Key Agile Success Factors (Mitch Lacey)

Key Agile success factors:

1. Demand technical excellence: make XP practices mandatory. Neglecting these is one of the reasons why teams are not able to produce shippable code at end of sprints.
1. Sustainable pace
2. Collective code ownership
3. Pair programming
4. Test driven development
5. Continuous integration
6. Coding standards
7. Refactoring
2. Promote individual change and lead organisational change
1. Individual response to change is not enough
2. Organisation should also be able to respond to change. Institutional transformation is essential. 
3. Make sure management is educated, trained, on board and participating in agile/ scrum implementation
3. Organise knowledge and improve learning
4. Maximise value creation across the entire process

Lean books

• Lean Software Development Mary Poppendieck , Tom Poppendieck
• The Lean Enterprise (Jez Humble , Barry O'Reilly , Joanne Molesky)
• Leankit flow metrics, and slides here Lean-Metrics-Slides
• Lean Mindset by Mary Poppendieck
• Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald G Reinertsen
• Lean UX 2e by Josh Seiden
• Lean Startup by Eric-Ries
• Personal Kanban by Jim Benson
• Lean from the Trenches by Henrik-Kniberg

Things needing long lead times

1. Firewall burning
2. Setting up BAC alarming
3. Security
4. Vulnerability testing

Obsession with customer delight, and obsession with early and frequent delivery of value

The core of Agile can be summed up or seen as two views complementing each other -- obsession with customer & customer delight, and obsession with early and frequent delivery of value. Everything else, even the last 2 that Stephen Denning proposes (Law of Network and Law of small team are mere enablers to these two) are very critical but in my view enablers.

Starting Agile Journey

1. Start without calling yourself Agile.
2. Don't buy into standard stuff practised elsewhere and adopting in your workplace -- Spotify, Netflix, etc. have a context; Simply monkeying them in your organisation won't make you agile.
3. Grow your Agile organically.
4. Understand the context of your organisation, the whys and wherefores and why exactly you want to go Agile.
5. Implement a holistic agile framework --
1. Make your entire organisation agile
2. Consciously and diligently remove organisational impediments to agility
3. Restructure your teams -- self organising, self sufficient teams, fix procurement, fix operations teams, fix support teams, etc.
4. Fix your funding model
5. Fix your procurement
6. Fix your portfolio management; make it lean
7. Define agile framework pertinent to your org.
8. Grow home capability; if you must hire, hire people including agile ones in permanent roles.
9. Kick out consultants, you don't need them. 
10. Coaches are good, however ensure you have only very senior folks who have implemented it in other organisations. Get them into the organisation fold instead of contracting. 
11. Avoid remote work for Agile coaching. It won't work.
12. Likewise as far as possible avoid remote work even for day to day Agile.
13. Remove the stupid concept of hot desks. It isn't working anymore, and for Agile it definitely doesn't. Instead have a dedicated room / space for the teams. 
14. Reduce vendor dependency. Bring down the vendor count.
15. Don't allow HR to lead the Agile transformation. 
16.