Agile and Lean

Mark Graban has written the Lean Blog since 2005 and is a three-time Shingo Award-winning author. His podcasts include Lean Blog Interviews and My Favorite Mistake. He covers Lean in healthcare, manufacturing and beyond, with a steady focus on respect for people and psychological safety. Start here for Lean as practitioners actually run it.

Martin Fowler is a co-author of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and works at Thoughtworks. This guide gathers his articles on what Agile is, the technical practices behind it and where adoption goes wrong. He is candid about the problems, including what he calls flaccid Scrum. Read it to see what the original authors meant.

John Cutler has written about product development since 2015 and spent four years at the analytics company Amplitude. His weekly newsletter looks at cross-functional work, incentives and how teams and systems shape each other. It is free, with an optional paid tier. Read it when the process looks fine on paper and still is not working.

The Lean Enterprise Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Boston, founded in 1997 by James P. Womack. It publishes the Lean Post and keeps a lexicon of Lean terms on its site. It describes itself as a do tank that tests methods with partner companies before teaching them. Come here for the vocabulary and the source material.

Agile Alliance is a global nonprofit founded in 2001 to support the values of the Agile Manifesto. Its site offers the manifesto and its 12 principles, an Agile glossary, experience reports and practice guides at no cost. It also runs conferences and community events. Use it to check a term before someone sells you a course on it.