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Featured Book: The Enterprise and Scrum by Ken Schwaber

Written by Liz Barnett

Saturday, 10 November 2007

Do we need yet another book about implementing Scrum? Actually, if the book is The Enterprise and Scrum then the answer is yes! We know that small and large teams have been successful with Scrum at the project level. But so many organizations seem to stumble when they try to scale Scrum up to the enterprise level. Why? What should they do differently? In this book, Ken Schwaber, the industry leader with by far the richest Scrum experiences, shares his insights and offers suggestions for those trying to use Scrum across the enterprise.

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As is his usual style, Ken is able to explain the most complex ideas with clear and simple language. The book assumes that the reader is familiar with Scrum and has likely implemented it on discrete projects.[i] In Part I, Adopting Scrum, Ken discusses how to determine if Scrum is a good fit for your environment, how to go about adopting it for an enterprise, and what you should expect to experience during your first year of Scrum implementations. It also focuses on the struggles to implement change in an enterprise, or what he calls fighting "muscle memory."

In Part II, Start Using Scrum for Enterprise Work, readers will be able to draw upon a range of organizational practices (e.g., creating an enterprise Product Backlog), engineering practices (e.g., integrating the work of multiple teams into a Sprint), and people-oriented practices (e.g., managing distributed teams) that other companies have successfully implemented. Ken asserts that none of these practices are new, but rather they are "just different from the way work is currently done." Don't be fooled: the differences can be profound. No one should assume that implementing these practices will be at all easy or straightforward. But the benefits will likely be significant.

Part III (which is actually one-third of the book) is a series of appendices that (1) bring Scrum newcomers up to speed, (2) provide additional examples of specific activities, such as running a Scrum Kickoff Meeting, and (3) offer some Scrum musings on additional topics.

Because Ken has worked with many companies, he is able to sprinkle specific customer stories (with hypothetical names) throughout the book. These stories provide context and concrete examples, and thus make the best practices easy to understand. Of course, each organization will need to tailor Ken's guidance to fit its specific constraints. But even those that are not yet ready for enterprise-wide Scrum can benefit from this guidance and begin to reap the quality, productivity, and agility benefits that Scrum promises.

[i] For a complete introduction to Scrum, consider Ken's earlier books: Agile Software Development with Scrum and Agile Project Management with Scrum.

Comments (1)

qiulang: ...

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 some 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 doesn’t 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 the introduction of scrum, which you can find all kinds of materials 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 want to be harsh and the author is really some person I admire. So maybe he was talking about something totally beyond my level and I hope anyone can point that out for me.

July 23, 2008

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