I attended Banking on Agile feeling pretty jaded about Agile.

However I learned that there is still a huge amount of passion and excitement about Agile. In most small companies, Agile is the obvious approach in most circumstances.

In the Banking industry, each company is so large that Agile could never win over the old waterfall based approaches without passionate people giving it the necessary momentum it needs to reach orbit before the pull of the 20th century thinking brings crashing back down again.

Tonight I learned from two Agile Coaches – Nick Henson and Kamila Piorowska. The talk was on their 3 year journey from a waterfall enterprise to an Agile enterprise, currently taking place at Barclays Bank.

There is still a long way for them to go, but for an organization of their size their progress is impressive.

Some books that were recommend to me were:

The Lean Startup
Joy Inc

One book which was recommended that I also recommend if you want to learn Scrum is:
Succeding with Agile by Mike W. Cohn

Further Reading
Eric Rise “The Lean Startup”
Is Agile the New Micromanagement?