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Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time Hardcover – September 30, 2014
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In the future, historians may look back on human progress and draw a sharp line designating “before Scrum” and “after Scrum.” Scrum is that ground-breaking. It already drives most of the world’s top technology companies. And now it’s starting to spread to every domain where leaders wrestle with complex projects.
If you’ve ever been startled by how fast the world is changing, Scrum is one of the reasons why. Productivity gains of as much as 1200% have been recorded, and there’s no more lucid – or compelling – explainer of Scrum and its bright promise than Jeff Sutherland, the man who put together the first Scrum team more than twenty years ago.
The thorny problem Jeff began tackling back then boils down to this: people are spectacularly bad at doing things with agility and efficiency. Best laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross purposes to each other. And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars. Drawing on his experience as a West Point-educated fighter pilot, biometrics expert, early innovator of ATM technology, and V.P. of engineering or CTO at eleven different technology companies, Jeff began challenging those dysfunctional realities, looking for solutions that would have global impact.
In this book you’ll journey to Scrum’s front lines where Jeff’s system of deep accountability, team interaction, and constant iterative improvement is, among other feats, bringing the FBI into the 21st century, perfecting the design of an affordable 140 mile per hour/100 mile per gallon car, helping NPR report fast-moving action in the Middle East, changing the way pharmacists interact with patients, reducing poverty in the Third World, and even helping people plan their weddings and accomplish weekend chores.
Woven with insights from martial arts, judicial decision making, advanced aerial combat, robotics, and many other disciplines, Scrum is consistently riveting. But the most important reason to read this book is that it may just help you achieve what others consider unachievable – whether it be inventing a trailblazing technology, devising a new system of education, pioneering a way to feed the hungry, or, closer to home, a building a foundation for your family to thrive and prosper.
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Print length384 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherCrown Currency
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Publication dateSeptember 30, 2014
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Dimensions6.4 x 0.9 x 9.53 inches
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ISBN-10038534645X
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ISBN-13978-0385346450
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“Full of engaging stories and real-world examples. The project management method known as Scrum may be the most widely deployed productivity tool among high-tech companies. On a mission to put this tool into the hands of the broader business world for the first time, Jeff Sutherland succeeds brilliantly.”—Eric Ries, New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup
“Engaging, persuasive and extremely practical . . . Scrum provides a simple framework for solving what seem like intractable and complicated work problems. It’s hard to make forward progress when you can’t see your impediments clearly. Sutherland offers a lens to remedy that. Amazingly, this book will not only make your life at work and home easier, but also, better and happier.”—Shawn Achor, New York Times bestselling author of Before Happiness and The Happiness Advantage
“This book contains immense practical value that could be transformative for your company. If you have a project that requires people to accomplish, your first act should be to read and be guided by Scrum.”—Stephen Lundin, New York Times bestselling author of Fish: A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Performance
“Scrum is mandatory reading for any leader, whether they’re leading troops on the battlefield or in the marketplace. The challenges of today’s world don’t permit the luxury of slow, inefficient work. Success requires tremendous speed, enormous productivity, and an unwavering commitment to achieving results.”—General Barry McCaffrey
“Jeff Sutherland has written the essence of Scrum for the masses. This book elevates Scrum from a fix-it tool to a way of life.”—Hirotaka Takeuchi, Professor of Management Practice, Harvard Business School
“Jeff Sutherland's book masterfully speaks truth to the political complexities that easily stand in the way of getting a lot of work done in the least amount of time. The busy professionals who’ll likely be drawn to this book will find not only an effective manual for getting things done but, also, a how-to guide for living a meaningful life.”—John Maeda, Design Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
“This extraordinary book shows a new way to simplify your life and work, increase your focus, and get more done in less time than you ever thought possible.”—Brian Tracy, bestselling author of Eat that Frog and Time Power
“Engaging . . . Sutherland tackles the problem of the perennially late, over-budget project—and actually shows how to solve it. His fascinating examples of rescued projects will change the way you think and act.”—Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap, authors of Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom
About the Author
J. J. Sutherland is the CEO of Scrum Inc., a global leader in organizational change and Enterprise Agile Transformation, and the author of The Scrum Fieldbook: A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future. He is also an award-winning journalist who spent years covering wars, revolutions, and uprisings for NPR in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Libya.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Way the World Works Is Broken
Jeff Johnson was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be a good day. On March 3, 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation killed its biggest and most ambitious modernization project--the one that was supposed to prevent another 9/11 but that had devolved into one of the biggest software debacles of all time. For more than a decade the FBI had been trying to update its computer system, and it looked as if they would fail. Again. And now it was his baby.
He’d shown up at the FBI seven months earlier, lured there by the new Chief Information Officer, Chad Fulgham, whom he’d worked with at Lehman Brothers. Jeff was Assistant Director of the IT Engineering Division. He had an office on the top floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington, D.C. It was a big office. It even had a view of the Washington Monument. Little did Jeff know he’d end up in a windowless cinder-block office in the basement for much of the next two years, trying to fix something that everyone believed to be unfixable.
“It was not an easy decision,” Jeff says. He and his boss had decided to declare defeat and kill a program that had already taken nearly a decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. By that point, it made more sense to bring the project in-house and do it themselves. “But it needed to be done and done well.”
The project was the long-awaited computer system that would bring the FBI into the modern age. In 2010--the era of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google--the FBI was still filing most of its reports on paper. The system the Bureau used was called the Automated Case Support system. It ran on gigantic mainframe computers that had been state of the art sometime in the eighties. Many special agents didn’t even use it. It was just too cumbersome and too slow in an era of terror attacks and swift-moving criminals.
When an FBI agent wanted to do something--anything, really--from paying an informant to pursuing a terrorist to filing a report on a bank robber, the process wasn’t that different from what it had been thirty years earlier. Johnson describes it this way: “You would write up a document in a word processor and print out three copies. One would be sent up the approval chain. One would be stored locally in case that one got lost. And with the third you’d take a red pen--I’m not kidding, a red pen--and circle the key words for input into the database. You’d index your own report.”
When a request was approved, that paper copy would drift down from upstairs with a number on it. A number written on a piece of paper is how the FBI kept track of all its case files. This method was so antiquated and porous that it was blamed in part for the Bureau’s failure to “connect the dots” that showed various Al Qaeda activists entering the country in the weeks and months before 9/11. One office was suspicious of one person. Another wondered why so many suspicious foreigners were getting flight training. Another had someone on a watch list but never told anyone else. No one in the Bureau ever put it all together.
The 9/11 Commission drilled down after the attack and tried to discover the core reason it was allowed to happen. Analysts, said the Commission, couldn’t get access to the very information they were supposed to analyze. “The poor state of the FBI’s information systems,” reads the report, “meant that such access depended in large part on an analyst’s personal relationships with individuals in the operational units or squads where the information resided.”
Before 9/11, the FBI had never completed an assessment of the overall terrorism threat to the United States. There were a lot of reasons for this, from focus on career advancement to a lack of information sharing. But the report singled out lack of technological sophistication as perhaps the key reason the Bureau failed so dramatically in the days leading up to 9/11. “The FBI’s information systems were woefully inadequate,” the Commission’s report concludes. “The FBI lacked the ability to know what it knew: there was no effective mechanism for capturing or sharing its institutional knowledge.”
When senators started asking the Bureau some uncomfortable questions, the FBI basically said, “Don’t worry, we have a modernization plan already in the works.” The plan was called the Virtual Case File (VCF) system, and it was supposed to change everything. Not letting any crisis go to waste, officials said they only needed another $70 million on top of the $100 million already budgeted for the plan. If you go back and read press reports on VCF at the time, you’ll notice that the words revolutionary and transformation are used liberally.
Three years later, the program was killed. It didn’t work. Not even a little bit. The FBI had spent $170 million in taxpayer money to buy a computer system that would never be used--not a single line of code, or application, or mouse click. The whole thing was an unmitigated disaster. And this wasn’t simply IBM or Microsoft making a mistake. People’s lives were, quite literally, on the line. As Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told the Washington Post at the time:
We had information that could have stopped 9/11. It was sitting there and was not acted upon. . . . I haven’t seen them correct the problems. . . . We might be in the 22nd century before we get the 21st-century technology.1
It is rather telling that many of the people who were at the FBI when the Virtual Case File disaster happened aren’t there anymore.
Product details
- Publisher : Crown Currency (September 30, 2014)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 038534645X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385346450
- Item Weight : 15.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.4 x 0.9 x 9.53 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #13,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13 in Business Project Management (Books)
- #181 in Business Management (Books)
- #257 in Leadership & Motivation
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
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Jeff is the co-creator of Scrum and a leading expert on how this way of working has evolved to meet the needs of today's business. The framework he developed in 1993 and formalized in 1995 with Ken Schwaber has since been adopted by the vast majority of software development companies around the world. But Jeff realized that the benefits of Scrum are not limited to software and product development. He has adapted this successful strategy for many other industries including: finance, healthcare, higher education, telecom, energy, non-profits, and all types of hardware companies. As the Founder and Chairman of Scrum Inc., CEO of JVS Management Inc., Chief Scientist of Frequency Research Foundation, and Managing Partner of Tesla Investment Holdings LLC, Jeff sets the vision for success with Scrum, advanced technologies in healthcare, and investment portfolios. He continues tp improve the performance of organizations around the globe and has written extensively on use of the Scrum Framework for accelerated product development in all industries.
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JJ Sutherland is the CEO of Scrum Inc., a consulting and training firm that uses Scrum to rapidly deliver results in companies across the globe. He is the author of The Scrum Fieldbook: A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future, and coauthor of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, written with his father, Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum.
Previously, he was an award-winning Correspondent, Producer, and Baghdad Bureau Chief for NPR. He covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. He has won Dupont, Peabody, Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas awards for his work.
In his free time, JJ enjoys cooking complicated recipes, traveling to the four corners of the globe, and gaming. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.
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Sutherland writes in an engaging, straightforward manner. He loves stories and hates technical jargon, and the book is fun to read even when though I didn’t find every principle directly applicable to my situation. Speaking of application, no matter who you are, if you are in any kind of team leadership role—and I mean any kind—you will find value in this book. I highlighted pages like crazy, dreaming of ways I could implement the ideas.
The real value of Scrum is how quickly you could put Sutherland’s ideas into practice, and how quickly you would see real results. Also, the research and stories Sutherland provides to support his ideas are fascinating. Fascinating, but in many ways superfluous as the principles of Scrum are so common sense it’s ridiculous. Yeah, why don’t we work like this, I found myself thinking. Can an idea be so common sense and yet as counter-intuitive as Scrum seems to be? A frustrating, but intriguing paradox.
As I stated above, if you lead a team, in any capacity, that is trying to accomplish a goal in as little time as possible, Scrum can help you. It’s worth a read.
Please Note: This book was gifted as a part of the Blogging for Books Reviewers Program in exchange for my unbiased review of this work. This has in no way influenced my opinion or review of this work.
Though his will and magnificence alone, he buried General MacArthur, shouting, "There can be only one!"
His son fixed NPR, taking it from a middling lemonade-stand outfit to the national, public, and radio organ it is today. His son fixed it using Scrum (the only child Jeff truly cares for) and according to the transitive property of progeny accomplishment, Jeff actually fixed it.
Jeff actually revamped how the New York Times, Washington Post, and Tiger Beat produce their content, and without him, we'd be getting all of our news from Twitter and Facebook posts oh wait-
When Jeff thinks about how great he is, a single tear wells in his eye. Much like the phoenix's, Jeff's tears are known for their curative and life-restoring abilities.
He has stared into the face of God and said, "had you used Scrum to design these animals, we wouldn't have mosquitos. None of the stakeholders want them. Change or die."
Jeff is also partnered with OpenView Venture Partners. I know this because he mentions it as often as possible. Did you get that? "OpenView Venture Partners", where Imagination Meets Life (tm). Is this book basically an advertisement for OpenView Venture Partners?
Whoa, did someone say OpenView Venture Partners?
Long story short, if you can look past the auto-fellatio, this book offers a good introduction to the Agile framework, its history, and many interesting examples of its use across industries.
But I honestly feel like I need to go read Donald Trump and Kanye's autobiographies to remember what (relative) humility sounds like.
There were so many take aways in this book that I absolutely loved. I should probably go back through the book before writing this, but historically, if I do not write now, it won’t get done.
By far, my favorite chapter was chapter 3 Teaming. On so many levels, this chapter hit so many points that I really believe.
Overall, in reading this book, it made me reflect on the organizations where I have worked - at our best, we had similar “business practices” - transparency, KNOWN priorities, a cadence to re-address work that needed to be done, etc. This book provides a framework to systemized this, or not leave it to chance.
I do intend to go back through the book and draft my notes to operationalize the concepts. I believe this book could be a GAME-CHANGER for any organizations.
**Almost forgot, I really loved chapter 9 and the stories of how teachers in Denmark are using Scrum as a teach tool - or said differently, a co-creative / collaborative teaching environment where EVERYONE is involved in the Teaching.
Whoever is doing the most talking, is also doing the most learning.
I recommend this book to leaders and practitioners at EVERY level.
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Top reviews from other countries
This book is a must read for any body in the IT Industry, part of scrum team and more importantly this book is for anybody(project managers) who wants to streamline processes, get more valuable work and reduce waste, risk.
This book gives the why behind the Scrum Framework, The how can be read in the "Official Scrum Guide".
The Author who is the founder of Scrum shares his own experience and journey on how he found issues in typical processes of companies and what could be made better both on a procedural level and also the emotional and psychological level of employees. All the learnings in his career led him to device Scrum and promote it. This books sums it up!
A good read to cement the Scrum concepts and take it to long term memory:
1. Accountabilities- Scrum Master, Product Owner, Developers)
2. Artefacts-Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Increment
3. Commitments- Product Goal, Sprint Goal, Definition of Done
4. Events-Sprint, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective
5. 3 Pillars of Empiricism- Transparency, Adaption and Inspection.
6. Scrum Values- CCFOR- Courage, Commitment, Focus, Openness and Respect