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The Professional ScrumMaster’s Handbook - Break the Chains of Traditional Organization and Management
Key FeaturesChecklists, questions, and exercises to get you thinking (and acting) like a professional ScrumMasterPresented in a relaxed, jargon-free, personable styleFull of ideas, tips, and anecdotes based on real-world experiencesBook DescriptionA natural and difficult tension exists between a project team (supply) and its customer (demand); a professional ScrumMaster relaxes this tension using the Scrum framework so that the team arrives at the best possible outcome. The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook is a practical, no-nonsense guide to helping you become an inspiring and effective ScrumMaster known for getting results.
This book goes into great detail about why it seems like you're fighting traditional management culture every step of the way. You will explore the three roles of Scrum and how, working in harmony, they can deliver a product in the leanest way possible. You'll understand that even though there is no room for a project manager in Scrum, there are certain aspects of management you should be familiar with to help you along the way. Getting a team to manage itself and take responsibility is no easy feat; this book will show you how to earn trust by displaying it and inspiring courage in a team every day.
The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook will challenge you to dig deep within yourself to improve your mindset, practices, and values in order to build and support the very best agile teams.
What you will learnCreate and maintain an impediment backlog to support continuous improvement for you, your team, and your organizationHow to tell the difference between an obstacle and a true constraintCreate a culture transition map to help your team and organization deliver quickly and flexiblyWork through exercises to help co-workers and management discover for themselves a new way of approaching tasksAlign your actions to the Scrum values every dayFacilitate lean meetings - light and quick, yet effectiveAbout the AuthorStacia Viscardi is an Agile coach, Certified Scrum Trainer, and organizational transformation expert, devoted to creating energized and excited teams that delight their customers and inspire others. With humble beginnings in Port Arthur, Texas, Stacia found her niche as a Manufacturing Project Manager in the early nineties; she landed in the technology world in 1999 and never looked back. In 2003 she became the sixty-second Certified ScrumMaster (there are now over 200,000!), and founded AgileEvolution in 2006. She has helped companies such as Cisco Systems, Martha Stewart Living, Primavera, DoubleClick, Google, Razorfish, MyPublisher, Washington Post, and many others find their way to agility. Co-author of the Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility, Stacia has taught Agile in 17 countries and is active in the ScrumAlliance as a CST and trusted community advisor.
Table of A Brief Review Of The Basics (And A Few Interesting Tidbits)Release Tuning Product DevelopmentSprint Fine-Tune The Sprint CommitmentSprint! Visible, Collaborative, And Meaningful WorkThe End? Improving Product And Process One Bite At A TimeThe Criticality Of Real-Time InformationScrum Values Expose Fear, Dysfunction, And WasteEveryday Leadership For The Scrummaster And TeamShaping The Agile OrganizationScrum - Large And Small<
This book goes into great detail about why it seems like you're fighting traditional management culture every step of the way. You will explore the three roles of Scrum and how, working in harmony, they can deliver a product in the leanest way possible. You'll understand that even though there is no room for a project manager in Scrum, there are certain aspects of management you should be familiar with to help you along the way. Getting a team to manage itself and take responsibility is no easy feat; this book will show you how to earn trust by displaying it and inspiring courage in a team every day.
The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook will challenge you to dig deep within yourself to improve your mindset, practices, and values in order to build and support the very best agile teams.
What you will learnCreate and maintain an impediment backlog to support continuous improvement for you, your team, and your organizationHow to tell the difference between an obstacle and a true constraintCreate a culture transition map to help your team and organization deliver quickly and flexiblyWork through exercises to help co-workers and management discover for themselves a new way of approaching tasksAlign your actions to the Scrum values every dayFacilitate lean meetings - light and quick, yet effectiveAbout the AuthorStacia Viscardi is an Agile coach, Certified Scrum Trainer, and organizational transformation expert, devoted to creating energized and excited teams that delight their customers and inspire others. With humble beginnings in Port Arthur, Texas, Stacia found her niche as a Manufacturing Project Manager in the early nineties; she landed in the technology world in 1999 and never looked back. In 2003 she became the sixty-second Certified ScrumMaster (there are now over 200,000!), and founded AgileEvolution in 2006. She has helped companies such as Cisco Systems, Martha Stewart Living, Primavera, DoubleClick, Google, Razorfish, MyPublisher, Washington Post, and many others find their way to agility. Co-author of the Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility, Stacia has taught Agile in 17 countries and is active in the ScrumAlliance as a CST and trusted community advisor.
Table of A Brief Review Of The Basics (And A Few Interesting Tidbits)Release Tuning Product DevelopmentSprint Fine-Tune The Sprint CommitmentSprint! Visible, Collaborative, And Meaningful WorkThe End? Improving Product And Process One Bite At A TimeThe Criticality Of Real-Time InformationScrum Values Expose Fear, Dysfunction, And WasteEveryday Leadership For The Scrummaster And TeamShaping The Agile OrganizationScrum - Large And Small<
486 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
14 people are currently reading
94 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 6, 2013
I met Stacia Viscardi for the first time at the 4th Open Scrum Gathering hosted by the Scrum Alliance in Boulder Colorado in late 2005. I also had the good fortune to work with Stacia for a couple of days in April, 2013, when she trained an organization on Scrum and Agile principles, after which I remained on-site as their Scrum Coach. When Stacia told me that she had written this book (scheduled for publication that week), I must admit that I had some immediate concerns...
The sheer number of books written about Scrum is daunting, with many of them overlapping in suspiciously similar ways. I reviewed "Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process" by Kenny Rubin in late 2012, concluding my review by saying "I pity anyone that intends to publish a book on Scrum in the near future (this act will be impossible to follow for a very long time!)". I downloaded and read the Kindle version of "The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook" from Amazon the instant it was available and thankfully discovered that this concluding comment in my review of Kenny's book was dead wrong.
Where Kenny's book is a complete compendium on Scrum roles, events and artifacts, written in a way to benefit those new to Scrum as well as seasoned Scrum veterans, "The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook" fills a different, very real, former vacancy in the world of Scrum literature. Although Stacia's book also covers all of Scrum quite thoroughly, it relates everything directly to the ScrumMaster role. Stacia and I both began practicing Scrum in 2003 (although she began several months before I did). She's been ScrumMaster and Coach for numerous teams since then and has learned the ScrumMaster role the hard way - by comprehending how to (in her words) "transition THROUGH" Scrum, rather than "transition TO" Scrum, which is a common misconception many ScrumMasters hold about the essence of this challenging role.
In the "Preface" Stacia expresses a very real concern I share about the current negative effect of the "rampant misuse and misunderstanding of Scrum". She bares her soul about the original "Scrum Values" and shares many personal insights that only arrive after years of living the ScrumMaster role (like differentiating between "dysfunctions" and "true constraints"). Although the book is packed with stories offering practical responses to some of Scrum's most challenging situations, it more importantly communicates the true core traits required to become a successful ScrumMaster.
Because of the depth of this book, I would not recommend it for new ScrumMasters, but would instead encourage ScrumMasters that have been practicing Scrum a year or more to read it cover to cover (and re-read it as they evolve into real ScrumMasters). At this stage of "ScrumMastering", Stacia's wisdom can effectively guide ScrumMasters who are becoming truly hopeless struggling with more and more seemingly irremediable Scrum fallout (while sparing them the pain Stacia has already gone through on their behalf, paving the way for them to succeed). In the book, Stacia likens the ScrumMaster to the skilled rider of a horse, implying techniques for dealing with the horse at any given moment in a variety of situations. Stacia extends this comparison to present some of the worst Scrum "horse" behaviors, common situations causing them and invaluable techniques for dealing with them in a variety of real organizational contexts.
Also described are fictional ScrumMaster "personas" many of us have encountered (or have been or still are!), identifying the shortcomings for each. "The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook" is a highly-recommended, real first, unlike other Scrum resources before it. It shares both practical and spiritual lessons flowing from deep personal knowledge absorbed over a very long time in Scrum's trenches, coming from a ScrumMaster that, as Ken Schwaber (co -inventor of Scrum) would say, really "gets it". Bravo!
The sheer number of books written about Scrum is daunting, with many of them overlapping in suspiciously similar ways. I reviewed "Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process" by Kenny Rubin in late 2012, concluding my review by saying "I pity anyone that intends to publish a book on Scrum in the near future (this act will be impossible to follow for a very long time!)". I downloaded and read the Kindle version of "The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook" from Amazon the instant it was available and thankfully discovered that this concluding comment in my review of Kenny's book was dead wrong.
Where Kenny's book is a complete compendium on Scrum roles, events and artifacts, written in a way to benefit those new to Scrum as well as seasoned Scrum veterans, "The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook" fills a different, very real, former vacancy in the world of Scrum literature. Although Stacia's book also covers all of Scrum quite thoroughly, it relates everything directly to the ScrumMaster role. Stacia and I both began practicing Scrum in 2003 (although she began several months before I did). She's been ScrumMaster and Coach for numerous teams since then and has learned the ScrumMaster role the hard way - by comprehending how to (in her words) "transition THROUGH" Scrum, rather than "transition TO" Scrum, which is a common misconception many ScrumMasters hold about the essence of this challenging role.
In the "Preface" Stacia expresses a very real concern I share about the current negative effect of the "rampant misuse and misunderstanding of Scrum". She bares her soul about the original "Scrum Values" and shares many personal insights that only arrive after years of living the ScrumMaster role (like differentiating between "dysfunctions" and "true constraints"). Although the book is packed with stories offering practical responses to some of Scrum's most challenging situations, it more importantly communicates the true core traits required to become a successful ScrumMaster.
Because of the depth of this book, I would not recommend it for new ScrumMasters, but would instead encourage ScrumMasters that have been practicing Scrum a year or more to read it cover to cover (and re-read it as they evolve into real ScrumMasters). At this stage of "ScrumMastering", Stacia's wisdom can effectively guide ScrumMasters who are becoming truly hopeless struggling with more and more seemingly irremediable Scrum fallout (while sparing them the pain Stacia has already gone through on their behalf, paving the way for them to succeed). In the book, Stacia likens the ScrumMaster to the skilled rider of a horse, implying techniques for dealing with the horse at any given moment in a variety of situations. Stacia extends this comparison to present some of the worst Scrum "horse" behaviors, common situations causing them and invaluable techniques for dealing with them in a variety of real organizational contexts.
Also described are fictional ScrumMaster "personas" many of us have encountered (or have been or still are!), identifying the shortcomings for each. "The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook" is a highly-recommended, real first, unlike other Scrum resources before it. It shares both practical and spiritual lessons flowing from deep personal knowledge absorbed over a very long time in Scrum's trenches, coming from a ScrumMaster that, as Ken Schwaber (co -inventor of Scrum) would say, really "gets it". Bravo!
July 25, 2016
This is surely the best book ever that I have read on this topic! I am not a scrum master (yet) formally, but in the teams and organizations where I am working I always try to introduce some elements of this and actually in one of the projects basically the coaching was really happening from me from the background. Oh I wish I have read all of this great information covered by the book back then! There were many times when I knew what we do wrong, but it is different when you only know what is bad and know what you should do from that skill to provide real guidance even against draft in the direction you are facing.
I agree with most of the contents here and I feel the things that she describes as it happened with me more or less. I don't know if the contents are really this usable even if you are not through someone trying to do "waterscrum", "scrumfalling" or "fragile" or even literal waterfall in the worst way and you try to understand what the hell is wrong with them and being able to change this at least a little bit - but I hope the contents are usable even if you don't have this experience!
Actually what is the most important is that the book not only covers scrum processes, not only shows what a scrum master do "physically", but embraces the scrum values and mindset. I have met people having certifications of being scrum masters who just do "managed scrum" and try to implement scrum as a process. This never works and not only because they water the scrum down a little bit and implement "code freezes", old style testing phases, old style contracts and old style everything and hold "daily scrum meetings" in a two-weekly fashion (added extra is that they still call it daily stand up even though it is not daily and not standing haha) - but more importantly what counts is that even when they implement everything, nothing works if the think about scrum as a process and toolset and not a mindset!
This book shows that SCRUM is a mindset and not a magic bullet process toolkit, nor a thing that is there for you to control people in a different way. If there are project managers on your team, no scrum masters at all and have system plans, weird phases you might do incremental development - but this is not scrum. It is so sad that people think they do scrum, when they do everything against its values and this book helps a lot in practical situations like that. Really a must-read for any scrum masters or wanna-be-scrum-masters this book even helps you if you are a pm looking into agile or a developer who want to take on other kinds of rules sometimes.
Extra bonus for the last chapter - even though it is not polished as much as the other parts of the book. Also extra bonus for those stories that are about how to fail miserably in having fear and not accepting the new mindset and killing scrum with the old scientific management methods.
A scrum master is a change agent and scrum is not a goal to reach or processes to apply, but a continuous process development mindset that unearth many already existing problems. This is why it is hard to live up to it in an organization.
I would add however that those who are not "infected" by the old ways of overdoing everything and paradoxically not doing anything properly - so for those who came out young of universities of kept a good mindset through ages - they can really easily understand scrum values and want to work like that. This is nice as new teams will apply better ways easier, however this book helps to understand what is the difference between the new and the old. This book helps to understand the nature of the waterfall infection more and what kind of illusions it feeds...
I agree with most of the contents here and I feel the things that she describes as it happened with me more or less. I don't know if the contents are really this usable even if you are not through someone trying to do "waterscrum", "scrumfalling" or "fragile" or even literal waterfall in the worst way and you try to understand what the hell is wrong with them and being able to change this at least a little bit - but I hope the contents are usable even if you don't have this experience!
Actually what is the most important is that the book not only covers scrum processes, not only shows what a scrum master do "physically", but embraces the scrum values and mindset. I have met people having certifications of being scrum masters who just do "managed scrum" and try to implement scrum as a process. This never works and not only because they water the scrum down a little bit and implement "code freezes", old style testing phases, old style contracts and old style everything and hold "daily scrum meetings" in a two-weekly fashion (added extra is that they still call it daily stand up even though it is not daily and not standing haha) - but more importantly what counts is that even when they implement everything, nothing works if the think about scrum as a process and toolset and not a mindset!
This book shows that SCRUM is a mindset and not a magic bullet process toolkit, nor a thing that is there for you to control people in a different way. If there are project managers on your team, no scrum masters at all and have system plans, weird phases you might do incremental development - but this is not scrum. It is so sad that people think they do scrum, when they do everything against its values and this book helps a lot in practical situations like that. Really a must-read for any scrum masters or wanna-be-scrum-masters this book even helps you if you are a pm looking into agile or a developer who want to take on other kinds of rules sometimes.
Extra bonus for the last chapter - even though it is not polished as much as the other parts of the book. Also extra bonus for those stories that are about how to fail miserably in having fear and not accepting the new mindset and killing scrum with the old scientific management methods.
A scrum master is a change agent and scrum is not a goal to reach or processes to apply, but a continuous process development mindset that unearth many already existing problems. This is why it is hard to live up to it in an organization.
I would add however that those who are not "infected" by the old ways of overdoing everything and paradoxically not doing anything properly - so for those who came out young of universities of kept a good mindset through ages - they can really easily understand scrum values and want to work like that. This is nice as new teams will apply better ways easier, however this book helps to understand what is the difference between the new and the old. This book helps to understand the nature of the waterfall infection more and what kind of illusions it feeds...
October 23, 2014
In my dozen years of working as a ScrumMaster, I have read numerous books and papers that have attempted to describe the role of the ScrumMaster and how to best fulfill it. To my dismay many of the works by prominent names in the Agile Community were a complete waste of time. Others were adequate, but none has been as thorough, thoughtful, and useful as The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook. Stacia Viscardi draws upon a wealth of real-world experience to provide not only a comprehensive guide to all of the Scrum meetings and artifacts, but also an in-depth guide to the philosophy and principles necessary to be great team facilitator.
I disagree with the reviewers who don't recommend this book for beginning ScrumMasters. I found that Chapter 1 provided a clear, concise description of the process, the roles and responsibilities, and the required meetings, of a Scrum team. This information could provide even a complete novice with a solid foundation upon which to get started. The rest of this manuscript provides insight into the challenges one can expect to meet and how to best address them. I would have loved to have had this book to serve as an additional "Scrum Buddy" in my formative days as a ScrumMaster.
As an experienced practitioner, I found that this work challenges me to continue to grow and increase my skill-set in order to help my teams to provide the greatest possible value to our organization. I particularly liked the coaching provided on ways a ScrumMaster can assist in transitioning an existing culture to Scrum-based set of values, beliefs and behaviors.
The author's ability to present an enormous amount of complex ideas in a manner that is easy to grasp quickly, makes this work a thoroughly enjoyable read. Her wit, candor and writing style, make this book feel more like an easy conversation with a great mind, rather than a dry lecture, a boring manual, or a sales pitch. My only complaint with this book is that it wasn't around sooner!
I disagree with the reviewers who don't recommend this book for beginning ScrumMasters. I found that Chapter 1 provided a clear, concise description of the process, the roles and responsibilities, and the required meetings, of a Scrum team. This information could provide even a complete novice with a solid foundation upon which to get started. The rest of this manuscript provides insight into the challenges one can expect to meet and how to best address them. I would have loved to have had this book to serve as an additional "Scrum Buddy" in my formative days as a ScrumMaster.
As an experienced practitioner, I found that this work challenges me to continue to grow and increase my skill-set in order to help my teams to provide the greatest possible value to our organization. I particularly liked the coaching provided on ways a ScrumMaster can assist in transitioning an existing culture to Scrum-based set of values, beliefs and behaviors.
The author's ability to present an enormous amount of complex ideas in a manner that is easy to grasp quickly, makes this work a thoroughly enjoyable read. Her wit, candor and writing style, make this book feel more like an easy conversation with a great mind, rather than a dry lecture, a boring manual, or a sales pitch. My only complaint with this book is that it wasn't around sooner!
June 6, 2013
This book is available at the publishers website here
August 26, 2015
Simple
Focus on Scrum Master role, not the whole Agile process
Focus on Scrum Master role, not the whole Agile process
Read
September 6, 2018Location: GG7 IRC
Accession No: DL030112
Accession No: DL030112
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews