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The Scrum Fieldbook: A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future by [J.J. Sutherland]

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JJ Sutherland

The Scrum Fieldbook: A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future Kindle Edition

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Scrum is the secret weapon behind the success of companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, which have reshaped the world through their incredibly fast innovation, laser focus on the customer, and continuous improvement practices. Based on the five years of work in the field with companies like Toyota, 3M, Schlumberger, and Autodesk, The Scrum Fieldbook offers a hands on approach to implementing the practices of the Scrum framework among traditional, non-technology companies.

In J.J. Sutherland's first book, Scrum, written with his father, Jeff, he laid out the Scrum framework used by almost all of today's leading technology companies, based on Agile software development. The book has gone on to sell over 120,000 copies in its print and ebooks editions, and another 95,000 copies as an audio download. Since publication, the Scrum framework has exploded across the corporate world. J.J. and his team at Scrum Inc. have worked with private space companies, global oil and gas firms, banks, medical device manufacturers, and firms on the cutting edge of genetic science.

In the Scrum Fieldbook, J.J. takes leaders, managers, and employees deeper into the specific challenges and opportunities the company has faced in working with major established companies like Toyota, 3M, Schlumberger, and Autodesk. He shows how the simple scrum framework can be successfully applied to any situation, and in every industry, from automobile manufacturers in the USA and Europe, to nonprofits in Africa, from home renovation contractors in Minnesota to gas exploration companies in South America, from building fighter planes to improving the banking industry.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Scrum is the way high-tech companies have worked for decades. In The Scrum Fieldbook, J. J. Sutherland shows how the rest of corporate America is implementing Scrum to increase productivity and achieve results.”—Verne Harnish, founder of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and author of Scaling Up (Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0)

“Essential for any leader, innovator, or potential disruptor who wants their company to learn how to get out of its own way. Through the compelling stories and data-driven insights, J. J. reveals the patterns and anti-patterns that actually matter and provides a practical guide on how to implement Scrum@Scale . . . and unleash its potential to truly nudge the world.”—Nathaniel Davis, CEO and executive product owner, Drinkworks

“Simply put, Scrum transformed our business. I highly recommend The Scrum Fieldbook to every company that wants to make it to the next level!”—Brian Fox, president and founder, Confirmation

“Four years ago, a few of us at 3M Healthy Information Systems took the challenge to implement Scrum to solve an acute business problem. Little did I know that Scrum was destined to be the antidote for all kinds of ills: mistrust, silos, bureaucracy, lack of community and belonging. . . . Every takeaway in The Scrum Fieldbook—and I mean every one—was like reliving our journey. Scrum is not hard to understand. It’s hard to do. Therefore: Decide. Create. Care. Adjust. Repeat. This is the way the good people in our world have made life for all of us better.”—David Frazee, director, Corporate Research Systems Lab, 3M

“Scrum creates both business value and happiness for the people involved. This framework is the key enabler for knowledge creating companies, and nurtures sustainable innovations in the global market and in society.”—Ikujiro Nonaka, Professor Emeritus at Hitotsubashi University and co-author of The New New Product Development Game and The Knowledge Creating Company

“The Scrum Fieldbook will expand the adoption of Scrum, enhance anyone’s usage of the approach, and unleash the agile potential in all of us. This no-nonsense guide reveals practical applications of Scrum in an inspiring range of real-life experiences. J.J. strips away the jargon to show how the world of business really works, and why Scrum makes it work far better.”—Darrell Rigby, partner, Bain & Company

About the Author

J.J. Sutherland is the CEO of Scrum Inc., a consulting and training firm that uses Scrum to deliver results in companies across the globe. He is the coauthor of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, written with his father, Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum.
Previously, he was an award-winning correspondent, producer, and Baghdad Bureau chief for NPR. He covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. He has won Dupont, Peabody, Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas awards for his work.He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 4
Busy vs. Done

Confirmation.com is a company created to solve a problem that wasted thousands of hours and millions of trees each year. They took a manual process that was slow and painful and hard and made it electronic, fast, and easy.

What they do is confirm financial data through a huge global network of accounting firms, financial institutions, law firms, and corporations. They think it should be easy to find the truth. And they realize that financial fraud isn’t going away, which is why the motto of their founder, Brian Fox, is that they help the good guys catch the bad guys.

Let me give you just one illustrative example. The founder and chairman of Peregrine Financial Group, Russell Wassendorf Sr., defrauded investors out of more than $200 million over a period of years. How did he do it? A little Photoshop and he was able to create real-looking bank statements. The whole thing came tumbling down when Peregrine was forced to begin using Confirmation.com. Within days the fraud became clear. And Wassendorf still has decades left in jail for his crimes.

For more than a hundred years, the confirmation process was done on paper. An auditor would send confirmation requests by mail to a bank: Does the institution being audited actually have this much money? The bank would receive not only this request but thousands of others—even hundreds of thousands—each year. Banks had to have whole groups of people deal with it. Each confirmation request needed to be responded to by manually checking the bank records, writing a letter that confirmed the institution had that much money, and sending it back by mail. Paper. Lots and lots of paper. It took weeks for each and every one of the many, many tens of thousands of these requests made each year.

Confirmation.com made all this happen in a matter of moments. When someone makes a request, Confirmation.com directs that request to one of the thousands of connected banks in its network, gets the response, and passes it back to the auditor. The amount of security needed to move all that sensitive financial data around is critical. And that was the hard part in the beginning: getting financial institutions, accounting firms, law firms, and their mutual clients to trust the Confirmation.com system.

Confirmation.com pioneered the idea of electronic confirmations almost twenty years ago—receiving seven patents along the way—and is still dominant in the space by a large margin. It started with one bank and one accounting firm in Nashville, Tennessee, and now sixteen thousand accounting firms, four thousand banks, and five thousand law firms in 160 countries use their platform. They confirm more than a trillion dollars of assets each year.

When the company started back in 2000, at first it was just four people, literally in a garage, cranking out their product, this new thing that had never been done before, which Brian envisioned and wrote up as his entrepreneurship paper in business school. Eventually big banks started to realize the amount of work they would save and the speed they would gain, and ultimately said they would only accept requests through Confirmation.com’s platform—no more paper. Confirmation.com grew rapidly, and they started to add new features and new confirmation types—like legal confirmations—to their platform.

But then something happened. They weren’t getting things done quickly enough. They were missing deadlines. The code quality a platform like theirs requires wasn’t there. They certainly weren’t going to risk that, so they took more time to try to get it right. Oh, they had people working hard. They were busy. One executive there told us he had to keep everyone busy. Hopefully they’d get something done, but if they didn’t, he could at least say he tried. But they were simply unable to get stuff out the door. Everyone was busy, but not much was getting done. So they called us.

This is a fairly typical issue in corporations. Some project—it doesn’t matter what it is—must get done. Management or sales or somebody has said it’s a top priority. Then someone else says something else is also a top priority. And someone else brings in yet another. And, of course, none of these people insisting that their priority is what everyone should focus on talk to one another. They just keep shoving them down on the teams. This is horrifyingly commonplace. Then, with the predictability of gravity, things stop getting done. So management starts putting pressure on the team. They want them to be busy all the time working on the many, many things that are all top priority. They make them work nights and weekends to meet an arbitrary deadline that they promised to someone. And they are mystified when it doesn’t happen.

Facts Can Be Stubborn Things
Priority is an old word. It began its life in the late fourteenth century when the French borrowed a Latin word to indicate the state of being earlier—this event happened before that event. It entered English in the early fifteenth century, referring to precedence in right or rank. (Incidentally, it’s a singular word. Saying something is a “top priority” is redundant. It’s using two words to say one thing. Another linguistic tidbit: Latin words aren’t pluralized by putting an s on the end, so the word priorities is actually nonsensical. It quite literally does not make any sense. It’s like saying there were five first-place finishers in a race.)

If you run a Google Ngram search (that’s where Google looks at however many thousands of books over the past few hundred years and counts how often words are used) on priorities, you get a graph that shows a significant increase in the 1940s and then continuous annual increases beginning in the 1960s.

Priorities wasn’t even a word until about 1940. I’m not dead certain about causation, but there is a certain correlation between the rise of the modern management movement of postwar industry and the birth of a new word that sounds seemingly logical and rigorous while actually being meaningless. That seems telling to me.

Stop Starting, Start Finishing
When Scrum Inc. goes into a company to assess how Agile they are, we usually find that about 30 percent of the work being done should not be done at all. That work is actually in opposition to goals of the business. Stop that. The Standish Group data says, and this is what we find, that 64 percent of the remaining 70 percent are working on features that the customer rarely or never uses. That means 75 percent of people in a company are
either actively working against the business interests or are working on things that no one wants. Let that sink in for a second. Three-quarters of your company shouldn’t be doing what they are doing.

The reason for this is that people refuse, or don’t know how, to prioritize. (Another quick linguistic factoid: Apparently prioritize wasn’t a word until it was first made up by government bureaucrats in the 1950s and popularized in the presidential campaign of 1972 when political operatives had to choose which voting districts to target. As the Oxford English Dictionary put it in 1982, it is “a word that at present sits uneasily in the language.” It apparently sits uneasily in people’s practices as well.)

Here are the symptoms we see. If you hear or utter any of these phrases, you might want to rethink your approach:

“We have multiple conflicting priorities.”

“Our teams are constantly disrupted by new priorities.”

“Everything is the number one priority.”

The thing that kills me is that everyone knows these are bad things. Not a single person I have ever spoken to thinks that working on five things at once and disrupting even that work for new urgent things is a good idea. No one. We all know it’s stupid. But we all do it anyway.

At Confirmation.com, everyone had different priorities. Sales wanted a better Japanese translation so they could sell there, marketing wanted to rebrand the website, and the leadership was concerned with an upstart competitor. So what should the product teams focus on? “I’m always waiting to hear what the new rules are today,” one executive told Avi Schneier, Scrum Inc.’s principal on the case. When Avi asked what the company’s number one priority was, he was told, “Meeting deadlines.” Not what needed to be done, notice, just the deadline itself.

So Avi had them work through the company’s real priorities. What are they? What is the most important thing? He helped them see that without choosing those priorities, they ended up with a company adrift, going in a different direction each day. So they made those choices. It can be done, but it requires honest reflection and some tough decisions. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07MCRGY6D
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Currency (October 1, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 1, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5346 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 248 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0593137450

Best Sellers Rank: #250,209 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #35 in Organizational Change (Kindle Store)
- #46 in Business Structural Adjustment
- #206 in Time Management in Business

Customer Reviews:
4.6 316 ratings

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JJ Sutherland

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JJ Sutherland is the CEO of Scrum Inc., a consulting and training firm that uses Scrum to rapidly deliver results in companies across the globe. He is the author of The Scrum Fieldbook: A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future, and coauthor of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, written with his father, Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum.

Previously, he was an award-winning Correspondent, Producer, and Baghdad Bureau Chief for NPR. He covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. He has won Dupont, Peabody, Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas awards for his work.

In his free time, JJ enjoys cooking complicated recipes, traveling to the four corners of the globe, and gaming. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

316 global ratings

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MS

Great follow up / complement to “Scrum, the art of doing twice the work in half the time”

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 16, 2019

Verified Purchase

Indeed, another great book by JJ Sutherland! Some of the notes / new perspectives / action items I took away:

- Patterns and anti-pattern content
- Scrum itself does nothing. All it does is unleash the greatness that lives in each of us
- Backlog refinement is where Scrum lives or dies
- Incremental approach reduces the cost of changing your mind
- stats on decision latency
- good examples of non-software dev Scrum, from a restaurant to a Navy explosive ordnance disposal unit
- “Priorities” was not even a word until the 1940s
- MVB- minimum viable bureaucracy
- Scrum emergency procedure steps

.... and so much more!

What’s missing? JJ’s autograph (which I have in his first book from my CSM cert training with him 😎)

I purchased the audiobook to listen to in the gym & car, then the hard copy for more study / note taking. Highly recommended!

Keep up the great work, JJ!

10 people found this helpful

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Rose Gold

Pretty Good. Read this after passing the PSM I certification

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 19, 2021

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This book, written by the son of one of the co-creators of the Scrum framework, gives some great insight into using Scrum. I would start with their first book to really get a good grip on how Scrum was created. There is more history there. This book is more about how Scrum works for all work. Many stories about how Scrum was implemented. The chapter on Fear was really good. Overall, I would say that this would be a foundational text for your journey toward Scrum certifications

5 people found this helpful

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Maggie

ok

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 15, 2022

Verified Purchase

too many examples, not enough scrum explanation
a good over view not a deep dive but if youre on the fencr about scrum give it a read

2 people found this helpful

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darrinobrien

Life Altering if embraced-Wholeheartedly

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 30, 2020

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This is a work manual designed to double the performance and speed (agility) of any project, from surgical work to building cars, the principles are derived from the military and are time tested and timeless. This book changed my life and I am now a target and enemy of the lazy @ work. I love this. I am now literally ‘Woke’. 👌🏼

3 people found this helpful

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David E Carlton

Continuing my adventure in Scrum

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 31, 2019

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Keeps reminding me that I am on the right path for the best work environment. All who are looking for a making their business fun should read this, and if you cannot change where you are, you will know what you want from where you are going.

6 people found this helpful

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sheldon smith

Must read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 12, 2021

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Everyone in business should/must read this book.

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DaveJayAllDay

Must read for Scrum professionals.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 3, 2019

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I have several years of experience with Scrum, and spent hundreds of hours training and learning about Agile software development, and was still available to take so much away from this book. Highly recommended.

6 people found this helpful

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Captain Shelton

Good light reading on Scrum

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 17, 2020

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Enjoyed the book and wanted more detailed examples.

3 people found this helpful

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John Gladstone

"How to say half as much, in twice the words"

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 20, 2020

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I read "How to do twice the work in half the time" by Sutherland senior and found it an accessible well written and thoughtfully structured book. The only thing it really lacked was practical tips on making Scrum work.
So, when I saw that JJ Sutherland (the son, not the father) had released this book I immediately purchased a copy.
What a let down! The book is 230 or so pages of randomly organised anecdotes of how Sutherland Jr came to the aid of various struggling businesses and he, or one one his colleagues helped them turn things around. That might sound helpful but there was so much waffle that it was very hard going and nothing approaching practical advice. If you're going to call something a "field book" then the one thing I want is practical, actionable and concise advice... What you get instead is a load of waffle - none of which is new as it was all said far more concisely in his father's book.
He often goes off on random tangents talking about irrelevant stories from history (cholera outbreaks, the discovery of atoms to name but two) in a clumsy attempt to try and illustrate his point. But I just found it frustrating reading page after page of filler, waiting for the "good stuff". After a while it became obvious the good stuff was not coming!...
Each chapter concludes with a few "take home points" which are generally direct copies of paragraphs that were written earlier in the chapter. You could get as much information from this book if you just read those and skipped the other 200 pages.
I guess if you haven't read anything else about Scrum the book may have some more value to you but I'd advise finding a copy of his father's book instead. Far, far better!

7 people found this helpful

nucy vasta

Love it

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 4, 2019

Verified Purchase

Excellent

One person found this helpful

Juan Carlos Duran

Scrum

Reviewed in Spain 🇪🇸 on July 5, 2020

Verified Purchase

Excelente exposición
Es fácil de leer y presenta el método como algo sencillo y aplicable.
Hay que probar para ver se efectividad

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Amzon User

Looks like a second copy... Paper quality is very cheap

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on September 13, 2020

Verified Purchase

Rating for the quality of the book and not the content
Feel cheated as the quality of paper looks duplicate
Definitely not satisfied

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