It’s 2014. Is your organization agile yet? That is to say, can it quickly respond to emerging customer requirements and is it open to change and innovation? This book can show you how to achieve these organizational goals.

This is not a book about agile software development. See Cockburn for that [1]. Nor is it a book about agile software project management. Highsmith is a good resource for that [2]. This book joins a growing body of knowledge on the ingredients (models, recipes, and tools) for developing and designing agile organizations [3].

The core factors of an agile organization culture, according to Pixton, Gibson, and Nickolaisen, are trust and ownership. Using their trust-ownership model and assessment, managers and change agents can assess the amount of trust a leader or business process has in an individual or team, and the commitment an individual or team has to a project or business. High trust and high ownership result in energy and innovation, which can increase value creation.

The authors describe a valuable set of practical tools for trust, ownership, business alignment, dealing honestly with ambiguity, and overcoming walls or barriers. The “collaborating with non-collaborators” tool will be useful to many. They also reveal metrics to measure the culture and factor changes, and make their case for how the model and tools work with a case study.

The collaborating with non-collaborators tool begins by helping you identify the traits, types, and motives of a non-collaborator. The second step is to help you deal with a non-collaborator by identifying where the non-collaborator is on the trust-ownership model (micro-management, conflict, failure, or energy), and deciding if you can ever collaborate, and determining what actions you are going to take as a result.

The authors cautiously provide a large set of possible metrics. Their recommended metrics to predict project progress are: earned value, story point burn-down or burn-up, and function point delivery. Other categories of possible metrics they recommend are: organizational support of delivery; improving delivered quality and reducing technical debt; reducing wasted development effort; assessing process effectiveness and improvement; assessing organizational productivity; assessing proactive adoption; assessing practice credibility; evaluating customer attitudes toward the product; business effectiveness; cultural-organizational metrics; and metrics for management. Additionally, the authors propose what not to measure. Many of the recommended metrics are based upon or derived from the net promoter score [4].

To help prevent your organization from moving from “good to great to gone,” read this book and start applying the model and tools now. There still may be time to become an agile culture. If not, you’ll at least be able to say, “We should have done that.”

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