Customer Reviews

The Enterprise and Scrum

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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I read this book based on Mike Cohn's recommendation. However, I was extremely disappointed in it.

The book starts out telling you what to do to manage Scrum throughout an enterprise. The only problem is the approach given assumes the entire enterprise has embraced using Scrum. I have never seen this. The real problem is typically getting the enterprise to embrace Scrum. The book gives little insight in how to do this. Integrating processes across teams and how to get organizations that work in competition with each other now to cooperate is pretty much ignored.

The rest of the book poses problems and tells you what you need to do, but rarely tells you how to do it. Most often, we are simply told to let the team figure it out. Sort of like a financial analyst telling you - "what you have to do is figure out how to buy stocks when they are low, and then sell them when the stocks go higher." Uh, OK, but _how_ do I do that? The book doesn't quite ever tell us.

The book also tells us about how the core of a system can become dead and tells us we have to stop this. But how? No advice is given on how to write tests or quality code or how to do integration across an Enterprise. In fact, almost nothing about writing code exists in the book. It's as if by following process entirely we can solve all of our problems with code quality, tests, integration, etc ...

My experience with Scrum teams and management is that you must give them reasons to expand Scrum beyond the team or you must explain to them how Scrum can scale when technical problems exist. How do you manage designs across multiple teams? How do you ensure re-use of common modules? How do you manage the dependencies between teams? These are all good questions which go both unasked and unanswered.

I'll admit that I didn't finish the book. After reading about 2/3rds through it I skimmed the rest because it didn't look like any value was coming forward from it.

Two books that I find much more useful are Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises by Dean Leffingwell and Agile Software Development in the Large: Diving Into the Deep by Jutta Eckstein

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.

An add-on to the existing two SCRUM books by Schwaber. This book discusses how to evolve an enterprise collectively rather than just parts of it at a time. You'll likely have no context for this book unless having first read the others. Note: this book is, like the others, descriptive in nature and definitively not prescriptive. So if you're looking for someone to tell you exactly `how' to do something, this isn't it.

The two best things about this book are that it: (1) provides a framework for adopting Scrum across an enterprise, and (2) describes some techniques for surmounting some of the problems you will likely face as you try. Although the book is about the "enterprise and Scrum" most of the contents will be applicable to any group of teams transitioning to Scrum. A set of five teams working together on a single project would benefit from this book even if they are not the whole enterprise.

Too many agile books suffer from being targeted at a single team working on a deserted island--that is, a seven-person team with no issues outside their one team. This book does not suffer from that problem. Want to know how to organize work on a project that is partitioned by architectural layer? How to structure a product backlog for the entire organization? Or how to organize teams across a large project? Or what are the proper reporting relationships on a large Scrum project? This book provides sage advice on these enterprise adoption issues and more.

The book is chock-full of real-life anecdotes (in which only the name of the company and key players have been changed). Each anecdote illustrates how one real company dealt with a real problem. Their problem, their context, and their solution won't exactly be yours, but seeing how others have addressed challenges can be illuminating in thinking how to address yours.

This is probably not your best choice as a first book on Scrum. For that start with the author's other two books. This book picks up where they left off, providing a wealth of information for enterprises and even workgroups adopting Scrum. If you're already familiar with the basics of Scrum, and especially if you are starting to hit the hard points of adopting it and spreading it through your organization then this book is for you.

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.

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 organizations 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 Organizational, 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 organization. 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 usable, definitive and up-to-date short reference currently available on the Scrum process and terminology.

In his book Ken Schwaber described how an enterprise can adopt and implement scrum across all IT work. Size-wise, the 176 pages long book is divided into two parts: the general text, and appendixes. The appendixes describe some of the key concepts and nomenclature of the scrum, while the general text covers the key topics. The general text also illustrates some of the cases, where scrum implemented, and the kind of results / benefits accrued.

The good part of this book is it talks about some good theories of the classical project management and behaviors. As example, it talks about four stages for team performance: form, storm, norm, and perform. This one is nothing to do with Agile, it was a separate concept altogether. The good part of the book is that it adopted it.

The not so good part is some of the key messages.

Scrum cannot be tailored for an organization, Organization needs to change itself: This illustrates the inflexibility of the case studies. If an organization needs to change itself for adopting scrum, while scrum stays unchanged, it practically makes the organization inflexible after scrum adoption. An inflexible organization is certainly going to take a downward dive on every aspect of the business.

The team needs to be self managed, self organized: This practically puts an end to the possibility of inducting junior team members. In every team there needs to be somebody who should be taking the lead role or coordinator role. The person needs to be somebody who can be looked up, and needs to be a role model for the junior developers while they are growing up. The book stays silent on this point.

Fire thy sales guy attitude: In a case study, the book found the solution in firing the sales guy who made some aggressive commitments to the client, and pushed developers harder for completion. A different case study of aggressive but successful sales guy would bring more relevance into it.

Developers not to be pressed: Throughout the book, the author emphasized not to press developers for producing more. It talks about giving the liberty of committing their own release dates, but not much have been mentioned on accountability, and aligning the dates with business reality. The book scares the readers on compromising on quality while speeding up the development, but surprisingly silent on measuring quality of the work product.

Derogating Offshore Work: The book does not support offshoring of work. Instead if asks for improving productivity at onshore. True, that productivity needs to be improved, but it's yet to be proven that offshore work is less productive. In today's world, when majority of the software development work is being done from offshore locations, it's a bit surprising to see the author has missed out the success stories and data.

Overall, the book is not a recommended buy. But if you are an avid reader, go read it with open mind.

I've been involved with the introduction of Agile methods and other process improvements in several large enterprises, and I have learned
-that there are no cookbooks
-that there is no process or set of practices that will work for everyone
-that as hard as it is to influence people to take on new practices, it is even harder to get the rest of the organization to accept the implications of these changes

This book does not prescribe a solution to all problems. The author I expect knows well that there is no such prescriptive solution (in his own words, "We want rules to follow, but life and product development are too complex for a single set of rules to suffice in all circumstances."). The book also does not delve into the depths of systems dynamics and org change- areas that are important in the change effort, but are explored by countless other sources. I believe that this is a strength, as it allows the book to be a focused, easy read without distraction.

This book does provide an implementation framework, plain and simple - a basic, repeatable, evolutionary framework for the introduction of Scrum to an enterprise, including feedback loops that will ensure that the right people know of challenges, and techniques to repeatably adjust the plan so that the effort is continuously improving. Following this, progress is very likely, and if the effort ends, it will be either due to success or to the conscious choice of those involved to stop further improvement.

I've seen many process improvement efforts flounder in large companies- often due to the process that was followed to run them. An approach such as that recommended in this book will at least ensure that the process to effect the improvement is not in the way itself, and is in fact an enabler.

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.