Book Review: The Fifth Discipline

This time I had in my reading list one of the business literature classics The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter Senge. It's a book that introduces systems thinking as we know it know.

Book is well written, but even more importantly the contents of it are really valuable. I had read about systems thinking before and I had been given so many recommendations about this book, that I had high hopes for the book. Luckily it matched my expectations.

The idea of the book is that organizations should become learning organizations to stay in business and have a good future. The book introduced a fresh way of seeing organizations as whole systems. It gives lot of value to personal development and human values ensuring that organizations learn to improve themselves in the long run.

Book introduces five disciplines of learning organization. Also it introduces eleven learning disabilities that prevents learning organizations to form. It has a lot good examples and it is easy to learn with this book.

I highly recommend this book to everyone working in organizations, small or big ones. So this would be a good book for almost anyone. It's a bit longish with over 400 pages. That's a pity, since it might scare few potential readers away from it.

It's great and important book. Many people have read it, but still only few organizations live to the values of the book. Learning needs understanding. Hopefully many more will read the book, understand the teachings and share the knowledge.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Agile Software Requirements

I did read this book a while ago, but I somehow had forgotten to review it. I recently took it from my bookshelf to check few things and decided to write a review about it.

First of all, I think the book title sucks. Dean Leffingwell's book is named Agile Software Requirements, but it is all about the Enterprise Agile model called Scaled Agile Framework (a.k.a. SAFe). I don't understand why that couldn't have been the title of the book also.

I have hands on experience about SAFe model, when it was invented (at least partly) at Nokia. I was heavily involved in taking it in to use in Multimedia area. I don't want to talk too much about SAFe model this time, I try to concentrate more on the book side. I have to say I'm not a huge fan of the SAFe model, but it does make many good points and definitely adds value to certain kind of organizations.

The book as such was a disappointment. It does have some good insights in many of the different chapters, but it is way too long. Everything about the book could have been said in around 200 pages. There is lot of repeating the same basic things in many different chapters.

Maybe it's just me getting bored, but I'm not sure if all Agile books need to repeat the how Scrum works and all the other basic things. I guess we could get over that part on the future books. I do realize those are easy to skip, but I don't easily skip chapters, because authors have wanted those to be there.

What I liked about the book was that it shows that software development affects to so many different parts of organization. There needs to be well planned mechanism to have proper amount of guidance to write the actual code.

For those who have no idea how to scale Agile software development to larger scale organizations, this might be a good book to read. It gives one view how scaling can be done, but it is too strict for my taste. I don't believe there to be one size fits all solution. I think I've heard Leffingwell to say the same thing, but the book forgets to tell about the other possibilities.

I'm not sure if I would actually recommend the book to anyone. Scaled Agile Framework is definitely worth of checking at, but you can get almost the same level understanding from the SAFe webpage. It didn't raise to be any of my favorite Agile books.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen