The People's Scrum: Agile Ideas for Revolutionary Transformation

When you adhere to the guidelines of scrum, and understand the underlying principles, a process will emerge that is suited to your own context.

Agile practice without self-organization is just another management-led process, and will stay rooted in the existing status quo.

When you remove a practice, you can safely do so if you retain the value that practice was providing. As an example, dropping ideal developer days as a measure and not estimating at all may be unwise, but replacing this technique with a relative measure, such as tee-shirt sizing, is smart; it retains the value that estimation provides and brings be

Since 2005 I have discouraged all teams I work with from measuring and tracking in hours. Using the “one-day task” rule will very quickly uncover impediments and dysfunction. It will also free up your developers to actually focus on the work, and off the numbers. The ultimate goal is to take focus off the tasks altogether, and focus on the actual r

People on the business end of the creative process need to define desired outcomes that describe audience and value. And as they are likely not developing solutions themselves, they need to be completely feet-off the solution pathway, unless specifically invited to step in.

People are puzzles waiting to be solved, but mostly unsolvable. We selectively and cautiously share our stories, observing social mores and cultural etiquette; we distribute ourselves and hide behind masks. It is hard to gather all the pieces back into one place, to peel away the facades and see the core beauty of another. Though difficult, it shou

There are only two weeks in a two-week sprint. There are only seven people on a seven-person team. Going faster can only mean going crappier.

Distributed teams are not teams; they are at best a collection of people who communicate regularly.

scrum makes one promise only: It will help you fail in thirty days or less. That’s it. Organizational dysfunction will begin to surface as the work plays out. Healing from that dysfunction is up to you.

Distributed teams require coordination and management and thus can never be truly self-organizing.