Gentle Introduction to Agile
Fun tutorial and introductions to basic agile concepts, forms and practices:
Lean In
Lean improvement videos
Here’s a deep dive into lean thinking that covers the Essentials
Agile Software Teams/Engineering/Scaling/Assessment
XP
Scaling Agile Engineering
AgileFluency
Mob Programming
Fading Problems with Mobs
Organizational Agility
- McKinsey Survey spells it out for org units that are startup/trapped/agile/
- The Spotify Squad/Guild/Tribe example
- The Kanban Movement and Limited Work In Progress (WIP) movement. I really like this simplified approach to organizational improvement. It was canonized by David Anderson who popularized RAD or Rapid Application Development. There are some great links and a Prezi you can use in this article .
Lean Startup, Discovery, Emergence and Innovation
IDEO On Design thinking
The lean startup
Lean Canvas
On Being Adaptive People and Organizations, on Being More Effective
Conscious Business Video (careful, video plays with audio right away after click)
Conscious Business Defined
Reinventing organizations Ken Wilber Integral Mapping
Otto Sharmer from MIT Labs on Upgrading our Systemic Operating Systems
Presencing as a way to create change/the future
Tools for Visualizing and Measuring the work and ensuring Real Time Connection of People
Trello is awesome and also a simple type of Kanban especially with plugins that allow WIP limits and lean analytics. Doesn’t allow for swimlanes though.
this is best Kanban board for professional use that I have found. Allows swimlanes, vertical and horizontal Kanban.
Pivotal Tracker is a scrum centric board for software development. Does what Jira and Rally does but without the cruft. Better for startups and small teams/orgs.
Online collaboration platform great for running online ideation and decision making. Games that get work done!
Online sticky/white board for visual conversations/virtual meetings
Instant Chat with easy to create channels is essential to keeping the question/response time to a few seconds even when you are sitting next to each other. (noisy environment/passing long strings of text)
Webex/Zoom/Skype/ for video/audio/screen sharing. All 3 works fine.
History and Theory
Deming is the master statistician that helped rebuild Japanese manufacturing after WWII and inspired the TPS, Toyota Production System that embodies lean thinking. PDCA: Plan Do Check Act cycle.
theory of constraints is the Essential way of understanding and affecting systemic change in organizations or simply problem solving complicated systems
Toyota Production System -- Goal: Highest Quality, Lowest Cost, Shortest Lead Time
Certifications
Comparison of PSM and CSM and other certs read Lucas Smith's excellent comparison on this page
Local Meetups
SF Bay Area
Lean Startup Circle in SF
Largest meetup for agile in the South Bay/Silicon Valley Agile Leadership Network (cofounded this one with Monica Yap and Stacey Louis)
Largest agile Meetup in SF: Bay Area Agile Leadership Network
East bay but focuses more on software QA
Lean Coffees are great for beginners to learn on a variety of topics and get questions answered
Agile Silicon Valley is sponsored by cPrime, a project management focused consulting/recruiter
Sillicon Valley Engineering Leadership is for engineering managers, includes lots of hardware folks. Run by Sam Hahn and Ron Lichty. Highly recommended for you.
Gateway is a new agile meetup in SF
East bay Agile
Lean User Experience in SF
Omaha
Also look at your local meetups: https://www.meetup.com/Omaha-Agile-Development/ is the largest.
Lean coffees are usually very accessible to beginners https://www.meetup.com/Omaha-Lean-Coffee/
Here’s one in Lincoln: https://www.meetup.com/Lincoln-Agile-Community/