You’ll explore how four different teams used Kanban to make paradigm-changing improvements in software development. These teams were struggling with overwork, unclear priorities, and lack of direction. As you discover what worked for them, you’ll understand how to make significant changes in real situations.The four case studies in this book explain how to:Improve the full value chain by using Enterprise KanbanBoost engagement, teamwork, and flow in change management and operationsSave a derailing project with KanbanHelp an office team outside IT keep up with growth using KanbanWhat seems easy in theory can become tangled in practice. Discover why “improving IT” can make you miss your biggest improvement opportunities, and why you should focus on fixing quality and front-end operations before IT. Discover how to keep long-term focus and improve across department borders while dealing with everyday challenges. Find out what happened when using Kanban to find better ways to do work in a well-established company, including running multi-team development without a project office.You’ll inspire your team and engage management to make it easier to develop better products.

    Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan a whole project out in advance, trying to foresee the final outcome, they make a series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning from lots of little failures and from small but highly significant wins that allow them to happen upon unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.           Based on deep and extensive research, including more than 200 interviews with leading innovators, Sims discovered that productive, creative thinkers and doers—from Ludwig van Beethoven to Thomas Edison and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—practice a key set of simple but ingenious experimental methods—such as failing quickly to learn fast, tapping into the genius of play, and engaging in highly immersed observation—that free their minds, opening them up to making unexpected connections and perceiving invaluable insights. These methods also unshackle them from the constraints of overly analytical thinking and linear problem solving that our education places so much emphasis on, as well as from the fear of failure, all of which thwart so many of us in trying to be more innovative.               Reporting on a fascinating range of research, from the psychology of creative blocks to the influential Silicon Valley–based field of design thinking, Sims offers engaging and wonderfully illuminating accounts of breakthrough innovators at work, including how Hewlett-Packard stumbled onto the breakaway success of the first hand-held calculator; the remarkable storyboarding process at Pixar films that has been the key to their unbroken streak of box office successes; the playful discovery process by which Frank Gehry arrived at his critically acclaimed design for Disney Hall; the aha revelation that led Amazon to pursue its wildly successful affiliates program; and the U.S. Army’s ingenious approach to counterinsurgency operations that led to the dramatic turnaround in Iraq.               Fast paced and as entertaining as it is illuminating, Little Bets offers a whole new way of thinking about how to break away from the narrow strictures of the methods of analyzing and problem solving we were all taught in school and unleash our untapped creative powers.

    How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes readers inside Google headquarters—the Googleplex—to show how Google works.While they were still students at Stanford, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation with another, as two of Google’s earliest employees found a way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars from Internet advertising. With this cash cow, Google was able to expand dramatically and take on other transformative projects: more efficient data centers, open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube), cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more.The key to Google’s success in all these businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking. After its unapologetically elitist approach to hiring, Google pampers its engineers—free food and dry cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses—and gives them all the resources they need to succeed. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every hire.But has Google lost its innovative edge? With its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. Some employees are leaving the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. Can the company that famously decided not to be evil still compete?No other book has ever turned Google inside out as Levy does with In the Plex.

    Today, software organizations are transforming the way work gets done through practices like Agile, Lean, and DevOps. But as commonly implemented as these methods are, many transformations still fail, largely because the organization misses a critical step: transforming their culture and the way people communicate. Agile Conversations brings a practical, step-by-step guide to using the human power of conversation to build effective, high-performing teams to achieve truly Agile results. Consultants Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick show readers how to utilize the Five Conversations to help teams build trust, alleviate fear, answer the "whys," define commitments, and hold everyone accountable.These five conversations give teams everything they need to reach peak performance, and they are exactly what's missing from too many teams today. Stop focusing on processes and practices that leave your organization stuck with culture-less rituals. Instead, unleash the unique human power of conversation.

    Team leads usually have little to no idea how to handle people related issues – issues that affect how the morale, quality of work, and overall performance of the team, and of course impacts how easy or hard it is to implement “the new stuff”.Most team leaders are clueless as to how to handle their manager giving them an impossible due date, a team member reluctant to try anything new, or another team member teaching all the other members practices from 25 years ago that today only hurt the team.Why?No one teaches that to software team leads. Team leads today, in the overwhelming majority of places, are just developers who worked hard and stayed with the company long enough to be promoted. But they have no people or management skills - and those are very painfully needed when you are trying to drive the things you believe in inside an organization that has very little interest in changing.Team leadership is the next big thing that software developers need to conquer, or none of this unit testing, TDD, Agile or Lean thing is going to catch on, except in very small circles, that, by chance, happen to have the right people leading their teams.

    Legendary testing expert James Whittaker, until recently a Google testing leader, and two top Google experts reveal exactly how Google tests software, offering brand-new best practices you can use even if you're not quite Google's size...yet! Breakthrough Techniques You Can Actually Use Discover 100% practical, amazingly scalable techniques for analyzing risk and planning tests...thinking like real users...implementing exploratory, black box, white box, and acceptance testing...getting usable feedback...tracking issues...choosing and creating tools...testing "Docs & Mocks," interfaces, classes, modules, libraries, binaries, services, and infrastructure...reviewing code and refactoring...using test hooks, presubmit scripts, queues, continuous builds, and more. With these techniques, you can transform testing from a bottleneck into an accelerator-and make your whole organization more productive!

    Brands around the world are spending (on average) over 25% of their total marketing budget on content marketing.What's been missing...until now...is the book that tells marketers exactly how to put content marketing to work.Managing Content Marketing shows you, in detail, how to manage content marketing within your organization. Whether you come from a small company or multi-billion dollar brand, this book gives you the ammunition and the ideas to develop a storytelling process that will create passionate subscribers to your brand.World-renowned content marketing experts Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi have teamed up to help marketing pros and business owners develop a content marketing plan that goes beyond theories and explains exactly how to turn that plan into reality.Managing Content Marketing will teach you to: --Build the Business Case for Content Marketing--Develop a Content Marketing Strategy that Works for Your Business--Tell a Consistent Story that Engages Your Customers--Determine the Right Marketing Channels to Implement--Create an Internal and External Workflow for Content Marketing--Measure Content Marketing and Communicate Results to Internal Stakeholders

    You’ll learn specific facilitation guidelines on how to run workshops, perform all of the main service design methods, implement concepts in reality, and embed service design successfully in an organization. Great customer experience needs a common language across disciplines to break down silos within an organization. This book provides a consistent model for accomplishing this and offers hands-on descriptions of every single step, tool, and method used.You’ll be able to focus on your customers and iteratively improve their experience. Move from theory to practice and build sustainable business success.

    They yearn to come up with a game—changing innovation like Apple's iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative—they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results.Why? In The Design of Business, Roger Martin offers a compelling and provocative answer: we rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo.To innovate and win, companies need design thinking. This form of thinking is rooted in how knowledge advances from one stage to another—from mystery (something we can't explain) to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides us toward solution) to algorithm (a predictable formula for producing an answer) to code (when the formula becomes so predictable it can be fully automated). As knowledge advances across the stages, productivity grows and costs drop-creating massive value for companies.Martin shows how leading companies such as Procter & Gamble, Cirque du Soleil, RIM, and others use design thinking to push knowledge through the stages in ways that produce breakthrough innovations and competitive advantage.Filled with deep insights and fresh perspectives, The Design of Business reveals the true foundation of successful, profitable innovation.

    In this fully updated and expanded edition, Robert Cooper demonstrates with compelling evidence why consistent product development is so vital to corporate growth and how to maximize your chances of success. By any measure, most product concepts never make it to market, and of those that do, most fail. Winning at New Products cites the most recent research and showcases innovative practices at such industry leaders as 3M, Exxon Chemical, and Guinness to present a field-tested game plan for achieving product leadership. Cooper outlines specific strategies for assessing risk, marshalling the appropriate resources, engaging customers in the pre-development discovery phase, evaluating your project portfolio, ensuring true cross-functional collaboration, and, most importantly, applying a rigorous process for making sound business decisions at every step-from idea generation to launch.

    Along the way, we encounter black holes, turtles, snakes, dragons, axe-sharpening, and yak-shaving—and take a guided tour through the theories and methods, both brilliant and misguided, that litter the history of software development, from the famous ‘mythical man-month’ to Extreme Programming. Not just for technophiles but for anyone captivated by the drama of invention, Dreaming in Code offers a window into both the information age and the workings of the human mind.

     With a foreword by Larry Page, and contributions from Bono and Bill Gates. Measure What Matters is about using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a revolutionary approach to goal-setting, to make tough choices in business. In 1999, legendary venture capitalist John Doerr invested nearly $12 million in a startup that had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. Doerr introduced the founders to OKRs and with them at the foundation of their management, the startup grew from forty employees to more than 70,000 with a market cap exceeding $600 billion. The startup was Google. Since then Doerr has introduced OKRs to more than fifty companies, helping tech giants and charities exceed all expectations. In the OKR model objectives define what we seek to achieve and key results are how those top­ priority goals will be attained. OKRs focus effort, foster coordination and enhance workplace satisfaction. They surface an organization's most important work as everyone's goals from entry-level to CEO are transparent to the entire institution. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will show you how to collect timely, relevant data to track progress - to measure what matters. It will help any organization or team aim high, move fast, and excel.

    The second edition of this book helps you prepare for the PMP certification exam using a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works. You'll find a full-length sample exam included inside the book. More than just proof of passing a test, a PMP certification means that you have the knowledge to solve most common project problems. But studying for a difficult four-hour exam on project management isn't easy, even for experienced project managers. Drawing on the latest research in neurobiology, cognitive science, and learning theory, Head First PMP offers you a multi-sensory experience that helps the material stick, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep. This book will help you:Learn PMP's underlying concepts to help you understand the PMBOK principles and pass the certification exam with flying colorsGet 100% coverage of the latest principles and certification objectives in The PMBOK Guide, Fourth Edition, including two new processes: Collect Requirements and Identify StakeholdersMake use of a thorough and effective preparation guide with hundreds of practice questions and exam strategiesExplore the material through puzzles, games, problems, and exercises that make learning easy and entertainingHead First PMP puts project management principles into context to help you understand, remember, and apply them -- not just on the exam, but also on the job.

    The book details agile principles, roles, managerial practices, technical practices and artifacts, offering a complete review that will help readers master all the important agile ideas.

    Yet they can't always articulate their ideas clearly enough for you to turn them into code. The Cucumber Book dives straight into the core of the problem: communication between people. Cucumber saves the day; it's a testing, communication, and requirements tool - all rolled into one. We'll show you how to express your customers' wild ideas as a set of clear, executable specifications that everyone on the team can read. You'll learn how to feed those examples into Cucumber and let it guide your development. You'll build just the right code to keep your customers happy, and not a line more. The first part of the book teaches you how to use the core features of Cucumber. You'll learn how to use Cucumber's Gherkin DSL to describe-- in plain language - the behavior your customers want from the system. You'll learn how to write Ruby code that interprets those plain language specifications and checks them against your application. In Part 2, you'll consolidate the knowledge you just gained with a worked example. Although it was born in the Ruby community, you can use Cucumber to test almost any system, from a simple shell script or a Perl script, to enterprise PHP or a Java web application. In Part 3, you'll find a selection of recipes for some of the most common situations you'll encounter using Cucumber in the wild. You'll learn how to test Ajax-heavy web applications with Capybara and Selenium, REST web services, Ruby on Rails applications, command-line applications, legacy applications and lots more! Written by the creator of Cucumber and one of its most experienced users and contributors, The Cucumber Book is an authoritative guide that will give you and your team all the knowledge you need to start using Cucumber with confidence. What You Need: Windows, Mac OS X (with XCode) or Linux Ruby 1.9.2 and upwards