The Scrum Fieldbook summary

Let’s say you’re getting into the real estate game. You want to buy an old house, fix it up, and put it back on the market, new and improved, for a hefty profit. Seems like a pretty straightforward task, right?

Well, that depends. Once you buy that fixer-upper, you may find it requires a lot of fixing up. The floors need to be replaced, the plumbing is leaky, and the walls are an awful shade of orange. Where to even begin?

Imagine you’re an engineer at a large car company. From your day-to-day experience on the factory floor, you realize that upgrading a piece of equipment could significantly boost productivity. Now, all you have to do is get permission.

So, you write up a purchasing request to your manager. Then, she passes it to the central planning group. The planning group generates a budget for the finance board. Then, the finance board goes to the regional VP, who goes to managing directors, and so on, and so on. By the time you get your part, it’s already obsolete.

Financial fraud was big business for Russell Wassendorf Sr. As chairman of the Peregrine Financial Group, he used fake bank statements to fleece investors of more than $200 million. But, preventing financial fraud can be big business, too. Just ask the founders of Confirmation.com.

This enterprising start-up uncovered Wassendorf’s scam using a revolutionary digital auditing software. Thanks to this high-profile success, the small company was in high demand. Yet, there was a problem: it couldn’t keep up. The company’s programmers worked day and night, but they couldn’t scale their product fast enough for their growing customer base.

Before founding Scrum Inc., J.J. Sutherland worked as a producer for NPR’s morning news radio show, Morning Edition. One day, while planning the show, a colleague rejected his proposed script. She said there was a rule against putting two interview segments back-to-back.

To Sutherland, this seemed like a strange rule that hampered the show’s creativity. So, he looked into its origins. After making a few calls, he discovered it began in 1978. Back then, the studio’s rudimentary equipment couldn’t seamlessly transition between two interview tapes. Of course, with digital technology, this was no longer an issue. Yet, producers still obeyed the old rule decades later.

Back in 2015, the big data experts at 3M Health Information Systems had a problem. They were in charge of updating the medical databases of hospitals all around the United States. The old databases tracked and measured health outcomes using 14,000 unique codes. The new system boosted that number to 140,000 codes — that's a serious tenfold increase.

Still, 3M was up to the challenge and instituted Scrum to accomplish its goal. Yet, after a few weeks, it was behind schedule. Teams were overwhelmed, Sprints were failing, and no one was feeling optimistic.

Imagine you’re running the perfect Scrum. You’ve thoroughly defined Backlogs, your Sprints are always hitting their mark, and your teams have never been happier. After a few weeks, you deliver your product, a flashy and functional flip phone.

But, wait – the year is 2008. Apple’s iPhone is the hottest thing on the market. No one cares about your new phone because it doesn’t even have a touch screen. This exact disaster scenario happened to Nokia. While the company was excellent at most aspects of Scrum, its Product Owners hadn’t properly assessed what customers wanted. As a result, all their Sprints produced the wrong product.

For decades, Markem-Imaje has been an international leader in making industrial printers. By the mid-2000s, it had a pretty stable production cycle. First, it would introduce a new model. Then, it would spend the following weeks dispatching what they called “Tiger Teams” to troubleshoot all the inevitable defects.

Obviously, the company wanted to skip that second part, so it gave Scrum a shot. It created Scrum Teams for every aspect of the development cycle from software and technical design to marketing and quality assurance. It held daily stand-up meetings for team members to share their progress.