Introduction

The Scrum Guide is only 19 printed pages long, including cover pages, indexes, and et cetera. It also omits any mention of the roles and responsibilities of line management and senior leadership, focusing instead on a little theory and some essential details about framework events. This brevity often leads people to believe that Scrum is simple, or that implementing it is easy, and that it can be done without being embraced across the entire organization.

In the real world, I’ve seen non-agile organizations send a single representative of the team to collect a Scrum Master certification, rebrand a few line line managers as “Product Owners,” and then tell a bunch of individual contributors that they are now part of a self-sufficient Scrum Team. What could possibly go wrong with that?

In these scenarios, the leadership team often sits back, confident that sprinkling the right agile buzzwords across the annual strategic plan has proactively fixed all the business problems they’re facing. Everything will stay the same, only better! Things will move faster; quality will improve; time to market will drop; executive bonuses will roll in!

When adopting Lip-Service Agile™ or employing Buzzword Management℠ fails, the blame is often laid at the feet of:

• a “wrong-headed” (rather than simply misimplemented) framework like Scrum;
• the “team” of random individual contributors who failed to become agile enough, fast enough;
• the Scrum Master who failed to hold the team accountable to management targets.

In almost all of these cases, improper application of framework principles, values, and roles is really the foundational problem. Failure to embrace Scrum at the senior leadership level (often called “tone at the top”) is a common comorbidity of a dead or dying Scrum implementation. In contrast, successful Scrum requires all hands on deck, all the way from the C-level down to the development team.

This book addresses a cross-section of common Scrum problems. Each chapter starts with a real-world problem an organization has applying Scrum to a concrete problem. Once the underlying problem has been identified, each chapter then suggests process improvements that will get things back on track.

As Fred Brooks famously argues in several publications, there is “no silver bullet.” Scrum is not a magic incantation that will fix organizational dysfunction, but it is a solid framework based on empirical control principles. This book will show you some concrete ways to apply those framework principles to the very real problems you face, and help teams and organizations struggling with Scrum to fix the process problems that are standing in the way of their success.