A majority of books in the agile space always relate to the practices talked about in various methodologies, if not focusing on the methodologies themselves. With the Agile Manifesto talking about Individuals and interactions over Processes and Tools our community seemed to have missed a bit about how you go about building better interactions between individuals.
Fortunately a community member, Gil Broza wrote a book called The Human Side of Agile: How to Help Your Team Deliver. Gil was kind enough to send me a book a while back, but it was only on this trip to Agile Brazil that I managed to find the time read and reflect upon what I learned in the book.
My first impressions about the book is that it covers a solid range of topics. It addresses the role of leadership, strategies for getting to the ideal “self-empowered team” and useful advice on practical topics such as communication, meeting facilitation and about how to go about constantly improving. These are all topics that are often skipped, assumed easy, and are also the topics many people ask about at conferences. Fortunately Gil has been able to put a lot of practical advice, peppered with some great stories about what impact some of these ideas might have on the team.
The book is laid out in a series of questions, and so I can imagine people finding it particularly useful in a, “What do I do here?” situation. He covers topics some might avoid such as how to deal with behaviour seen as potentially destructive to the interactions of a team as well as dealing with the fact that people change in organisations and advice on how to deal with it.
This book provides a much needed guide to our industry where there was a big gap before. The writing is clear, easy to digest and quite approachable. Definitely one to add to any essential agile reading list.
