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No heroics. If you need a hero to get things done, you have a problem. Heroic effort should be viewed as a failure of planning.

While this is a good (and entertaining) book, I’m not quite sure who to recommend it to. I got this as study material after I had booked a Scrum course. But it was actually more a companion book. Our coach told us on the first day that we don’t need to read it to bolster our chances of passing the assessment. I would go a little further and recommend not to read it shortly before the assessment because it occasionally contains contradictory information to the current Scrum Guide. But that’s not a knock on the book. It has been published in 2014, and Scrum, being so much about adapting, has itself adapted since then.

Is this book outdated then? No, not at all. You see, this isn’t a textbook. It is a firsthand account of how Scrum came to be. Or more precisely, about the ideas and the philosophy behind Scrum and how they drove the development of it. It is told by one of its inventors, using real life examples of when and how Scrum helped to get projects over the line. A broad range of them, from the FBI’s work on a program that was supposed to prevent another 9/11 to a friend of the author using Scrum to organize his wedding.

Sutherland tells the story of his baby in an entertaining, often funny, and sometimes a little self-congratulatory voice. He clearly doesn’t think much of traditional project management and makes his contempt for Waterfall known at various points in the book. He’s a captivating storyteller, though.

On the first day of the course our coach asked us why we were here. I said something like, “You know, I’ve been working on a couple of projects and they turned out fine, but I don’t really know what I’m doing. It’s time I start filling my toolbox.� He started laughing. “Dennis, to that I can only tell you this: Forget about the tools. This is the course of common sense.�
And this is where this book wildly succeeds. There are many moments where you think, Of course. Why are we not doing this? It’s so much easier that way.

So, who to recommend this to? I can’t answer that. I will answer the “when�, though. Read this before you start your Scrum course. I promise, it will make you excited about the whole thing.

And remember, it’s not just in business that time is important. Time makes up your life, so wasting it is actually a slow form of suicide.