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Amplio Development: The Path to Effective Lean-Agile Teams is a workbook that supports Success Engineering’s Amplio Development Masterclass workshop designed for the business professional.

“Amplio” means “improve” in Latin. At Success Engineering, we believe that people need to continuously learn how to improve their methods of adding value to their customers. Success Engineering is creating ‘amplios’ for strategies and budgeting, for discovery (product management), and for development (team level). These can be used at all scales. An Amplio for SAFe will be made on demand. All of these are pragmatic approaches validated with real-world experience. Amplio Development Masterclass is our first offering.

This book and the associated appendices are used in this workshop. Amplio Development is a subset of the full Amplio approach.

Being able to apply a method requires five things:

A deep understanding of what’s needed (this book)
An understanding of how to convey it to people (the appendices)
An understanding of how people learn (the appendices)
Tools to help support the above
The right character (you have to supply this).

A PDF of this book is available here.

1. Why we need a 21st Century Agile at Teams Approach
2. The Amplio Approach
– The Design of Amplio Development
– Attending to What It Takes To Be a Coach
– Who This Workbook Is For
3. The Mindset of Amplio
– A fundamental question that separates many in the Agile community.
– Systems thinking and complexity
– Attend to value streams
– Consultants’ Corner Value streams are not business processes
– An inherent problem
– Getting executives to understand the value of quick flow
– First principles, Mindsets/Values
– Guidance
– The Value Stream Impedance Scorecard
– Amplio is a pattern language
–    Dealing with complexity in Knowledge Work Includes Amplio from a Cynefin Perspective
4. How Amplio Development’s Capabilities Are Organized
5. Understand Your Problems Before Offering Solutions
6. The Amplio Team Approach, Challenges, and Related Practices Graphically
7. Timeboxing or Flow.
8. Minimum Business Increments Note: This points to a chapter on MBIs by the PMI. I will rewrite this shortly.
9. Capabilities for Managing the Workflow
– Manage Work In Process
– Use Feedback to Attend to Risk
– Use Pull Methods to Keep Workload Within Capacity
– Have a Product Backlog Serve as an intake process
– Have an Effective Way of Deciding What to Do Next
– Create Visibility of Work and Workflow
– Use DevOps When Useful
– Use Automated Testing
10. Capabilities for Requirements and Artifacts
–    Work on small, releasable items
– Build in small, vertical slices
– Have definition of ready (DoR) and definition of done (DoD).
–    Attend to the customer journey. Agree on classes of service
11. Capabilities for the Quality of the Product
The following chapters are coming soon
12. Capabilities for Organizing Teams and Backlogs for Effective Value Streams
13. Capabilities for Learning, improving, and Pivoting
– Continuous Learning
– The Underlying Belief System
– Learning Methods
– Continuous Detection is a Path to Quick Prevention
– Objective: Do a pre-mortem
– Keep Everyone Informed
– Swarm on Problems
– Know how to Select A More Appropriate Practice
– Have Frequent Reviews
– Starting a Project/Product
14. Roles
– Who is responsible for the product backlog
– Developers
16. Amplio Light – A Lightweight Agile Approach Based on Getting Feedback Quickly
17. Summary of book

Appendices

Note: The numbers after these topics refer to the session in which they are read for the Amplio Lean-Agile Teams Master Class.

A. Practices and Patterns

B. Making Scrum Lean

These chapters are intended to provide an overview of how Amplio Development can be used to improve the workflow of those doing Scrum. In a nutshell, it will convert you from Scrum to Lean. You won’t be doing Scrum anymore but you will be more effective with less effort. And if your manager requires you to do Scrum, just call this “Scrum And.” Before continuing, read A fundamental question that separates many in the Agile community ethat was presented earlier in the book.