Australian Scrum Community

As Lachlan recent blogged, Ken Schwaber has a new Scrum book out. As its title, The Enterprise and Scrum suggests, this book is primarily focused on the challenges of top-down Scrum rollouts in large organisations. Such a rollout is called an ‘Enterprise Transition Project’ and is managed (surprise, surprise) as a Scrum project. Don’t just assume that this isn’t relevant to you in a smaller organisation and/or Scrum implementation. Must of this is relevant to anyone seeking to transition to Scrum or expand it to multiple teams and/or projects.

Ken sent me a draft of this book some months ago. At the time, I was hoping that it would continue where the papers variously titled A CIO’s Playbook for Achieving Software Agility with Scrum and A Playbook for Adopting the Scrum Method of Achieving Software Agility left off. Specifically, I was hoping for a more extensive set of ‘Impediments and Change’ descriptions that incomplete versions of the latter paper included. Whilst this problem-consquences-solutions material does not appear in the book, there is plenty of guidance in other (perhaps less prescriptive) forms.

The book is divided into three parts:

• Part I is titled ‘Adopting Scrum’ and provides an excellent outline of a scalable process for transitioning to Scrum along with description of some of the likely challenges (most of which is relevant to small-medium sized organisations as well as large ones). This includes a month-by-month activity description and some examples in the form of stories about ‘hypothetical’ companies.
• Part II goes into more detail by outlining several specific practices addressing Organisational, Engineering, People, and Product Owner – Team Relationship issues. Each practice answers a question that might well be asked by someone involved in a transition project.
• Part III provides an extremely concise and authoritative overview of the Scrum process, terminology, related reading and an example Scrum Kickoff Meeting Agenda. This is followed by ‘Scrum Musings’ – a series of 1-2 page essays on important concepts behind Scrum.

Generally, I found that this book flows better than the first two books and is no less as inspiring a read. It also reflects the current maturity of Scrum in a number of subtle ways including the terminology used. One example that happens to be topical to a colleague of mine is that this book repeatably uses the terms Product Manager/Customer together so as to be explicitly inclusive of both product development and bespoke/internal application development projects. In this way, it comes across as clearer and more inclusive that the earlier literature.

Judging by how much I got out of it, I would say that you certainly don’t have to be doing an Enterprise-wide Scrum rollout to make this book well worth reading. You could expect though to get even more out of it once you go beyond one Scrum team and/or project to the challenges of co-ordinating multiple.

Keep in mind that this is a short book at 145 pages and coverage is concise and not exhaustive. The brevity does make it quick to read though.

Whilst I would not say that The Enterprise and Scrum” is essential for all ScrumMasters concerned with only a single team and project, it could be considered essential reading for anyone dealing with multiple projects or pursuing wider adoption of Scrum within an organisation. For some, the introductory material on the challenges and steps to transition to Scrum and the Appendices may be worth the purchase price on their own as it constitutes perhaps the most definitive and usable short reference currently available on the Scrum process and terminology.

See also Mike Cohn’s review.