Business driven IT wide agile (scrum) and or kanban (lean) implementation : an action guide for business and IT leaders Preface: What Is This Book About The main objective of this book is to provide a practical guide to business and IT leaders who want to improve IT capability to better serve the business. By this we mean the ability for IT teams to improve the pace at which software applications can be delivered not just on one Agile pilot project but on all IT projects. But there lies the difficulty for IT management to make the leap from doing Agile or Kanban (Lean) on one project to an IT wide effort which requires much more than just deploying some Agile techniques to a few people. Likewise rather than blindly deploy Agile to the entire IT organization in a one size fits all approach we also show in this book how IT and business management can work together to determine business goals that can drive this IT wide undertaking. IT improvement may also require leverage of Kanban (Lean) rather than of Agile alone to improve its ability to deliver better and faster applications on a large scale. While we make no claim that what we mention in this book is the best or the only way to introduce change programs into a company everything in this book comes from our experience in software project management and software delivery in the trenches within companies of different sizes. To make things easier for the busy IT leader and executive we have constructed and included in this book a few case studies with the intent to illustrate ideas or principles. All resemblance to a specific real life event or character is therefore purely coincidental. It is as always up to the readers to devise approaches and ideas that will make the most sense in their specific situation. K15472.indb 19 6 15 12 2:10 PM xx  Preface: What Is This Book About This book explains how to successfully deploy Agile and Kanban on a large scale in order to increase IT delivery capabilities. It factors in change communication a sense of urgency clear and measurable goals political realities and infrastructure needs all of which are critical ingredients for success. Through real world examples the authors explain how IT wide Agile and Kanban can be implemented to the entire enterprise and IT department. The text also includes many templates for use as an on the job guide for business and IT leaders and their teams.