People Over Process: Leadership for Agility

The most recent book in the Tales of Agility trilogy deals with the most important agile value, People and Interactions over Processes and Tools. This primacy is the first agile value as stated in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development almost twenty years ago. The author notes that unfortunately many organizations now, to the contrary, equate the more recently-developed scrum process with agility. People need to be the primary focus to enable agility, and leadership is the key to unlocking people's potential. To paraphrase the value's formulation, the author believes that leadership for agility is more valuable than scrum, although scrum is valuable as well.

The book presents the leadership for agility model. This model emphasizes the need for rigor, alignment, and efficiency through the use of frameworks. Leadership, the author explains, is for everyone involved in agile projects, including each team member, formal team leadership positions, and organizational managers. The special obligations of organizational managers are specifically called out.

As in the earlier books in the trilogy (which are not prerequisites to reading this book), the model is developed and then demonstrated in engaging and illustrative stories. Leadership behavior at all levels is shown in key development activities including technology and business process architecture, project planning, team structure, scrum and governance meetings, and retrospectives. The author provides stories from both his extensive direct experience and through a complex agile development program at the fictional Pacifica Bank.

Pacifica is being pummelled by nimble fintechs and other competitors. In response it has gone all in on agile to build a critical new product. The team is stuck on the transition to development because the standard scrum methods don't quite fit their situation. One of the stars from earlier books in the trilogy, Mary O'connell, comes to the rescue. Mary helps the team build their own leadership muscle as she guides them in innovative approaches to rigor, alignment, and efficiency through frameworks.


People over Process leaves the reader with superb examples of engagement mechanisms, tools, and a superior elaboration on the responsibilities of organizational management that can be immediately useful to readers, and which readers will come back to repeatedly for years.