Book 2 of the Applied Agility Series
Applied Team Agility
A Field Guide for Value Delivery Leaders
Coming August 2026.
Agility isn't a framework you follow. It's a capability you build.
You adopted the ceremonies. You ran the trainings. You stood up the boards. Two years later, the same friction every sprint.
Framework Purgatory. Trained in Scrum or SAFe and still grinding through unclear requirements, endless dependencies, and retrospectives that produce nothing but more retrospectives. Most books either tell you to be more agile or hand you a heavier process manual. Neither helps a team staring at constraints the textbook never named.
Applied Team Agility is the practitioner's handbook. It empowers teams to stop asking for permission to improve and start engineering their own success using the Applied Agility Knowledge Base. Quick Start Accelerators stand up a context-specific Way of Working in hours, not weeks. The Team-Level VAP turns complaining into a working improvement backlog. Value Increments slice work small enough to flow and large enough to matter.
Master your context. Optimize your flow. Own your Way of Working.
Don't just follow the rules. Rewrite them to fit your context. This is your toolkit for building a team that actually flows.
What's Inside
Diagnose the team altitude. Twenty team-level gaps mapped to the Three Barriers, with the diagnostic vocabulary that turns "the sprint isn't working" into specific, fixable system defects.
Stand up your own Way of Working. Quick Start Accelerators give you the patterns that match your context. No blank page, no four-week off-site. Pick the accelerator that fits your situation and adapt from there.
Build the team's improvement loop. The Team-Level Value Acceleration Process turns retrospectives that change nothing into a working improvement backlog. Diagnose the friction. Burn it down. Validate. Repeat. Value Increments give you the slicing discipline to keep work flowing.
When Leaders Haven't Done Their Job
Book 1 assumes the executive altitude has been addressed. Reality rarely cooperates. Book 2 closes with the evidence base, the arguments, and the escalation patterns teams need when systemic constraints sit above their authority. The same diagnostic vocabulary that surfaces team-altitude defects produces the case a team makes upward when the constraint is not theirs to fix.
How It Fits the Series
Three books. One framework. Each delivers alone.
- Book 1: Applied Enterprise Agility establishes the diagnostic at the executive altitude. The Three Barriers, the 23 Gaps, the Value Acceleration Process.
- Book 2: Applied Team Agility translates the framework to the team altitude. Quick Start Accelerators, Team-Level VAP, Value Increments, and the manage-up tools for when leaders haven't done their job.
- Book 3: Agility by Example shows the framework in execution. One initiative, end-to-end, with the real artifacts at every altitude and AI integrated as enabler throughout.
Read Book 1 first and Book 2 sharpens its application. Read Book 2 first and Book 1 names the upstream causes you can't fix from the team altitude. Reading order is not prescribed. Any order works.