Michael K. Levine is a leader in lean and agile thought. As a senior executive he has driven results at Wells Fargo, US Bank and a leading software company. He has written well-received books on why we do lean & agile, how to make organizational change to do so, and how to lead for agility. The books are both instructional and entertaining, as he mixes teaching and story-telling (Tales). Michael’s most recent book is People Over Process: Leadership for Agility. This website shares more information on Michael, his models, and his books, and provides links to articles and reviews in media. Check out the models, the books, and look at a few media pieces!

People and Interactions over Processes and Tools. While we value both, we value People more.

So begins the Agile Manifesto, the declaration that marked the beginning of the agile revolution in technology development. I’ve written three books to share ideas to help technologists bring this declaration to life.

I’ve been doing agile software development for thirty years, before it had a name. For the past decade I’ve been writing about it. My perspective is a little different from most writers in this area.  I’m not a consultant: I have spent my career as a senior executive in successful large financial institutions and as CTO of a software company.  I desperately wanted people to understand and practice agile concepts, mostly because I like working that way and don’t like failure, so I’ve tried to explain directly and through stories…or Tales if you will. I’ve found stories a better learning mechanism than dry explanation.

My journey as an author began out of frustration. I’d been one of four delivery leaders for an enormous project at Wells Fargo to build a new origination system for home mortgages and home equity lines and loans. This was in 2005 or so, and my teams had been “agile” since before the term was formalized and had adopted many lean techniques as well. By 2008 the project had completely failed, most of the team lost their jobs, and the project was reconstituted from ground up for another shot. My sub-team also mostly lost their jobs despite the fact that they had been highly successful. I asked myself, how could a great company, with outstanding leaders and enormous resources, fail so miserably at something so important?

As I struggled to make sense of this, I had the opportunity to add a few weeks study of lean product development at the University of Michigan to what I’d learned in practice about lean operations, mostly from the Lean Enterprise Institute. The combination of lean operations, lean product development, and agile / scrum (which seems to me “lean for software”) helped me understand the foundational problem: mistaking the nature of the problem at hand as one amenable to prescriptive process management, versus one demanding adaptive techniques. Excellent business leaders and capable technology managers applied the wrong model to the problem, assisted by well-intentioned but deluded consultants and vendors, and the result was a billion dollar failure.

I was both saddened and motivated by my realization, but motivation was stronger. I wanted to help excellent business leaders and well-intentioned technologists understand what it takes to succeed in highly complex product and technology development initiatives. I’d enjoyed the business novel format of Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal, a lean classic, so decided to try it and write my own book, aimed at being accessible to business leaders dependent on technology for their success. Out of this came a lean/agile model and the story that became Tale of Two Systems. I dreamed of a future where folks like me in the future could buy the book for their leaders and help prevent future disasters.

The book was modestly popular and to a minor extent met my goals. In the intervening years I’ve continued to do large scale projects at Wells Fargo and US Bank using lean and agile techniques, and have written two additional books aimed at helping people succeed at large scale technology development. I have just completed what has become the Tales of Agility trilogy with the capstone, People over Process, coming back to the first value in the Agile Manifesto after my first two books dwelt on process and organizational change.

In this website I am sharing with you the key models I created for agility — what is lean and agile for technology development and why we have to use it, approaches for organizational adoption, and most importantly, how to sustain agility through people and interactions using facilitative leadership for agility. Each of these topics corresponds to one of the trilogy books, which are shown on the Books page with links to purchase if you wish.

I hope this information provides you with ideas and entertainment and helps you with your own agile journeys.