About The Agile Handbook

What this site is

Most writing about Agile is either a certification syllabus or a sales pitch. This site tries to be neither. Each post takes a framework, role or practice and says what it is, where it works, where it fails, and what I'd do about it. When a popular practice doesn't hold up on real teams, the post says so.

Explainers and guides

Explainers answer "what is this, and should I use it?" They're the place to start if you're learning, or deciding between approaches.

Guides answer "how do I do this at work?" Each one follows a single scenario through numbered steps and ends with copy-paste templates, the mistakes that sink most attempts, and a checklist for knowing when you're done. Every guide links to its explainer, so you don't have to read the theory twice.

How it's written

• From practice. The advice comes from running projects, not from summarising other summaries. Where I cite a framework's rules, I link to the source: the Scrum Guide, the Kanban Guide, the Agile Business Consortium.
• With a position. Posts recommend something. You may disagree, but you'll know what's being argued.
• Kept current. Posts are revised when the frameworks change or a better way turns up, and show the date they were last updated.
• Free and unsponsored. No paywall, no affiliate links, and no tool vendor deciding what gets recommended.

Who writes it

I'm Lesith Dissanayaka, founder and director of Final Frontier Ventures and Chief AI Officer at ES2 Solutions. Before that, I spent more than ten years delivering enterprise software as a project and program manager, Scrum Master, product owner, business analyst and in business development. I hold the PMP and PMI-ACP certifications, and I've led large transformation programmes using SAFe and Scrum.

I've delivered close to a hundred projects for small companies and large enterprises, mostly with distributed teams, across Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the UAE, Australia, Cambodia, Nepal, Bhutan, the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil. That's where the opinions on this site come from: fixed deadlines, sponsors who wouldn't decide, teams in four time zones, and the occasional framework that worked exactly as the book said.

Most recently I architected and created AttackSight, an attack surface management product from Final Frontier Ventures. It connects what an organisation exposes, from systems and people to brand and leaked data, so security teams can see where an exposure leads and what to fix first.

I work in Agile by preference and in Waterfall when the situation calls for it, and I lead as a servant leader: the team's job is to deliver value, and mine is to clear the way.

Get in touch

Spotted a mistake, or want a topic covered? Get in touch through lesith.com. You can also follow new posts by RSS.