The Scrum Fieldbook

The first clusters of backlog items are related to the Agile Manifesto and the usage of Scrum itself. Important but the information can be found in other books too. The other clusters will move you into the master class. Have a look at some examples from the book related to specific backlog items:

- Decision latency as a result of a study from The Standish Group. How much time is wasted waiting for a decision to be made? Measure your meetings. More than 40% of decisions made in meetings are overturned. Think about the last time you or your organization faced a crisis. Could you have acted more quickly? How could you change your decision-making process next time?
- Too much structure, too much processes will have a negative impact on agility. If you have just enough structure to ride the edge of chaos, that’s where interesting things happen. Creativity blossoms and can be channeled. Ideas are generated and applied. There is freedom of expression but also some controls in place to focus.
- A structural reorganization emerged as the goal shifted from output (making sure everybody was busy) to outcome (getting to done).
- Know the power of no. Choices have to be made.
- Find your ba. It’s a shared space between individuals that is the foundation for knowledge creation. - When you are in a partnership or participating on a team or teams aligned on a single goal, you create something larger than the sum of the parts.
- Your structure is your culture. And your culture is your limits. A rigid structure begets a rigid cultural and product architecture.
- You need to create an environment that ensures the Scrum values are present. This is when you strike out at the bureaucracy that slows things down and frustrates everyone. But what structure should you have? Where do you begin? For the most part you do need some hierarchy, because you don’t want chaos, but you want just enough hierarchy – the minimal viable bureaucracy.
Once you reshape your structure, a new culture emerges. Organizations, families, people are all - complex adaptive systems.
- Focus maximum team effort on one item in the product backlog and get it done as soon as possible (swarming).
- Watch out for anti-patterns. The problem with à la carte Scrum. Use data for decisions, not opinions. Don’t outsource competence. If you outsource how to do it, you don’t internalize the knowledge. Remove them one by one.

Conclusion. A book about the world behind Scrum. It will help to expand your knowledge how to use Scrum to accelerate performance and getting things done. You got a lot of examples using Scrum in and outside IT. Definitely worth reading.