This article offers a reading list of resources and books related to FLEX. These resources are essential to developing the mindset of FLEX.

Books

Management

Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions, and Results. This article summarizes the essential concepts from each chapter of the important book, The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay. We highly recommend this article/book for executives, management, and leadership who are responsible for  transitioning their enterprises with Lean and Agile.  For even more information check out Stephen Bungay’s website.

Lean-Agile

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Don Reinertsen.  This book is still the definitive work for Lean Product Development – whether software is involved or not.

Articles

An Introduction to the Guardrails: Agreements to Keep You Aligned and On Track. The Guardrails are a set of agreements recommended by Net Objectives for any organization undertaking a transformation to business agility.

Videos

Lean-Agile at Mid-Scale: FLEX An introduction to Lean-Agile as defined by FLEX.

Agile Product Management Online Course – Free Videos

• Why Business Agility
• Introduction to Minimum Business Increments
• Business Capabilities and Business Offerings: A Business Architecture Perspective

Webinars

Here are webinar recordings that pertain to FLEX and important concepts related to FLEX.

• Lean-Agile at Scale: FLow For Enterprise Transformation (FLEX). Provides an overview of FLEX and how to implement it.
• Configuring and Fine-Tuning Agile Release Trains. Contains important concepts of Value Stream Impedance and the Theory of Constraints.

Websites

Net Objectives does not pretend to be the sole owner of all useful information.  This section contains some websites we think are very useful that directly relate to FLEX.

• True North Consortium is the website for a group of like purposed individuals.  See the members’ websites for more.
• Availagility is Karl Scotland’s site.  He has been a front-runner in Kanban since almost its inception.

Resources to prepare for the FLEX Online Course

These resources are selected items from above and are presented to prepare students for the online course, Lean-Agile at Mid-Scale: Flex Essentials. They do not need to be read/viewed prior to the class.

• Agile Product Management Online Course – Free Videos
  • Why Business Agility
  • Introduction to Minimum Business Increments
• An Introduction to the Guardrails: Agreements to Keep You Aligned and On Track
• Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions, and Results

Resources for transformation agents

We are in the process of creating a page on how  to use Lean Management and visual controls to create collaboration across the organization.  This will draw from the following blogs and articles and are presented here until that page is created.

• Resistance is not to change. This is both useful to know and creates the awareness that you can make improvements for someone and they won’t object.
• Why not to focus on a company’s culture. Culture is important, but it’s a reflection of management.
• Middle-Up-Down Management. The choices are not between command and control and letting everyone self-manage. The answer to Agile management is in a document written by the same person who co-wrote the article that inspired Scrum.
• What to say when someone just doesn’t get it. People are not naturally resistant.  See what you can do when they appear to be so.
• Plans, Actions, and Results. This article summarizes the essential concepts from each chapter of the important book, The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay.
• An Introduction to the Guardrails: Agreements to Keep You Aligned and On Track. The Guardrails are a set of agreements recommended by Net Objectives for any organization undertaking a transformation to business agility.
• The Three Oiled Wheel Approach. A less than 7 minute video which teaches the lesson of Theory of Constraints that it is not about removing the constraints as much as it is working within them.

Resources for Mid-Scale

The value of cross-functional teams.  This article discusses why and how to use cross-functional teams when possible.

Aligning multiple teams with Lean-Agile Thinking. This article describes a case where teams were effectively doing Scrum but couldn’t deliver quickly.  What was missing was Lean Thinking and collaborating by focusing on the whole.

Agile with multiple teams.  Segment on product management with multiple business stakeholders and multiple teams is from 14:50 in for just under 11 minutes.  At the time what we now call minimum business increments (MBIs), were still being called minimum marketable features (MMFs).