Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams

Ready, set, liftoff! Align your team to one purpose: successful delivery. Learn new insights and techniques for starting projects and teams the right way, with expanded concepts for planning, organizing, and conducting liftoff meetings. Real-life stories illustrate how others have effectively started (or restarted) their teams and projects. Master coaches Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies have successfully lifted off numerous agile projects worldwide. Are you ready for success?

Every team needs a great start. If you're a business or product leader, team coach or agile practice lead, project or program manager, you'll gain strategic and tactical benefits from liftoffs.

Discover new step-by-step instructions and techniques for boosting team performance in this second edition of Liftoft. Concrete examples from our practices show you how to get everyone on the same page from the start as you form the team. You'll find pointers for refocusing an effort that's gone off in the weeds, and practices for working with teams as complex systems. See how to scale liftoffs for multiple teams across the enterprise, address the three key elements for collaborative team chartering, establish the optimal conditions for learning and improvement, and apply the GEFN (Good Enough for Now) rule for efficient liftoffs. Throughout the book are stories from real-life teams lifting off, as seasoned coaches describe their experiences with liftoffs and agile team chartering.

Focused conversations help the team align, form, and build enough trust for collaborating. You'll build a common understanding of the teams' context within business goals. Every liftoff is unique, but success is common!

A founder of FutureWorks Consulting in Portland, Oregon, Diana Larsen partners with leaders around the world to design work systems, improve team performance, and transition to Agile methods. Diana co-authored Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Quickstart Guide to Five Rules for Accelerated Learning. She also co-created the influential Agile Fluency model.

As principal of Acorn Consulting, Ainsley Nies' work focuses on developing sustainable work environments for learning and improvement. With more than 20 years' experience as a program/project manager in a Fortune 100 company, Ainsley enables clients to capitalize on the insights they have and discover the knowledge they need. She teaches a variety of agile management courses in university programs.