Business-driven It-wide Agile (Scrum) and Kanban (Lean) Implementation

"Preface: What Is This Book About? The main objective of this book is to provide a practical guide to business and IT leaders who want to improve IT capability to better serve the business. By this, we mean the ability for IT teams to improve the pace atwhich software applications can be delivered, not just on one Agile pilot project but on all IT projects. But there lies the difficulty for IT management to make the leap from doing Agile or Kanban (Lean) on one project to an IT-wide effort, which requires much more than just deploying some Agile techniques to a few people. Likewise, rather than blindly deploy Agile to the entire IT organization in a one-size-fits-all approach, we also show in this book how IT and business management can work together todetermine business goals that can drive this IT-wide undertaking. IT improvement may also require leverage of Kanban (Lean), rather than of Agile alone, to improve it's ability to deliver better and faster applications on a large scale. While we make no claim that what we mention in this book is the best or the only way to introduce change programs into a company, everything in this book comes from our experience in software project management and software delivery in the trenches within companies of different sizes. To make things easier for the busy IT leader and executive, we have constructed and included in this book a few case studies, with the intent to illustrate ideas or principles. All resemblance to a specific, real-life event or character is, therefore, purely coincidental. It is, as always, up to the readers to devise approaches and ideas that will make the most sense in their specific situation. K15472.indb 19 6/15/12 2:10 PM xx ? Preface: What Is This Book About?"--

Andrew T. Pham, Author of Scrum in Action, Agile project management and software development in the real world, has trained hundreds of software professionals and coached multiple project teams throughout the world to Agile (Scrum) and Kanban (Lean).

An elected senior member with the prestigious IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), Andrew Pham has held top positions in project management, enterprise architecture and software development.

In addition to the above, Andrew Pham is also a PMP and PMI-ACP, the Project Management Institute’s newly created certification for Agile Practitioner.

David K. Pham, prolific software creator, is the author of the two Ruby on Rails case studies in the book Scrum in Action, Software Project Management and Development, and a Sun-Certified Java and Microsoft-Certified Developer.

A technology entrepreneur, he was formerly the CTO of KTD Media Corp. and currently president of a web-based company in Providence, Rhode Island. David K. Pham was the invited guest speaker at the DevChatt conference for software developers in Nashville, Tennessee in 2011. He can be contacted at hello@davidkpham.com.