Book review for "An Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide"

Recently I read an ebook about agile called An Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide from infq.com, it is written by Michael Sahota. It is really a good book, bring lots of useful insights and information.

What I learned most is the author provides the concept of adoption and transformation for agile.

• Adoption is about "doing agile", treats agile as a process or product;
• Transformation is about "being agile", which means we has the agile mindset.

So I learned that adopting agile without agile mindset transformation is doomed to failure. That would explain why Scrum is so difficult to implement in many companies, because most of them just adopt the Scrum practices, but did not transform the agile mindset.

Quote from the author: "Agile is not a Process – it Defines a Culture, Agile Culture is about Collaboration and Cultivation" So we need to create a culture to help us adopt and transform the agile.

This is a very important concept, culture is more important than the practices. Before I learned that agile is not enough just by following its practices, we need to do something more. This time the author explicitly pointed out the concept of transformation, and concept of culture. We can not treat agile as a set of tools, we can just pick one of them like buffet, the more importantly, we need agile mindset change and culture change.

To help you transform from the existing culture to the agile culture, the author provides different paths, patterns and models, that is the reason why it is called "Survival guide".

Another reason I like this book is it brings you lots of useful models, I already know some of them, but I did not realize the author could integrate them such nicely. I just list some of them:

• Schneider culture Model 
• chasm
• hype and disillusionment
• Fearless change
• ADAPT
• Containers, Differences and Changes(CDE)

Summary
This book has lots of information, I highly recommend any serious agile practitioner to read it, you will learn a lot.To make agile successfully, We definitely need change from 'doing agile' to 'being agile'.

Resource

1. Book download link from infoq.com
2. The author's blog about this book
3. The author's web site: agilitrix.com