How To Use This Book
The first thing we’d like you to do is to print this book. Yes we mean on paper! We live in a digital world and yet we find that tactile tangible things are sometimes so much simpler and better. Don’t get us wrong, we aren’t technophobes. We love our fitbits, smart phones and apple tv, but for some things paper just works better. We hope having this on your desk will serve as a great reminder to continue your learning. We’ve left plenty of space for you to write in the book. This means it will be easy to reflect on what you’ve learned over several weeks. The book is intended to be printed in colour on A4 paper, but feel free to try something different if that works better for you.
Next we recommend setting aside an hour a week in your calendar for the next 15 weeks. Go put it in your calendar now. Pick a time you aren’t generally distracted and when you will be able to focus and learn. You might even want to book a meeting room for yourself to get away from the interruptions that might happen at your desk.
Each chapter is focused on a topic, and the intention is for you to focus on that topic for a week. If an hour once a week is more than you can commit to, feel free to go at your own pace. You can take a break at anytime (for example if you go on holiday), then pickup on the next chapter when you return. You can also skip around to chapters that are more relevant if you prefer.
Each chapter/week is colour coded and structured as follows:
- An introduction to the topic
- One or two blog posts related to the topic
- An exercise for you to do
- A journal page for you to take notes for the week
- Some weeks also include cards you can cut out to use for the exercises
We know that everyone learns differently, so we have provided a variety of materials related to each topic. Feel free to use only what makes sense to you, and what you have the time for. Don’t worry if you can’t do every exercise, rather focus on what you can learn on the topic.
We’ve learned through our other books that although there is a wealth of information and great ideas on the internet about agile, just providing links can be frustrating because links change and content gets deleted all the time. For this book we’ve decided to provide the text of the blog posts in a downloadable PDF. This means that you never need to visit a broken link and wonder what the article said. We’ve also kept the reading short, so it’s no more than five pages for any one chapter. Feel free to print the Reading PDF out, or to read the short articles on your computer or device.
The Reading PDF is included in the extras in Leanpub where you purchased this book.
We recommend reading the introduction and blog posts and before doing the exercise. Some of the exercises will require you to schedule time with your team or other people to complete them.
One of the best ways to learn as a Scrum Master is to keep notes on how things are going, what you do, and what you notice. Often it takes some time for the impact of our actions to be visible, so being able to reflect over a longer period is a valuable learning tool. For this reason, we’ve included a journal page each week for you to fill in. We’ll prompt you with some things to think about for the journal each week, but feel free to capture whatever you think might be important to look back on.
When you start we recommend filling in your journal daily. Sometimes by the end of the week it is difficult to remember what we did earlier in the week. A great tip is to put a reminder in your calendar for 15 minutes each day to fill in your journal. Once you do this for a few weeks, it will become an easy habit to continue.
As agile coaches our favourite meeting is the retrospective. Reflecting on how things have gone in the past is the best way to set ourselves up for success in the future. It’s also a great way to amplify your learning. Because of this, we’ve structured every fifth week to be a retrospective. This is a personal retrospective to do by yourself. The chapters for those weeks will be a little different because they don’t include any reading. They are all colour coded in yellow.