Changing Your Team From the Inside

by Alexis Monville

Change Management needs to change. Change Management is so important that... What if there was no need for change management because we are continuously improving our way of working? This book is about you fostering that change from the inside! This book has everything you need to know to build high impact, sustainable teams.

170 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2018

About the author

Alexis Monville is a member of the Engineering Leadership Team at Enterprise Open Source Software company Red Hat. He brings more than 20 years of operations and management experience from diverse sectors such as the automotive industry, a dotcom startup, IT consulting, public sector, software development, and his own management and organization consulting and coaching firm.

From 2011 until Red Hat acquired eNovance in 2014, Alexis nurtured and grew the eNovance agile organization from a few individuals to more than a hundred people. During this time he maintained the team’s focus on delivering private cloud services with OpenStack while building an open and people-centric culture.

Alexis regularly speaks about management and agile transformation, and participates at industry events such as the Open Infrastructure Summit, Open World Forum, and Agile Lean Europe.

Alexis Monville builds high impact sustainable organizations.



Alexis is the author of Changing Your Team From The Inside, a book published in 2018.

Reviews

[Dave Neary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this book is most valuable for team leads or managers rather than for individual team members. This book serves best as a kind of lit review of various areas of organization theory, management theory, sociology, and software engineering practices. It is dense - I appreciated the short chapters and the exercises at the end of each chapter, but at times the treatment of the underlying techniques or philosophies was, by necessity, cursory, and limited to communicating the principles. Reading this book did add another dozen references to the list of books I want to read (thanks, Alexis!) and I can see immediate ways to enact some of the recommendations around planning work, organizing meetings, and integrating games to help with organizational change. All in all, a strong recommendation to read for anyone in any management function.

[Franck · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a founder of a 50 people SaaS startup and I loved this book.
I may have a bias as the author also comes from the IT world. I found real-life examples really interesting as well as references to proven methodologies.
The "summary and action" of each chapter is a good wrap up and the format of the book (170 pages) makes it a quick read.

[Claude Aubry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Building on a very solid foundation of modern management (there are references to the best trends in recent years), the author adds stories nicely told to offer us a great book on the agile future of teams and organizations.
This book was selected by the reading club Agile Toulouse, and the debates showed that it was very appreciated.

[Julien Danjou · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book giving amazing insight on how to organize your team and make it reflect on itself for improvement. Full of good advice and exercise you can apply. I loved the tales from the battlefield!

[Alexandre BOUTIN · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recommand this book as it gives some clear recommandations of how make your team more efficient and especially the first one : "start by yourself", as I'm convinced that a key of success
I also appreciate all the detail examples provided, and especially the chapter about gaming ("Play for real") as it is also one of my strong conviction that it works!
And a last thing, this book is well written and easy to read. This is really important for someone like me who is not a good reader at all :)

[Chris Deniaud · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author offers us through this book his perception of a constructive transformation fully based on empathy and benevolence.
Through relevant and precisely described tools, anchored by anecdotes or significant recommendations, he offers us beyond a turnkey solution, a set of valuable references.
They allow us to become aware and to make aware that a change without involvement and without starting by ourselves has no chance to achieve anything clever, just by relying on tools or practices.
But beyond that, he conducts us to discover a potential of influence and impact at each level, starting with oneself, which is extremely enlisting.

Note: This second edition is further enriched. Here is a reference on which to return regularly.

[Guillaume Vincent · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great book! This book is about management, engineering practices, agility. How to change the teams from the inside. I loved the stories, the exercises and the tools described in this book. The book is well documented and references and quotes are very relevant.

There is a lot of kindness in this book.
Like others I find the "summary and action" great to remember in a few lines, a few months later, how to solve some problems.

Strongly the next book!

[Val · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent resource of ideas for driving change within your teams. There is a lot of talk about high-performing teams out there on the Internet and very limited working practices and ideas on how to actually change your team from average or even underperforming to a high-performing one. Alexis has managed make quite a collection of proven methods with 1st hand sharing of experience and really nice to read language.
I personally love that book and keep it close as it is not one of those books you will read and leave on a shelf. It works best, when you flip through it and pick what to do next.

[Michael DeLanzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed reading this book! It is well organized and easy to read. The author is humble and not afraid to use many of his less than successful attempts at solving a particular problem for his examples. Those examples are some of the best parts of the book. It will certainly continue to be a reference book for me and has the added bonus of including pointers to many good resources on product development management and organizations. I will not even ding the author for inventing the minivan!

[Cassaigne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book about how to change your organization from inside. I agree with author, start by changing your team from inside that's could have import consequences to other teams too. A well written book.

[Philippe Aubrée · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book for managers and associates (coachs, even scrum masters)
I liked the wrap-up/summary at the end of each chapter
And I liked the (lot of) serious references (Bonus: direct link to goodreads!)

[Emerald Fallarme · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an easy read with a lot of relevant experiences by the author. It also shares a lot of other great references that discuss the concepts. It must be read by both leaders and members alike as forming a high-impact sustainable teams involves conscious effort from both sides.