Rather than deciding whether or not to get involved in global sourcing, many companies are facing decisions about whether or not to apply agile methods in their distributed projects. These companies are often motivated by the opportunities to solve the coordination and communication difficulties associated with global software development. Yet while agile principles prescribe close interaction and co-location, the very nature of distributed software development does not support these prerequisites. Šmite, Moe, and Ågerfalk structured the book into five parts. In “Motivation” the editors introduce the fundamentals of agile distributed software development and explain the rationale behind the application of agile practices in globally distributed software projects. “ Transition” describes implementation strategies, adoption of particular agile practices for distributed projects, and general concepts of agility. “Management” details practical implications for project planning, time management, and customer and subcontractor interaction. “Teams” discusses agile distributed team configuration, effective communication and knowledge transfer, and allocation of roles and responsibilities. Finally, in the “Epilogue” the editors summarize all contributions and present future trends for research and practice in agile distributed development. This book is primarily targeted at researchers, lecturers, and students in empirical software engineering, and at practitioners involved in globally distributed software projects. The contributions are based on sound empirical research and identify gaps and commonalities in both the existing state of the art and state of the practice. In addition, they also offer practical advice through many hints, checklists, and experience reports. Questions answered in this book include: What should companies expect from merging agile and distributed strategies? What are the stumbling blocks that prevent companies from realizing the benefits of the agile approach in distributed environments, and how can we recognize infeasible strategies and unfavorable circumstances? What helps managers cope with the challenges of implementing agile approaches in distributed software development projects? How can distributed teams survive the decisions taken by management and become efficient through the application of agile approaches?

Today, companies are expected to be flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change, which basically asks them to be agile. By combining Beyond Budgeting,Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile, this book provides a practical guide for companies that want to be agile company-wide. Notes to the 2nd edition: This second edition reflects such updates as: the new Agile Fluency Model, the renaming / rebranding of Statoil to Equinor, and some small additions to complexity. We also enhanced the description of Organizational Open Space and explain how it differs from Liberating Structures. Enjoy insights in the book shared by Jez Humble, Diana Larsen, James Shore, Johanna Rothman, and Bjarte Bogsnes. Find out what Spotify, ING, Ericsson, and Walmart say in the book. Quotes from early readers: “[This is] a very important book. My hopes are that it will be the missing link between agile for teams and the flexible, adaptive and humane organisations we want to build. It’s a great book. Thanks for writing it!” ~Sandy Mamoli, author of Creating Great Teams “Just as Spotify has worked hard to make all aspects of product development align well and work together - I see Jutta and John in this book exploring methods and processes that will work very well across the whole company.” ~ Anders Ivarsson, Spotify “I love how those practices [are] integrated and summarized into actionable recommendations.” ~ Yves Lin, Titansoft “Really wonderful balance of structure and space, rigor and creativity, that you're suggesting.” ~ Michael Herman, Openspaceworld.org “Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space and Sociocracy [...] makes an important case for companies to regard trust and autonomy the norm, rather than a privilege. [...] Overall a great overview of how leaders can reimagine the way power is distributed within their companies.” ~ Aimee Groth, Author of The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia This book invites you to take a new perspective that addresses the challenges of doing business in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.

Lack of Agility is the kiss of death. Position your company to succeed in world of change. To edge out the competition in today’s disruptive environment, you need to ensure that your company is agile—that it can respond to change instantly and effectively. Because fast and furious change is the only thing you can count on in business today. Network expert Michael Arena helped enable GM’s legendary turnaround. In these pages, he explains how you can transform your own company through the concept of adaptive space. Based on hundreds of interviews and the author’s own groundbreaking study of dozens of organizations spanning a variety of industries, Adaptive Space shows how to position your company for today—and for the future—by enabling creativity, innovation, and novel ideas to flow freely among teams, across departments, and throughout the company. Using GM as the main case study—along with the stories of other highly adaptive organizations, like Apple, Amazon, Disney, and Gore—Arena provides a model you can follow to reinvent your company. It’s about inspiring employees to explore new ideas, empowering the most creative people and teams to spread their ideas across the organization, and operationalizing the entrepreneurial spirit so adaptability is set in stone. Hesitation is a killer in today’s business landscape. With Adaptive Space, you have everything you need to confront disruption with smart, confident actions and seize the valuable opportunities that come with change.

The relentless pursuit of industrial efficiency no longer yields the profits it once did because it requires a level of business predictability that no longer exists. Instead, the Internet and global video and telecom systems provide a massive and continuous flow of data that causes the whole world to behave like a giant stock market, with all the volatility and uncertainty that goes along with such markets. Responsiveness now trumps efficiency. By being responsive to the evolving needs and desires of specific groups of customers, companies can wrap their products and services in a tailored blanket of value-added services to consistently earn an additional four percent or more gross margin than they would otherwise earn for the product or service alone. This customer and market specialization is the most promising and the most sustainable source of profits in our fluid, real-time economy. Part of the Microsoft Executive Leadership Series, Business Agility discusses the three fundamental process loops that drive an agile enterprise and how they work together to deliver the responsiveness that generates profits in a high-change economy. Providing strategies for innovative and pragmatic use of people, process, and technology to drive operations in an agile enterprise, this book reveals the principles of the agile enterprise, backed by real-world case studies from the author's own experience. Michael Hugos is a speaker, writer, and practitioner in IT and business agility, and agile system development methods. He writes a column for Computerworld and a blog titled "Doing Business in Real Time" for CIO magazine.

This authoritative text/reference describes the state of the art in requirements engineering for software systems for distributed computing. A particular focus is placed on integrated solutions, which take into account the requirements of scalability, flexibility, sustainability and operability for distributed environments. Topics and features: discusses the latest developments, tools, technologies and trends in software requirements engineering; reviews the relevant theoretical frameworks, practical approaches and methodologies for service requirements; examines the three key components of the requirements engineering process, namely requirements elicitation, requirements specification, and requirements validation and evaluation; presents detailed contributions from an international selection of highly reputed experts in the field; offers guidance on best practices, and suggests directions for further research in the area.

Graduate Attributes in Higher Education illuminates the value of graduate attributes for students, graduates and lecturers in higher education. A coherent, intelligent, subtle and important enhancement to the field, this text guides readers through a theoretical and historical analysis of graduate attributes, using interdisciplinary and interprofessional lenses. This unique approach offers pertinent coverage of a wider range of graduate attributes than one usually sees, generating multiple perspectives and discourses that have implications for both theory and practice. Through an open and exploratory analysis, this text asks questions such as the following: • Are programmes of study which claim ‘postgraduate’ attributes providing something further, deeper or enhanced in comparison, or just more of the same? • Should we be developing continuing professional development attributes for our professional learning programmes of study, or are attributes of this nature established at the undergraduate level? • How can we embed graduate attributes in curricula in a wide range of subject discipline-specific and interdisciplinary ways? • In a culture of lifelong learning and a cross-disciplinary changing global market, are attributes simply a starting point – a launch pad for future and ongoing development required for a world of increasing complexity? Clearly structured and offering a mix of case study and theoretical frameworks to explore each GA, practical guidance is offered at the end of each chapter on how to embed the relevant graduate attribute whilst providing well-researched theoretical underpinning. The varied methods applied and methodological attitudes espoused will prove inclusive to a wide range of readers. Bringing together analysis of specific case studies from a wide range of professional and discipline-specific contexts, Graduate Attributes in Higher Education will be a valuable text for educators and professionals focused on curriculum development and professional learning.

"As the leaders of the Work Design Collaborative, authors Charles Grantham and Jim Ware have helped some of the world's top companies become more productive. In Corporate Agility, they share the results of their ground-breaking five-year research project and the forward-thinking strategies that have grown out of this new knowledge. This is the first book to show companies the practical applications for staying competitive in a global economy."--Jacket.