Product Description

The rules and practices for Scrum—a simple process for managing complex projects—are few, straightforward, and easy to learn. But Scrum’s simplicity itself—its lack of prescription—can be disarming, and new practitioners often find themselves reverting to old project management habits and tools and yielding lesser results. In this illuminating series of case studies, Scrum co-creator and evangelist Ken Schwaber identifies the real-world lessons—the successes and failures—culled from his years of experience coaching companies in agile project management. Through them, you’ll understand how to use Scrum to solve complex problems and drive better results—delivering more valuable software faster.Gain the foundation in Scrum theory—and practice—you need to:•Rein in even the most complex, unwieldy projects •Effectively manage unknown or changing product requirements •Simplify the chain of command with self-managing development teams •Receive clearer specifications—and feedback—from customers •Greatly reduce project planning time and required tools •Build—and release—products in 30-day cycles so clients get deliverables earlier•Avoid missteps by regularly inspecting, reporting on, and fine-tuning projects •Support multiple teams working on a large-scale project from many geographic locations •Maximize return on investment! 

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17921 in Books
• Brand: Microsoft
• Published on: 2004-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

Lots of case studies,
Scrum is a simple emperical process of project management. There are few rules and these are adequately explained in a few pages and within the appendix of this book. So what, you might ask, is the rest of the book taken up with.

Well there's lots of case studies to demonstrate the practical use of Scrum in different scenarios. I must admit to having found these case studies a little uninteresting at times and a bit repetitive, however by the end of the book I feel I probably appreciated their purpose more than I did whilst reading them.

In terms of whether the book is worth owning, I found it well enough written and in general quite useful, however I do feel the meat of the subject can be summed up in far fewer pages and I'm split between the feeling that fewer case studies would have been adequate and that some were just "fillers" to pad out the book and the fact that, maybe, you can never have too many examples.

Invaluable book. Do not start implementing SCRUM before reading it!
Scrum is easy to understand and hard to implement. You can read about the roles, artefacts and ceremonies on many websites however this isn't enough. You learn best by doing it and in this book Ken is giving us his experience so we don't make the same mistakes. Of course there are many more truths to be learnt but this book gives you an excellent start. A must have for anyone starting with Scrum!

Stick with PRINCE2
Having read numerous other books about Project Management methodologies I came to this one. A colleague at work recommended Scrum, so I bought this and had a good read.

First of all, the whole 'less is more' point of view didn't wash with me and my experience. The author's tone seems to suggest that he is inferring that other methodologies are overly prescriptive. I get the feeling that he was making an aside to PRINCE2. However, if he checked out the 2009 revisions and read up, he'd see that a common misconception is that PRINCE2 is too heavy on the management side. It isn't; you can scale to whatever size project you want.

Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe the author just thinks Scrum is great, but from the projects I have run I know I wouldn't have gotten anywhere. The whole language (pigs and chickens..?) seems childish to the point of being banal. I'm sure that stakeholders would be confident if they heard that terminology. I'm sure it works for some, but for me (and most of the world thankfully), I'll stick with PRINCE2.