in Software Delivery Performance

In their book, “Accelerate – The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, Building and Scaling High Technology Organizations”, Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim came out with 24 key capabilities that drive improvements in software delivery performance.  This is another great book on DevOps -following ‘The Phoenix Project’ and and “The DevOps Handbook”.

These capabilities are classified into five categories

1. Continuous Delivery
2. Architecture
3. Product and Process
4. Lean Management and Monitoring
5. Cultural
   

• Continuous Delivery Capabilities
  1. Use version control for all production artifacts – Use of version control systems such as GitHub or Subversion for all production artifacts – application code, application configurations, system configurations, scripts for automating build etc.
  2. Automate your deployment process – Deployment automation is the degree to which deployments are fully automated and do not require manual intervention
  3. Implement Continuous Integration (CI) – CI is the first step towards continuous delivery. Code is regularly checked in, each check-in triggers a set of tests to discover serious regressions which are fixed immediately. The CI process creates canonical builds and packages that would be deployed and released.
  4. Use Trunk Based development – Trunk based development is a predictor of high performance in software delivery. It is characterized by less than three active branches in the code repository; branches and forks having short lifetimes and application teams never having “code lock” periods where no one can check in code or do pull requests due to merging conflicts, code freezes or stabilization phases.
  5. Implement test automation – Test automation is a practice where software tests are run automatically continuously through out the development process. Developers should be primarily responsible for creation and maintenance of automated test suites.
  6. Support test data management – Test data requires careful maintenance and effective practices include having adequate data to run your test suite, ability to acquire necessary data on demand, ability to condition your test data and data not limiting to the amount of tests you run.
  7. Shift left on security – Integrating security into the design and testing phases of the software development process is key to driving IT performance. This includes conducting security reviews of applications, using preapproved security libraries and packages and testing security features.
  8. Implement Continuous Delivery (CD) – CD is a development practice where software is in a deployable state through out its lifecycle and the team prioritizes keeping the software in a deployable state over working on new features.  The system can be deployed to production at any time, on demand.
• Architecture Capabilities

9. Use a loosely coupled architecture – This affects the extent to which a team can test and deploy their applications on demand without requiring orchestration with other services. Having a loosely couple architecture allows teams to work independently and enable them to work quickly and deliver value to the organization.
10. Architect for empowered teams – Architects should collaborate closely with their users, engineers who build and operate the system and help them achieve better outcomes and provide them with the tools and technologies that will enable the outcomes.  
    

• Product and Process Capabilities
  

11. Gather and implement customer feedback – Organizations actively and regularly seeking customer feedback and incorporating them into the design of their products is key to better software delivery performance
12. Make flow of work visible through the value stream – Teams should have a good understanding of and visibility into the flow of work from the business through to the end user.
13. Work in small batches – Having work decomposed into small features allow for rapid development – this enables shorter lead times and faster feedback loops
14. Foster and enable team experimentation – This is the ability of developers to try out new ideas and create and update specifications during the development process without seeking approval from outside the team.

• Lean Management and Monitoring capabilities

15. Have a lightweight change approval process – Having a light weight change approval process based on peer review produces superior IT performance than using external change approval boards
16. Monitor across application and infrastructure to inform business decisions – Use data from application and infrastructure monitoring tools to take action and make business decisions
17. Check System Health proactively – Monitor system health, using threshold and rate of change warnings to enable teams to preemptively detect and mitigate problems
18. Improve processes and manage with WIP limits – Used effectively, WIP limits drives process improvement, increases throughput and makes constraints visble in the system
19. Visualize work to monitor quality and communicate – Visualizing work has been shown to contribute to improved software delivery performance

• Cultural capabilities

20. Support a generative culture (Westrum Model) – this entails good information flow, high cooperation and trust and a conscious enquiry.
21. Encourage and support learning – Learning culture is essential for continued progress and improvement. How the organizations treats learning is key – as a cost or as an investment.
22. Support and encourage collaboration between teams – This reflects how well teams, which have traditionally been siloed, interact in development, operations and information security.
23. Provide resources and tools to make work meaningful – being empowered to exercise skills and judgement in doing the work which is meaningful and challenging.
24. Support or embody transformational leadership – Transformational leadership supports and amplifies the technical and process work that is so essential in DevOps. This consists of vision, intellectual stimulation, inspirational communication, supportive leadership and personal recognition.

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Brief Summary of Humble Leadership

In their new book, “Humble Leadership – The Power of Relationships, Openness and Trust” , Edgar Schein and Peter Schein talk of new approaches to leadership which are based more on personal relationships rather than a transactional role relationships.

They talk of 4 levels of relationships that are generally accepted in society and that great leaders exhibit qualities of openness, trust, empathy to being emotionally intimate relationships.

* Level Minus 1
Total impersonal domination and coercion.

* Level 1
Transactional role and rule-based supervision, service and most forms of  professional helping relationships.
Interactions are routine and there are low levels of personal investment

* Level 2
Personal, cooperative, trusting relationships as in friendships and effective teams

* Level 3
Emotionally intimate
Total mutual commitments

This book is a great read for any one who intends to build quality relationships at work. Here is a link to a video where Edgar Schein talks more about Humble Leadership – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wJaNKIALLw

Here is a brief summary of the book –> Brief Summary of Humble Leadership

Brief Summary of “Enterprise Agility – Being Agile in a Changing world”

This is a brief summary of “Enterprise Agility – Being Agile in a Changing World” by Sunil Mundra.  Pretty comprehensive book covering the need for Enterprise Agility and different aspects of Enterprise Agility –  Mindset and culture, Leadership, Organization structure, process, people, technology, governance and customer.  Enterprises are considered as a living system and Complex Adaptive Systems are dealt with at length.  This is a great book  to understand the different aspects of Enterprise Agility.

Here is a brief summary of the book  –> Brief Summary of Enterprise Agility

Brief Summary of Kanban Maturity Model:Evolving Fit for Purpose Organizations

This is a brief summary of “Kanban Maturity Model:Evolving Fit for Purpose Organizations”. As David Andersen and Teodora Bozheva say, the purpose of the Kanban Maturity Model is to help organizations relief from overburdening, deliver on customer expectations, predictable outcomes and survivability.  Kanban Maturity Model bases itself on the 5 levels of CMMI – but borrows a lot of concepts from Lean/TPS, Real World Risk Institute, Mission Command and Maturity Model of Jerry Weinberg.

The Kanban Maturity Model architecture rests on two dimensions – Maturity Levels on the Vertical and the Kanban Practices on the Horizontal.

The Seven Maturity levels are
Maturity Level 0 – Oblivious, Maturity Level 1 – Emerging, Maturity Level 2 – Defined, Maturity Level 3 – Managed, Maturity Level 4 – Quantitatively Managed, Maturity Level 5 – Optimizing, Maturity Level 6 – Congruent.

The Six Practices are Visualize, Limit WIP, Manage Flow, Make Policies Explicit, Implement Feedback Loops, and Improve Collaboratively and Evolve Experimentally.

Having been in Agile and Kanban coaching for a few years, I feel this book is pretty comprehensive in terms of assessing organizations at different maturity levels and what is needed for organizations to get to the next level. This is a very brief summary of the book – the book is a must read for Kanban coaches.

Here is a link to the summary –> Brief Summary of Kanban Maturity Model

Brief Summary of “More Fearless Change – Strategies For Making Your Ideas Happen”

Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising, in their new book “More Fearless Change”  have come out with an excellent sequel to their first book “Fearless Change” – a collection of tactics and strategies to make change happen in an organization.  As the authors say, this book is not a recipe for change but a collection of patterns which will provide ideas to  change the mindsets and behaviors of people involved in change in organizations .  Their first book had a set of 49 patterns and their second had 15 patterns.

Here is a brief summary of the 64 Change Patterns  –> Brief Summary of More Fearless Change