DEVOPSdigest

IT Revolution announced the availability of its newest book, Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture.

Authored by two internationally recognized software development leaders, Agile Conversations unveils a step-by-step guide for having crucial discussions about the five key characteristics that all high-performing teams share—not just software teams but all human teams.

In the book's two parts, readers first see how people-centred software methods have evolved and learn techniques to improve their conversations, and then go in-depth with step-by-step techniques for having constructive conversations on five vital topics: Trust, Fear, Why, Commitment, and Accountability. By learning how to unleash the unique human power of conversation, organizations adopting practices like Agile, Lean, and DevOps can build effective, high-performing teams and not only diagnose cultural problems but also cure them.

"Many books can help the reader identify cultural problems associated with how work gets done in a digital transformation journey, but Agile Conversations goes beyond to actually help you address these challenges," said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Unicorn Project, and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook and Accelerate. "Transforming organizational culture by focusing on the way people communicate and enabling an environment for those conversations to occur provides the needed structure for relationships and workflow to happen dynamically."

"A conversation is more than just talking; it is a skilled activity," said Douglas Squirrel, co-author of Agile Conversations. "With our step-by-step guide, executives and other leaders can begin a conversational transformation and build the foundation for true changes."

"Nothing is more frustrating to an engineer, product owner, Scrum Master, sysadmin, tester, or any other 'doer' than to buy into a transformation journey, to get excited about real change, only to have it end as a new set of buzzwords but the same old dynamics," said Jeffrey Fredrick, co-author of Agile Conversations. "The good news is that teams can create real change by having the right conversations. It is a more demanding road, but it something anyone can learn if they put in the effort—we've seen it happen and you can too."