INTRODUCTION

Welcome. This book provides business professionals with a philosophy, strategy and suite of tools to help you work smarter, leaner and succeed faster. It will help you to:

• understand and apply agile methods in your working world;
• discover strategies and tools to make you work faster and better;
• find out how to anticipate change and navigate uncertainty;
• gain immediate clarity and control in any situation;
• streamline and improve your day-to-day workflow;
• uncover new ways to communicate and collaborate.

Adopting agile and lean methodologies can help to bring success faster by structuring your time differently. For example, if you find yourself in long planning meetings where you feel your time would be better spent doing some work, agile and lean provides a model for quick meetings with clear actions on what to do next.

It will provide you with tools to simplify communication and visibility in your working environment, ensuring the best use of time and resources. Use the tools with your colleagues to improve your abilities as a team player.

Use this book to find ways to identify strengths and opportunities, and uncover barriers and bottlenecks that are limiting your performance. This simple method and toolbox enables you to turn ideas into reality, using an approach that embraces learning and collaboration. As well as tactics, tools, templates, materials and guides, this book contains case studies and exercises to find the best way for you to thrive and succeed in any situation.

I assume you have picked this book primarily because you would like to become better at what you do. You want to make your job easier, increase enjoyment and satisfaction and generate positive results so that you can progress and excel in your career.

You may have a great opportunity on the horizon that you wish to explore, or you may feel stuck in your current position. You may be firefighting in your job day to day, going through extreme change, whether personally or as an organisation, which means the future is uncertain and decisions have to be made. You may be simply intrigued by a new technique for becoming a better business professional.

Whether your personal preference is to take a scientific or a creative approach to your work, these methods have been found to enable both approaches to be incorporated. The tools and methods are structured to allow you to pick out the bits that work for you. The case studies, shown by , and exercises, shown by , will help you to adapt and evolve them to suit your style and environment.

The book is split into sections to help you to approach and practise being more agile in your working environment.

The approach in this book is an adaptation of ideas and concepts from agile and lean, taking the best of both to present one unified way of working. The practical heart of the book is Part 3, where you yourself can experiment by personally adopting agile tactics and tools. The book is divided into four parts:

• Part 1 Being agile – defines what agile is, the characteristics of an agile and lean business professional and the reasoning for developing these traits within your working practices.
• Part 2 Agile thinking – explores why we want and need to be agile in the jobs we do, and the drivers and beliefs needed to adopt an agile approach.
• Part 3 Agile approaches – the methods, techniques, tools, materials, practices that give you the structure to be able to act in an agile way.
• Part 4 Agile culture – will help you to consider how you can scale and share agile with those you work with, simple steps on how to create a great working environment through collaboration, and how to expand your agility beyond yourself to your teams and organisation.

These techniques can be used to help you beyond your professional life too, whether it is a project to renovate your house, or just thinking through something that is playing on your mind to gain some perspective and find a way forward.

Discover how to anticipate change and navigate uncertainty.

Gain immediate clarity and control in any situation.

Streamline and improve your day-to-day workflow.

Uncover new ways to communicate and collaborate.