Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams & Projects

I see it all the time in my agile coaching. Teams who, in their effort to be agile and get going, start sprinting/iterating too soon--before they know where they're going. It feels good to be moving, developing working software--so often this is the attraction. It's an intoxicating combination of feel good forward progress on the part of the team and leadership.But more times than not, the team started too soon. They're building software but they haven't connected it towards the customers higher level problems & needs--so they're not delivering the value the customer desperately needs. Nor can they communicate what they'll deliver for a "release" and when.They should have listened to Stephen Covey - about "Beginning with the End in Mind".And they should have read this book. Diana and Ainsley have written what I think is the seminal work on how to properly START agile projects. They put a focus on the front of the line that is necessary and welcome.Should every agile project perform a Liftoff? Probably not. But for the vast majority that should...this is the guide for how to get your goals established and feet underneath you before you start iterating towards delivery. How to charter to connect the team to the business and have a clarity around expectations.And it's effective as a project recovery mechanism as well, for when you've started too soon but realize that fact and want to realign your efforts. So new liftoffs and recovery liftoffs are covered.For me, if you're an agile coach, product owner, scrum master or literally anyone who is charged with starting agile projects, this book is a must read. And if you're a traditional project manager who is familiar with the notion of Project Charters, then this book will help map that knowledge to agile contexts. Either way, let's start Beginning with the End in Mind.Bob.

The most important things are often the hardest to explain well. Getting started as an agile team sounds deceptively simple. There are lots of articles and other materials that emphasize how simple the practices are. While this is true, real behavior change is not easy. Diana and Ainsley do a great job of breaking out the elements of starting - e.g. Discovery has 3 parts: product discovery, process discovery, team discovery - and they then walk you through a description of how this is done for a real team. That's just one small example, of a part of the liftoff activity.In chapter 7, on Chartering, the description of their 2-part process is totally on-target:"For years I have used a simple two-part framework to get a team formed and quickly engaged in productive work. The first part focuses on pulling together the right people to get the job done and securing their commitment. Often, people have been committed by others to be part of the project team. The goal of the first part is to shift this coerced commitment to an informed and consensual commitment...The second part of the framework is focuses on creating a shared understanding of the work ahead...I call this phase Discovery."Having trained and coached Agile teams for over 12 years, I can highly recommend this book to both managers and technical teams.At Agile New England, we are now using this book to guide the chartering and liftoff of all our volunteer teams, so they can experience Agile principles in action for all the types of work they do. - by Nancy Van Schooenderwoert, @vanschoo

During our Agile Management course, we followed this book for our studies, and Ainsley was one of our instructors, too. I recommend the book to everyone, and more than that, I recommend taking classes from her, too.Important part is the beginning for any project, if you do it right, then you the rest of the project life cycle can go smoothly. By giving advises about how to handle different cases especially during liftoff, this book shows right direction to team members. And at the end of the book, there are some sample charters are given, they summarize: how important the chartering is and how easy it is if the steps described in the book are followed.Some feedback: I have the Kindle version: remaining minutes and percentages are not showing correctly; always shows 1 or 2 minutes left on chapter. And I recommend someone non-technical should read the book: some sentences and maybe some paragraphs should be re-written: since I am technical it was easy to understand, what the sentence or paragraph intended; sometimes it requires to stop, to re-read and to think.

I really like the book as a guide on how to get a team started. I myself use the Tuckman model to describe how a team develop and I feel that the great benefits of going agile is that you get a team that works in a good way. It has nothing to do that you use tools like Jira or how your wallboard looks it is about the team and how the team works together.To do that you need to work a lot of forming the team ==> align ==> working in the same directions, define way of working ==> what values we have and what rules we set up to get the team going etc.This book is of great help of how to get the team work as a team BUT doing liftoffs needs a good facilitators in my current team we have been using a company crisp.se to do the facilitating which I recommend

This book provides everything you needs to launch a great agile project. I appreciated all the activities and resources. Thank you!

Before I was 10% into this book, I was already learning new practices I could put to work with my clients. As the authors point out, every day brings an opportunity for a team to lift off their work into a new realm of performance. The this book has a combination of great research into what makes teams start well, along with many valuable practices that you can call upon any time. This book can be a hard read at times, but it will be well worth any attention you give it.

I've heard so many good things about this book, but I feel the material could have been condensed into a few articles and checklists and it would have been more useful.

I love the retrospective book by Larsen and had high thoughts of this one, but was disappointed... The book repeat it self, the tables are messy, some characters are missing, the war stories are pretty bad. But the worst thing is that you don't get an Agile feel, lots of talk about core group, managers and presenting to the "Core team" for me there are just teams, and they make the decisions, you can't have one on the forehand and "modify" it with the team...

Great start!