The past few months have seen an epic spurt of new books on the subject of leading and adopting Lean/Agile/Scrum in the enterprise. So rather than reviewing each of them individually, for those readers who don’t want to “break their book budget” this holiday season, I thought it might be best to compare and contrast them a bit to see where each is best suited.

The roundup of contenders could be summarized as “Stand Back and Succeed Leading Lean/Agile/Scrum in an Imperfect Enterprise” but I’ll list them individually for our more discriminating readers:

• Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility; by Pollyana Pixton, Niel Nokolaised, Todd Little and Kent McDonald (Addison-Wesley, June 2009)
• Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World; by Greg Smith and Ahmed Sidky (Manning, August 2009)
• Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum; by Mike Cohn (Addison-Wesley Signature Series, October 2009)
• Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are Not The Point; by Mary and Tom Poppendieck (Addison-Wesley Signature Series, October 2009)
• Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility; by Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver and James Trott  (Addison-Wesley, October 2009)

I was fortunate enough to be able to read the early draft manuscripts of most of these books (made publicly available by the authors on their websites, often with a corresponding mail-list for comments and feedback), as well as the final result. There is certainly plenty to like about each of them, but also some key differences that make some of them more suitable than others for some readers’ needs. So let’s get started shall we?

First-up is Stand Back and Deliver. This book “weighs in” at 192 pages spanning 7 chapters and is primarily focused on agile project leadership and a framework of 4 specific decision-making tools for facilitating collaboration utilizing collective intelligence. Each chapter of the book ends with a summary, references, and often a detailed case-study. There is even a summary chapter at the end of the book that serves as an excellent review/refresher for each of the tools.

To be honest, I found myself in strenuous disagreement with the author(s) on what I feel are some crucial elements of the “soft” aspects of leadership collaboration and communication style:

• While I like the idea of management standing back to empower a self-organizing agile team, I felt it spoke more to the role of manager or PMO than of an agile coach.
• There were some important cases where I feel more (rather than less) dialogue is warranted before taking an action with team/project-wide consequences.

So this book wouldn’t be my first choice for someone wanting to learn how to become a successful agile “coach” or team facilitator. I was particularly dismayed by the “get off the bus” story about how someone was removed from the team for “not delivering” without any further dialogue, when it looked to me like the real problem was not having more dialogue earlier and waiting all the while for the other person to come to them (or the team) to ask for help. And what about getting other perspectives to better understand and learn from the situation before deciding the blame lay entirely on the one member (rather than first reflecting on one’s own possible leadership and communication failure)?

I found that deeply disturbing, to the extent that I almost let it “turn me off” to the rest of the book – and that would have been a gross oversight! The framework of decision-making leadership tools that are the “meat” of this book is nothing short of outstanding! In fact I would go so far as to say that the book is worth the price for this framework alone (maybe even its weight in gold). So don’t let the one or two possibly disturbing leadership stories dissuade you from learning these tools and how to apply them.

The tools are:

• The purpose alignment model (differentiating, parity, partner, who-cares)
• The leading collaboration model
• The context-leadership model for assessing project uncertainty and complexity (colts, bulls, cows, sheepdogs and skunks)
• The value-based decision-making model (purpose, considerations, costs & benefits, decisions/actions/intentions)

I could easily spend a separate paragraph or more on each of these, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that these are tools that every agile leader, coach, and facilitator will want to have in their toolbox.

Next-up, weighing in at 408 pages spanning 8 chapters is Smith and Sidky’s Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World. This book reads like a field-guide (that could easily serve as the text for a week-long training course) for organizational leadership in adopting and adapting agile development within a large enterprise. It provides a complete roadmap of stages/steps, what to expect at various intervals, readiness assessments & fitness tests, step-by-step notes/tables on selection and tailoring, making the mental paradigm-shift, and much more (see some of the sample material online).

This book is a wealth of information about adapting agile to your organizational context. The assessment frameworks and in-depth analysis and stage-by-stage, step-by-step roadmap and guidance are tailor made for leading an agile adoption “program” in a large organization. (Note that readers of the Agile Journal may remember Ahmed Sidky, the co-author, for his four-stage Agile Adoption Framework and five-level value-based Sidky Agile Measurement Index - SAMI.) The book may read as too formulaic or clinical to some, but to those living in these large organizations it will be “just what the doctor ordered!”

Regarding Mike Cohn’s Succeeding with Agile, it is an impressive 504 pages spread across 5 parts in 22 very modest-sized chapters. I am quoted in the “praise pages” of the book as saying the following:

“In Succeeding with Agile, Mike Cohn has created an indispensable trail guide for all those who are adopting Scrum in order to reap the benefits of agility for their teams and projects. Mike has scoured through the collective lessons of not only scores of different projects, teams and organizations from his own agile experience, but also from the experience of countless others. He provides real-world stories from the trenches, useful data and studies, and invaluable insights into what has and hasn't worked. What I like best about the book is that Mike provides wisdom, yet gives several different alternatives and shows when each approach is most suitable. If you are trying to lead an agile adoption, then this book will help you inspect-and-adapt your way to success.”

After looking at the above and re-reading it again months after I first wrote it, I must conclude that “I meant what I said and I said what I meant!” (in the immortal words of Horton the Elephant in Dr’ Seuss’ “Horton Hatches the Egg”). I really can’t say it any better than that.

What I can say is that the key difference between Cohn’s “Succeeding with Agile” versus Smith and Sidky’s “Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World” is that the latter will appeal more to those looking to lead an “Agile Company Initiative” across an organization, whereas the former will appear more to those trying to lead and spread the adoption of agile (using Scrum) in a less formal and more iterative fashion, a team/project (or two) at a time.

Cohn successfully delves into issues of scaling Scrum across multiple disciplines, multiple (geographically dispersed) teams, integrating (or at least aligning) with a PMO, overcoming resistance, co-existence with other approaches, and leading self-organizing teams. (In fact the section on leading self-organization is quite probably the single best description of the subject in any Agile development book I’ve come across to date.)

Whereas Smith and Sidky come across as more formal/clinical, “top down” and management-focused, Cohn comes across as more personable, battle-worn/proven on the “front-lines”, and team-focused. Those trying to lead agility in just their small company or department will likely prefer Cohn’s book over Smith & Sidky’s, as will those who prefer a more iterative approach that feels more like working in an agile team than as part of a company-wide initiative.

In Leading Lean Software Development, the Poppendiecks have followed up their previous two books on Lean Software Development with what I think is their most hard-hitting and inspiring text to date for installing and “instilling” the proper mind-set for Lean/Agile in the heads of management and senior leaders. They have done their homework in researching and relaying compelling stories and evidence from both current projects as well as historical ones from luminaries as early the seventies (and earlier for some non-software cases, as in the creation of the empire state building).

In 312 pages, 6 chapters, and 24 “frames of reference”, they masterfully get to the heart of the key attitude changes and critical elements for the mindset that is required of management in order to attain Lean/Agile success not just in name only or for a few projects or organizations, but to sustain and grow a truly lean software development organization. The chapters, and the frames they describe, are:

1. Systems Thinking (Frames: customer focus, system capability, end-to-end flow, policy-driven waste)
2. Technical Excellence (Frames: essential complexity, quality by construction, evolutionary development, deep expertise)
3. Reliable Delivery (Frames: proven experience, level workflow, pull-scheduling, adaptive control)
4. Relentless Improvement (Frames: visualize perfection, establish a baseline, expose problems, learn to improve)
5. Great People (Frames: knowledge-workers, the norm of reciprocity, mutual respect, pride of workmanship)
6. Aligned Leaders (Frames: from theory to practice, governance, alignment, sustainability)

The introduction describes the importance of frames and leadership’s role in “framing”. It then provides the big picture, showing the collection of the frames for each of the six chapters.

Each chapter then proceeds to systematically and comprehensively “blow you away” with its clarity of profound insight and distillation of decades of wisdom.  Among my favorites is the description of the five biggest causes of policy-driven waste:

1. Complexity
2. Economies of Scale
3. Separating decision making from work
4. Wishful thinking
5. Technical debt

In particular the insights explained regarding complexity and technical debt, and on economies of scale versus economies of flow will be a real eye opener to many who work in organizations that currently apply these policies.

Last-up, is Lean-Agile Software Development, by the folks over at NetObjectives, led by Alan Shalloway. I was really looking forward to this book, particularly since of all the authors mentioned in this review, Alan Shalloway is the one whose writings on the Agile discussion lists I most often find myself in most resonating agreement. The online resource page for the book used to have a great deal of the initial material and I remember reading through it, waiting with baited breath for the rest of the “meat and bones” to be fleshed out.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Despite 304 pages in three parts across 14 chapters (and two appendices), I found myself regularly asking “where’s the meat?” when I read through it. Don’t get me wrong, what the book does say I think it does a GREAT job of saying.

This book more than any other mentioned here really manages to put its finger on the key differences between Scrum and Lean and where each may fall short or need the other to complement or supplement it for an enterprise-level approach. The material on the going beyond scrum, product coordination team, the role of software architecture, and the “integrated theory” of lean and agile together are particularly insightful. And yet, after every few pages I felt like the theory part had been explained adequately, but the practical portion showing what it looked like and how to do and apply it in the real world was absent.

Fortunately, many (but not all) of those “missing pieces” can be found in the authors’ other work The Lean-Agile Pocket-Guide for Scrum Teams (which is freely available online). Taken together, these two form a much more complete work (in my opinion).

So what was the outcome of that book-battle again? I think this judge’s ruling is as follows:

• The Addison-Wesley Signature Series is the overall winner with both Succeeding with Agile and Leading Lean Software Development as two “must read” knockouts.
• The set of tools in Stand Back and Deliver is certainly of great use for any leader or manager.
• And the agile adoption framework, readiness assessments, and measurement index in Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World are of greatest use to anyone playing a key part in an agile change initiative for a large organization!
• Lean-Agile Software Development is especially good at explaining the relationship between Scrum and Lean and how to integrate them together into something more powerful, but it has a bit of a “glass jaw” unless backed by The Lean-Agile Pocket-Guide for Scrum Teams to deliver an effective “one-two punch” combination.

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