Kurt Bittner – författare

Hone Your Agile Leadership Skills to Help Your Organization Transform and Thrive

To leverage the immense opportunities associated with accelerating change, organizations need teams capable of trying new ideas quickly, learning from their experiences, and adapting based on that learning. Helping these teams to grow and thrive requires agile leaders who support, inspire, and encourage, and who can leave behind the management skills of directing, monitoring, and rewarding or punishing.

The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide, written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving--they show you how it's really done.

Great agile leaders aren't born that way--they're regular people who care deeply about helping others achieve shared goals and have discovered a better way to lead. Whatever your role in the organization, this guide will help you master those skills and mindsets a whole lot faster.

"Drawing on vast experience, Ron, Kurt, and Laurens tease out practical tips and patterns for good leadership [and show] how a leader can help shape the environment for agile teams to succeed. . . . The narrative style of the book makes it easy to read, and I am sure there will be many times that you see yourself in it."--From the Foreword by Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org

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The Practical, Start-to-Finish Guide to Planning and Leading Iterative Software Projects

Iterative processes have gained widespread acceptance because they help software developers reduce risk and cost, manage change, improve productivity, and deliver more effective, timely solutions. But conventional project management techniques don’t work well in iterative projects, and newer iterative management techniques have been poorly documented. Managing Iterative Software Development Projects is the solution: a relentlessly practical guide to planning, organizing, estimating, staffing, and managing any iterative project, from start to finish. 

Leading iterative development experts Kurt Bittner and Ian Spence introduce a proven, scalable approach that improves both agility and control at the same time, satisfying the needs of developers, managers, and the business alike. Their techniques are easy to understand, and easy to use with any iterative methodology, from Rational Unified Process to Extreme Programming to the Microsoft Solutions Framework.

Whatever your role–team leader, program manager, project manager, developer, sponsor, or user representative–this book will help you

Whether you are interested in software development using RUP, OpenUP, or other agile processes, this book will help you reduce the anxiety and cost associated with software improvement by providing an easy, non-intrusive path toward improved results–without overwhelming you and your team.

Today, organizations want to scale Scrum to ever larger and more complex projects, driving the benefits of agility throughout the enterprise. But most conventional solutions to scaling agility have added complexity and deviated from the principles that make Scrum so attractive. The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum introduces a better approach, reflecting the authors' many years of applying and scaling Scrum in multiple industries.

Three leading Scrum.org experts introduce the Nexus Framework, showing how it enables smooth integration among multiple Scrum teams, as well as highly-effective collaboration with non-Scrum teams working on the same project. Drawing on their immense experience, they explain what Nexus is, how it works, and how it solves agile scalability problems that have bedeviled organizations for years. Next, they offer start-to-finish guidance for applying Nexus Framework principles throughout your own organization. You will walk through forming a Nexus, organizing work in a Nexus environment, managing and enabling a Nexus, and much more—all you need to succeed with Scrum in even the most challenging global projects.

Leverage Evidence-Based Management, a scientific method, to enable organizations to achieve goals under conditions of uncertainty.

Organizations often believe in the certainty of their plans and see every deviation from the plan as a sign of failure. They view the organization as a machine for creating and executing plans instead of looking at it as a responsive organism, attentive to the changes in its environment. In a world of uncertainties, organizations need to be capable of reinventing themselves every day based on new information.

In Unlocking Business Agility with Evidence-Based Management, authors Patricia Kong, Todd Miller, Kurt Bittner, and Ryan Ripley use the framework developed by Scrum.org called Evidence-Based Management (EBM). EBM is an empirical approach that helps organizations use experimentation and rapid feedback to progress toward goals. This path is not always obvious or straightforward, but that is a benefit: in a complex and changing world, the path toward goals will always be uncertain. EBM helps organizations use new data to adapt their plan toward their goals.

Throughout the book, the authors present stories and experiences that illustrate how EBM can be applied to set better goals and then leverage empiricism to achieve those goals using feedback, learning, and evidence. This definitive guide will help your organization identify its true purpose, improve its ability to reach goals, and build a culture of trust, transparency, and growth.

Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.