Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders

Jurgen Appelo

Dec 2010 · Pearson Education

About this ebook

In many organizations, management is the biggest obstacle to successful Agile development. Unfortunately, reliable guidance on Agile management has been scarce indeed. Now, leading Agile manager Jurgen Appelo fills that gap, introducing a realistic approach to leading, managing, and growing your Agile team or organization.

Writing for current managers and developers moving into management, Appelo shares insights that are grounded in modern complex systems theory, reflecting the intense complexity of modern software development. Appelo’s Management 3.0 model recognizes that today’s organizations are living, networked systems; and that management is primarily about people and relationships.

Management 3.0 doesn’t offer mere checklists or prescriptions to follow slavishly; rather, it deepens your understanding of how organizations and Agile teams work and gives you tools to solve your own problems. Drawing on his extensive experience as an Agile manager, the author identifies the most important practices of Agile management and helps you improve each of them.

Coverage includes

• Getting beyond “Management 1.0” control and “Management 2.0” fads

• Understanding how complexity affects your organization

• Keeping your people active, creative, innovative, and motivated

• Giving teams the care and authority they need to grow on their own

• Defining boundaries so teams can succeed in alignment with business goals

• Sowing the seeds for a culture of software craftsmanship

• Crafting an organizational network that promotes success

• Implementing continuous improvement that actually works

Thoroughly pragmatic–and never trendy–Jurgen Appelo’s Management 3.0 helps you bring greater agility to any software organization, team, or project.

About the author

Jurgen Appelo is a writer, speaker, trainer, developer, entrepreneur, manager, blogger, reader, dreamer, leader, and freethinker. And he’s Dutch, which explains his talent for being weird.

After studying software engineering at the Delft University of Technology, and earning his Master’s degree in 1994, Jurgen busied himself either starting up or leading a variety of Dutch businesses, always in the position of team leader, manager, or executive.

Jurgen’s most recent occupation was CIO at ISM eCompany, one of the largest e-business solution providers in The Netherlands. As a manager, Jurgen has experience in leading software developers, development managers, project managers, quality managers, service managers, and kangaroos, some of which he hired accidentally.

He is primarily interested in software development and complexity theory, from a manager’s perspective. As a writer, he has published papers and articles in many magazines, and he maintains a blog at www.noop.nl. As a speaker, he is regularly invited to talk at seminars and conferences.

Last but not least, Jurgen is a trainer, with workshops based on the Management 3.0 model. His materials address the topics of energizing people, empowering teams, aligning constraints, developing competence, growing structure, and improving everything.

However, sometimes he puts all writing, speaking, and training aside to do some programming himself, or to spend time on his ever-growing collection of science fiction and fantasy literature, which he stacks in a self-designed book case that is four meters high.

Jurgen lives in Rotterdam (The Netherlands)–and sometimes in Brussels (Belgium)–with his partner Raoul. He has two kids and an imaginary hamster called George.