In one of my previous blogposts I recommended the Handbook for Agile Practices “Management 4.0” edited by Dr. Alfred Oswald and Wolfram Müller [http://blog.ipma.world/management-4-0-handbook-agile-practices/]. Both are engaged and facilitating the Special Interest Group “Agile Management” of GPM, the German Project Management Association. The handbook was written by various experts with academic, practice, social and technical background, using the platform of OpenPM [https://www.openpm.info/], which allowed for an agile exchange with the community.

Now, the second release is available. It is written for anyone who is interested in agility or needs to adopt an agile mindset. It´s for those who seek deeper knowledge about what keeps the agile world together. It provides insights into foundations of agile practices, including but not limited to theoretical models, mindsets and methods, principles of agile leadership and cybernetical approaches of organisations, e.g. agile and fluid structures and an Agile PMO 4.0. The second part provides insights into agile principles and their applications, agile scaling and examples of agile transformations.

For example, it´s stated that an “agile PMO 4.0 is both, on the one hand an organizational unit that follows agile principles, and on the other hand, a governance unit for establishing agile transformation in project organizations and supporting change in direction of self-organizing… It must be designed by the following components: an agile mindset, self-organization, leadership and agile as well as traditional techniques.”

Management 4.0 is defined in the Handbook by the cornerstones self-leadership and Agile Mindset, respect for basic human needs, understanding of complex systems and meta-competence, continuous learning and adaption, and taking care of self-organization of teams and organizations to create customer value by agility. Key role of leadership 4.0 is to take care of the self-organization of a team or organization. Interventions need to be carried out on macro-tier and micro-tier levels. The macro-tier interventions are systemic Governance interventions and micro-tier interventions are necessary to support team members in adapting and supporting the transformation. Yet, there are no simple cause-effect relations. It´s necessary to monitor the transformation by feedback loops.