Jurgen Appelo’s Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders is not so much about agile software development as it is about agile management, the managerial counterpart to agile development. This book is easy to understand, and it should be valuable to anyone involved in agile-lean product development. Some of the reasons I found this book easy to understand are Jurgen’s witty, entertaining, clear, and concise writing style combined with his basing the content on solid and pragmatic real-world experience.

I have read many management books in my thirty-year career and found this book to be unique, because it is grounded in science and leans heavily on complex system theory. This is significant because of the inherent complexity in developing system-software and that a software development team is a complex adaptive system in and of it itself.

Jurgen simplifies the inherent difficulty in managing agile system-software development by representing the different aspects of agile management using a cartoon model he calls “Martie, the Management 3.0 model.”

Jurgen created Martie because the author is a cartoonist at heart and finds using cartoons an effective way to communicate topics that are complicated by nature. Martie has six views on organizations, each of which Jurgen describes from both a theoretical side and a practical side. Though it is possible to read only the practical chapters about the “how” of agile management, you would miss the “theory” described in the other ones. Quite simply the “theory” gives the reason for needing or wanting to know the “how”.

There are few dependencies between the chapters, so, in theory, you could read about the six management views in any order. Within each chapter, you may sometimes notice that different topics are only weakly connected. This is by design. According to the author, “I found it important that the six views of the Management 3.0 model, and the separation of theory versus practice, were the constraints for the structure of this book. Self-organization within each chapter, and tightening the seams between topics, was sometimes a challenge.”

Management 3.0doesn’t offer mere checklists or prescriptions to follow; rather, it deepens your understanding of how organizations and agile teams work and gives you tools to solve your own problems. Agile system-software development quite often ends up being looked at as a holistic homogeneous process or methodology containing all the ingredients you would need to be agile for any type of system-software development project. Unfortunately, people don’t seem to realize or come to understand that religiously following checklists does not guarantee success.

Simply put, the “essence” of agile-lean product (system-software) development is not a codifiable process or methodology. Believing so and calling it such conveys the wrong message, leads to confusion, misinterpretation, disappointment, and waste. As an agile system-software development practitioner you focus on being agile-lean within dynamic real-time given situations and contexts with a strong reliance on tacit knowledge; you do not do agile, you are agile. This book will help make you aware that a successful adoption of agile system-software development is also based on understanding how organizations and agile teams work.
 

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