FLEX for the Disciplined Agilist: FLow for Enterprise TransformaTIon  (online book)

Note: Much of this book has chapters on concepts that are either not well known or that are explained in this book in a more accessible manner than in the past.  If you are already familiar with advanced Agile topics, reading these chapters can give a broad stroke of how FLEX is different than current Agile frameworks.  These are high-lighted for the interested reader. These chapters are in bold. A page with these chapters and why they are so useful, along with some other useful concepts not in this book, can be found here.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction to FLEX

Part I: The Theory Underneath FLEX

1. Why We Need an Attitude change in Agile
2. What’s Holding Us Back
3. Dealing with Complexity by Creating a Bias For Simplicity
4. The Dilemmas We’re In

Part II: The Goal Is Business Agility (with exercises)

1. The Business Case For Agility
2. The Minimum Business Increment
3. What is flow?
4. The value stream of the effective organization
5. Strategic Planning and Lean Portfolio Management
6. Lean Product Management
7. The importance of Having an Intake Process
8. Planning, Collaboration, and Dependency Management 
9. Implementation and Integration
10. Release and Realization

Part III: The Goal Is Business Agility: What’s in Your Way?

1. Inherent Challenges at Scale
2. Mapping Your Value Stream
3. Why Looking at the Value Stream Is So Important
4. Using the Theory of Flow to Find Your Impediments

PART IV: FLEX as a Patterns Framework

1. Understand Your Options
2. Contrasting Epics and MBIs
3. How Using MBIs Tie Strategies, the intake process, ATDD, and planning together

Part V: Using FLEX to transform your organization (with exercises)

1. Starting a Transition to Business Agility in Six Steps
2. Setting up a Transition Monitoring Team
3. The Purpose of an Assessment
4. Using FLEX to Perform an Assessment
5. Using the Intake Process to Educate Leadership
6. Attending to Flow Through the Development Group
7. The assessment timeline for a development group of less than 125 people
8. Creating a Roadmap for Improvement
9. Improving your company’s culture

Part VI: New Roles Needed

1. Business Architect
2. The Application Development Manager
3. The Technology Delivery Manager
4. The Value Stream Network Architect

Part VII: Agreements We Make With Each Other: The Guardrails

1. Leadership and Management
2. Those Working at the Portfolio Level
3. Business Architect
4. Product Managers and Product Owners
5. During Implementation and Integration
6. Teams and Agile Coaches
7. During the Planning Event
8. During Release and Realization (ops et al)

Part VIII: Topics In Depth – Value Stream Wide

1. The Mindshifts of FLEX
2. Laws of Software Development
3. The Value Stream Impedance Scorecard
4. Systems thinking and How It Can Be Applied to Frameworks and Methods
5. Why Lean-Agile Should Be More Predictable than Waterfall
6. Collaboration and alignment
7. The role of leadership and management
8. The Software World Is Not Like the Physical World and What That Means

Part IX: Topics in Depth – Practices

1. Create visibility
2. High Level Release Planning – Pareto Vs Parkinson
3. Improving WSJF
4. Running Effective Planning Events
5. The Benefits of Acceptance Driven Development Using Behavior Driven Development
6. The Relationship Between Acceptance Test-Driven Development and Design Patterns
7. How to Use Estimates
8. A Simple Guide to See if a Change Will Be an Improvement
9. The Purpose of Metrics

PART X: Using FLEX to Both Enhance and Simplify Scrum

1. Why Agile Coaches Need to Know Both Scrum and Kanban

Part XI: Using FLEX to both enhance and simplify SAFe

1. Why Essential SAFe is Both More and Less Than What’s Needed at Small to Mid-Scale
2. SAFe From a Value Stream Perspective
3. Putting it together: FLEX and SAFe

Part XII: Additional Resources on the Net Objectives Portal

Appendix

1. Reflections by Al Shalloway
2. How FLEX is different from Agile Approaches
3. SAFe: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
4. The FLEX Patterns