Product Description

Get the practical guidance you need to apply Scrum enterprise wide--straight from a leader and innovator in the agile process movement. Agile development methods, such as Scrum, have been shown to produce improvements in speed, quality, and cost. However, the practices within Scrum, such as self-managing teams, are often so different from the norm at most enterprises and cause an organizational reaction. The productivity and quality benefits of Scrum pose a compelling reason to make such changes--moving it from the small team to the enterprise level. And as Scrum crosses to the mainstream, executives need to know how to manage the necessary change processes. In addition, managers and employees alike want to know what the change means to them, personally. With case studies and pragmatic approaches, this book shows development managers and developers how to extend Scrum from one or two projects within an engineering organization to the larger enterprise. It also addresses the questions that newcomers have regarding process, interaction, reports, habits, tradeoffs, and more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14982 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From the Publisher
Key Book Benefits:

-Delivers best practices from an author with more than 20 years of experience with agile development methods

-Provides guidance about both system and interpersonal processes

-Features numerous case studies about Scrum adoption at large enterprises--including Microsoft® Corporation

About the Author
Ken Schwaber is an experienced software developer, product manager, and industry consultant. He is one of the leaders of the agile process revolution, a signatory of the Agile Manifesto, founder and director of the Agile Alliance, founder of the Scrum Alliance, and one of the developers of the Scrum agile process. Over the last four years, he has had a hand in training more than 4,000 certified ScrumMasters (Scrum change agents and project managers).

Customer Reviews

The book is more like an informal set of lecture notes written for a presentation
I built up a lot of expectation before reading this book because I learned a lot from the author's earlier book "Agile Project Management With Scrum" and not to mention that the author was the cofounder of scrum. But after I read it I was rather disappointed. I feel like the book is more like an informal set of lecture notes written for a presentation in stead of a well written and well thought book.

Before I further comment about that let me first take a guess about why people want to read a technical book. I think most people want to read a technical book because they hope the book can teach them something new. And if the reading process makes readers entertained that will make the book even more valuable. And that was what I got from "Agile Project Management With Scrum". But technical reading mostly does not get that luxury so long as the book is informative (and enlightened) we will say the time and energy spent for it is well worth.

So back to this book, I think before reading it every one will know that running scrum in a traditional waterfall process company is hard. What we want to know is how hard that it is. What kind of (typical) situation we may run into; what kind of specific issue we need to address and what was the author's way or suggestion to tackle them. But the author just kept saying that it is hard but you got to stick with scrum then finally you will make it. The author kept repeating that without even giving a valuable suggestion for it (putting the obstacles into transition backlog can't really be counted as a valuable suggestion). And the examples he gave were also superficial, i.e. repeating that you will make it finally without giving any valuable suggestion about how.

The second part of the book is about the practice using in the enterprise. But except for suggesting the use of scrum of scrum, which again readers will anticipate before reading the book and checking your burn down chart to know your productivity I still do not see any thing new or enlightened, although the example the author gave here were a little bit more impressive than the examples gave in the first part.

The third part of the book was the worst. The third part is about the introduction of scrum, the kind of materials you can find all over the internet. I even found that the author copies pasted some of paragraphs in his previous book "Agile Project Management With Scrum".

I do not mean to be harsh and the author is really some person I look up to. So maybe he was talking about something totally beyond my level and I hope anyone can point that out for me.

Clear, Succinct, and Useful
This book contains useful information on how to apply Scrum in large organizations. It provides real world examples of how Scrum was implemented, the problems that were uncovered and the lessons learned.

If you are looking for an intro book on Scrum, this is not it.

If you are familiar with Scrum, you will devour the information in this book.

If you are a seasoned project manager, many of the scenarios will resonate with you.

It is a short book (under 150 pages) but it is chock full of valuable information that you can apply to your practice. I recommend that you read it at least twice to derive full benefit.

scrum in large projects - the guide
I recently run a large project (~100 people) under a structure very similar to the organization described by Ken in this book:
-one product: a large web site
-8 scrum teams: 6 service teams, 1 IT team, 1 CM team
-scrum of scrum: team composed of senior engineers from each scrum focused on global code integration, standard / API definitions, run by uber scrum master and uber product owner
-meta scrum: team composed of local scrum masters (problem raisers) and executives (problem solvers) focused on organizational issues, run by uber scrum master

The results?
-a product delivered within a deadline of 18 weeks (the last product of similar size and complexity was delivered in 18 months and was mostly unsuccessful)
-a very happy product owner (financial outcome better than expected, all key features delivered)
-best quality software ever written in the company (best as from a technical debt perspective, and great architecture paradigm)
-fantastic morale in the team

This book is written for people that understand scrum and are ready to think it to the next level. It clearly outlines a simple and powerful framework to roll out scrum across the enterprise and achieve great coordination in scalable manner in large projects. This is not an "enterprise scrum". It is the same scrum applied to the enterprise.
Some might miss details on tactical implementation which the book doesn't try to address. Why? I think because it is scrum and details have been written about over and over. So how do you attack your big impediments? Run Ken's framework and let it to the self-organization of the teams! It is scrum after all.