The Scrum Fieldbook

The Scrum Fieldbook Plot Summary

Introduction

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, the ability to adapt quickly has become the difference between thriving and merely surviving. Organizations face unprecedented challenges - market disruptions, technological revolutions, and shifting customer expectations that demand a fundamentally different approach to work. The traditional ways of planning, executing, and delivering value are breaking down under the weight of complexity and accelerating change. What if there was a framework that could help you navigate this complexity? A method that could enable your teams to deliver twice the work in half the time while increasing quality and innovation? This isn't just a theoretical possibility - it's the practical reality for organizations that have embraced the power of Scrum. Throughout these pages, you'll discover how to reduce the cost of changing your mind, make decisions at lightning speed, focus on completion rather than busyness, and remove the impediments that are holding your teams back from reaching their full potential.

Chapter 1: Embrace Change as Your Competitive Advantage

Change isn't just inevitable - it's accelerating at a pace that can feel overwhelming. Moore's law showed us that computing power doubles approximately every two years while costs are cut in half. This exponential growth isn't just affecting technology; it's transforming every aspect of how we work and live. The organizations that thrive aren't fighting against this tide of change - they're surfing it, using it as propulsion to outpace competitors. Consider the story of Confirmation.com, a company that transformed the slow, painful process of financial data confirmation into something electronic, fast, and easy. Their platform connects accounting firms, financial institutions, law firms, and corporations to confirm financial data through a global network. Founder Brian Fox's motto reflects their mission: "We help the good guys catch the bad guys." In one telling example, Russell Wassendorf Sr., who had defrauded investors of over $200 million through falsified bank statements, was caught within days when Peregrine Financial Group was forced to begin using Confirmation.com's platform. For over a hundred years, the confirmation process was done on paper. Auditors would mail requests to banks asking if an institution actually had the claimed funds. Banks received thousands of these requests yearly, requiring manual checks of records and written responses. The process took weeks for each request. Confirmation.com transformed this into a matter of moments, routing requests through their secure network to get immediate responses. Starting with just four people in a garage in 2000, the company pioneered electronic confirmations, receiving seven patents along the way. Today, sixteen thousand accounting firms, four thousand banks, and five thousand law firms in 160 countries use their platform, confirming more than a trillion dollars of assets annually. But as they grew, they began missing deadlines and struggling with code quality. Everyone was busy, but they weren't getting things done. This is the core challenge Scrum addresses - moving from busyness to completion. Scrum provides a framework for embracing change rather than fighting it. By working in short cycles called Sprints, teams can get quick feedback, adapt their approach, and deliver value continuously. The key is making change cheap and easy rather than expensive and painful. To implement this approach in your organization, start by identifying where change is currently expensive. Look for long approval processes, rigid planning cycles, or places where feedback comes too late. Then create small, cross-functional teams empowered to make decisions and deliver incremental value. Finally, establish regular review points to gather feedback and adjust course accordingly. Remember that responsiveness to change is more valuable than adherence to a plan. Scrum isn't just about moving faster - it's about changing what's possible for your organization. By embracing change as your competitive advantage, you position yourself to thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Chapter 2: Reduce the Cost of Changing Your Mind

The true power of Scrum lies in its ability to make changing course inexpensive and painless. Traditional project management approaches treat change as an exception that requires formal processes, approvals, and often substantial rework. Scrum, by contrast, is built on the premise that change is inevitable and should be embraced rather than resisted. Joe Justice, a colleague who works primarily with companies producing physical goods like cars, rockets, and medical devices, has a simple refrain: "Scrum is about reducing the cost of changing your mind." This principle applies universally across industries and organizations. Consider how 3M handled one of its largest acquisitions - the $2 billion purchase of Scott Safety from Johnson Controls. Mark Anderson, who had recently attended Scrum training, was put in charge of this massive integration effort. Instead of creating elaborate, detailed plans for how every aspect of the integration would work, Mark took a different approach. He assembled a cross-functional team of Product Owners with expertise in finance, research and development, sales, marketing, and HR - all the areas that would need to be integrated for Scott Safety to become part of 3M. Each of these Product Owners had their own team, creating a network of teams all focused on delivering specific components of the integration. Rather than committing to a detailed year-long plan, they worked in one-week Sprints. Every Wednesday they would review the backlog, prioritize work for the coming week, estimate the effort required, and begin execution. They met three times weekly for fifteen-minute coordination sessions to keep alignment across all teams. The results were remarkable. On day one of the integration, all managers were in place, every employee had somewhere to report, and financial systems were ready immediately. The incredibly complex interlocking parts of a massive integration fit together precisely. Most importantly, when they identified three separate market opportunities late in the process, they could quickly pivot to take advantage of them - something that would have been nearly impossible with a traditional approach. To implement this approach in your organization, start by acknowledging that requirements will change during development. The Standish Group reports that in any project, 67 percent of requirements change during the process. People learn as they go, market conditions shift, and new opportunities emerge. Rather than creating elaborate change control processes, build your work approach around short cycles with frequent feedback points. Create cross-functional teams that can deliver complete pieces of value within these short cycles. Keep your backlog prioritized but flexible, allowing new insights to inform what you'll work on next. Most importantly, make sure your leadership understands that changing priorities isn't a sign of poor planning - it's a sign that you're learning and adapting. The essence of reducing the cost of changing your mind is making your entire system more responsive. When you can pivot quickly without massive waste, you create a sustainable competitive advantage that traditional organizations simply cannot match.

Chapter 3: Make Decisions Fast to Outpace Competition

In today's hypercompetitive landscape, the speed of decision-making often determines the speed of progress. Jim Johnson, founder and chairman of the Standish Group, discovered through extensive research that decision latency - the time between when it's clear a decision needs to be made and when it actually is made - is the root cause of most project failures. Johnson's research revealed a shocking truth: for projects where decisions could be made in under an hour, 58 percent succeeded. When decision time stretched beyond five hours, success rates plummeted to just 18 percent. This correlation between decision speed and project success held true across hundreds of projects globally. The finding was so startling that Johnson waited a year before publishing, verifying the data through presentations at business schools and workshops. Consider the contrast in decision-making approaches at a large automotive company. Their traditional system, called ringi, requires elaborate consensus-building for even simple decisions. An engineer requesting funds for equipment (already budgeted) must prepare extensive documentation including business cases, accounting data, and environmental reviews. This paper packet then requires signatures from multiple management levels across different departments - sometimes up to fifty signatures. The process typically takes four to five months for decisions involving mid-six-figure amounts. During this time, critical work is stalled, opportunities are missed, and competitors gain ground. The cost of this delay isn't just in lost time - it's in lost market position and competitive advantage. This company is now using Scrum to try to automate and streamline this process, making it visible and faster. In contrast, look at how U.S. Navy Commander Jon Haase implemented Scrum in his Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit (EODMU2). In this high-stakes environment where teams disarm everything from improvised explosives to weapons with nuclear, chemical, or biological payloads, speed with precision is essential. Haase structured Scrum with himself as Product Owner, his Executive Officer as Scrum Master, and key staff as Team Members. The results were remarkable - team velocity increased from 4 points per day to 50 points per day (a 1,250% improvement) in just eighteen months. Communication improved, priorities became clear, and team happiness became a metric that informed leadership decisions. Most importantly, timeboxing each activity forced the team to focus on what mattered most rather than getting lost in procedure. To accelerate decision-making in your organization, consider implementing these approaches: First, push decisions down to where the knowledge is - to the teams and individuals closest to the work. Second, create clear, simple escalation paths for decisions that truly need higher approval. Third, make decision delays visible and track their cost to the organization. Finally, establish timeboxes for different types of decisions - complex strategic decisions might get days, but routine decisions should be made in hours or less. Remember Napoleon Bonaparte's revolutionary military approach: "If you see the enemy, start shooting. Ride toward the sound of the guns!" This simple rule allowed French troops to self-organize and bring their forces to where they were needed without waiting for permission. Your organization needs similar clarity about when to act versus when to wait for approval. The most valuable competitive advantage in today's market isn't size or resources - it's the ability to move quickly, decisively, and with purpose. Make decisions fast, and you'll outpace competitors still waiting for approval.

Chapter 4: Focus on Completion, Not Busyness

In organizations worldwide, a dangerous illusion persists - the belief that keeping people busy equates to productivity. This misconception leads to a startling reality: according to assessments by Scrum Inc., approximately 30% of work being done in typical organizations directly opposes business goals. Of the remaining work, 64% produces features customers rarely or never use. In total, 75% of organizational effort is essentially wasted - either actively harmful or simply irrelevant. This problem manifests in familiar phrases like "We have multiple conflicting priorities" or "Everything is the number one priority." At one global materials company, this mindset led to over a hundred simultaneous projects with far fewer people to execute them. When Steve Daukas of Scrum Inc. asked them to put names on all these projects, they ran out of names around project seventy. The result? Nothing was getting finished. The pattern repeats across industries. At Confirmation.com, their biggest challenge wasn't starting projects but completing them. They had a legacy system that worked well but had accumulated features over years without architectural consideration. Employees spent more time fixing old mistakes than building a new, more modern system. Everyone was busy, but forward progress had stalled. The solution begins with making a fundamental shift from focusing on output (how much stuff teams produce) to outcomes (the actual value delivered). This requires defining what "done" actually means before starting work. When a team picks up an item from their product backlog, they should clearly understand the definition of done for that piece and how it relates to other components. Consider how the Stealth Space Company approached this challenge when building rockets. Their first iteration had tightly coupled systems - the engine, avionics, and structures were so interconnected that changing one component required extensive modifications to others. When an avionics circuit board failed, they had to pull out all boards and redo hundreds of connections with rare, expensive materials. The solution was to create stable interfaces between systems - standardized connectors that allowed components to be swapped independently, like Lego blocks. Similarly, Spotify uses stable interfaces between software components. Teams working on playlists can innovate freely as long as they maintain consistent data formats and connections with other system parts. This architecture allows teams to move quickly without breaking the entire system. To implement this approach, start by having each team create a clear, ordered backlog with well-defined acceptance criteria for each item. Then focus on completing one item at a time rather than starting many. The manufacturing principle of "one-piece continuous flow" applies here - move each piece of work to completion before starting the next. Finally, track and celebrate completions rather than activity. The human brain literally cannot multitask effectively. Research shows that even brief interruptions can derail focus for thirty minutes or more. Just as drivers using cell phones look directly at hazards without seeing them because their attention is divided, workers juggling multiple priorities fail to see critical issues right in front of them. By shifting focus from keeping people busy to getting work done, you'll not only increase productivity but also boost morale. Nothing is more satisfying than seeing tangible results from your efforts. Focus on completion, not busyness, and watch your organization transform.

Chapter 5: Build Stable Teams That Finish Early

In most organizations, when a project ends, successful teams are disbanded and reshuffled. This practice, while common, destroys one of your most valuable assets: the collective capability that emerges when people work together effectively over time. Building stable teams that finish early creates a powerful engine for acceleration and innovation. The science behind team stability is compelling. Bruce Tuckman's famous model shows that teams progress through stages: forming (testing boundaries), storming (conflict), norming (establishing roles), and performing (using team structure to drive results). This progression takes time and investment. When teams reach the performing stage, they develop what researchers call "transactive memory" - a shared mental model where team members know who knows what, can anticipate needs, and work together seamlessly. Rally Software analyzed data from over 75,000 teams and found that fully dedicated team members (those working on just one team) are nearly twice as productive as those split across multiple teams. When people work on multiple teams simultaneously, the context switching kills productivity and prevents the formation of true team cohesion. At 3M Health Information Systems, this insight proved transformative. Before implementing Scrum, most people worked on half a dozen teams or projects simultaneously. When they moved to dedicated teams focused on their top priority - adapting to the new ICD-10 medical coding system - the results were immediate. Teams that had struggled to meet deadlines suddenly delivered on time. Their velocity increased by 160% in just one year. Equally important is the pattern of "Teams That Finish Early Accelerate Faster." When OpenView Venture Partners analyzed their Scrum implementations, they discovered that teams who routinely finished their sprint work early continued to accelerate, while teams that filled every sprint to capacity maintained the same velocity without improvement. By implementing "Yesterday's Weather" - only committing to the amount of work completed in the previous sprint - teams build confidence and momentum that drives continuous improvement. Another key pattern is "Swarming" - focusing the entire team on completing one item at a time rather than having each team member work on separate tasks. Like a Formula One pit crew working in perfect synchronization to get a car back on the track in seconds, teams that swarm on work items complete them faster and with higher quality than teams where everyone works in isolation. To build stable teams that finish early in your organization, start by keeping team membership consistent over time. Assign people to a single team rather than spreading them across multiple efforts. Implement one-week sprints to get faster feedback and tighter learning cycles. Use the "Yesterday's Weather" pattern to avoid overcommitment, and encourage teams to swarm on the most important work items. Create an "Interrupt Buffer" - set aside a percentage of capacity for unexpected work, and have Product Owners protect teams from unnecessary interruptions. When interruptions exceed the buffer, abort the sprint and replan rather than pretending everything is fine while knowing the team will fail to deliver. Finally, implement "Scrumming the Scrum" - identify one improvement each sprint and make it the top priority for the next sprint. By systematically removing impediments, teams can double their velocity in just a few sprints. The most successful organizations don't just form teams - they nurture and protect them, allowing them to reach their full potential. When teams finish early, they have time to innovate, improve, and accelerate even faster.

Chapter 6: Create the Minimum Viable Bureaucracy

Organization structure shapes culture, and culture defines what's possible. A rigid structure creates a rigid culture and product architecture, making change exponentially more difficult. The key is finding the minimum viable bureaucracy - just enough structure to enable coordination without stifling innovation and speed. Riccardo Mariti discovered this principle when transforming his London restaurant, Riccardo's. After decades in the restaurant industry, known for its strict hierarchies and abusive management, he was ready to sell his business. Then he discovered Scrum and decided to try something radical. He eliminated all management positions, making everyone (including himself) equal team members. He offered profit sharing, eliminated titles, and created a flat organization where teams figured out together how to best serve customers. The impact was immediate and profound. Response time to customer issues dropped by 70%. Scheduling, which had been a management nightmare taking hours each week, became a simple process where team members collectively arranged shifts on a visible board. This transparency revealed that managers had been allocating unnecessary shifts, reducing profit by 10-20%. When the team saw this data, they self-organized to optimize staffing without any management intervention. This illustrates Conway's law, which states that organizations "are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." Your product will mirror your organization's communication patterns. If your organization is hierarchical, rigid, and slow to communicate, your products will have those same characteristics. At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, this principle transformed how art was displayed. For over a century, the museum organized exhibits by department - paintings, sculpture, ceramics - reflecting their organizational structure. During a decade-long renovation, they reorganized displays by time period rather than medium, allowing visitors to see how different artists of the same era influenced each other. This required cross-functional teams of curators to work together in ways they never had before. Traditional management often becomes an impediment in this new structure. Instead of telling teams what to do, leaders must become mentors who help teams make better decisions. This shift requires courage - the willingness to push decisions down to teams and hold them accountable for results rather than activities. To create the minimum viable bureaucracy, start by forming an Executive Action Team empowered to change the organization without asking permission. This team should include representatives from all key functions (legal, HR, business, technology) who can make decisions that stick. Focus initially on one project or product where teams control the entire value stream from idea to execution. Establish a mechanism for impediments to rise quickly to the Executive Action Team. At Saab Aerospace, they coordinate about 2,000 people building fighter jets through a series of 15-minute daily meetings. Teams meet at 7:30 AM, Scrum Masters at 7:45, and by 8:30 the Executive Action Team receives problems only they can fix, with a commitment to resolve them within 24 hours. The number of layers should match your organization's needs - some areas might need two layers, others just one. Only coordinate what's absolutely necessary. What you want is just enough hierarchy to enable teams to move quickly without creating unnecessary bureaucracy. The results can be remarkable. At a hospital, process improvement using Scrum cut operating room turnover time in half - from an hour to thirty minutes - without sacrificing quality. This wasn't achieved through new technology or additional staff, but by examining and improving the process itself, allowing the hospital to treat more patients and save more lives. Your structure is your culture, and your culture defines what's possible. Create the minimum viable bureaucracy, and you'll unleash your organization's full potential.

Chapter 7: Remove Impediments That Slow You Down

The journey to extraordinary performance begins with identifying and systematically removing the obstacles that prevent your teams from reaching their potential. In Scrum, impediments aren't just annoyances - they're the primary targets for improvement that can transform your organization's capabilities. At 3M Health Information Systems, this approach led to remarkable results. When David Frazee (CTO) and Tammy Sparrow discovered Scrum in 2014, they faced a critical deadline: adapting their systems to the new ICD-10 medical coding system, which expanded from 14,000 codes to 141,000. With over 5,000 customers depending on their system for insurance reimbursements, failure wasn't an option, yet confidence in meeting the October 1, 2015 deadline was low. The first impediment they identified was their inability to prioritize. Teams were working on too many things simultaneously, even though the ICD-10 transition was clearly their top priority. Working with Scrum Inc., they launched five teams focused exclusively on this critical goal. They implemented one-week Sprints to get faster feedback and tighter learning loops. Using the "Scrumming the Scrum" pattern, each team identified one improvement every Sprint and made it their top priority for the next Sprint. This systematic approach to impediment removal doubled their velocity within months. When October 1 arrived, their systems worked flawlessly, and over the next year, their velocity increased by 160%. Another critical pattern they implemented was "Good Housekeeping" - maintaining a clean product and work environment every day. This principle was powerfully demonstrated at the Red River Army Depot in Texas, which transformed from fixing just three Humvees a week to rebuilding forty a day - a 6,600% improvement. They achieved this by changing how they worked rather than changing the people doing the work. Instead of attempting to repair damaged vehicles, they disassembled them completely and rebuilt them with improved components every sixteen minutes. They implemented the Toyota Production System principle of never letting a known defect pass to the next station. The workers adopted the motto: "We build it like our lives depend on it, because theirs do," referring to the soldiers who would use these vehicles in combat zones. To identify and remove impediments in your organization, start with measuring happiness as a leading indicator. In every Sprint Retrospective, ask team members how happy they are with their role, their team, and the company on a scale of 1-5. Then ask what would make them happier. Teams will naturally focus on addressing the concerns of the least happy members, creating a continuous improvement cycle driven by engagement rather than compliance. Implement the "Emergency Procedure" when things go wrong. Just as pilots have checklists for emergencies, Scrum teams should have a standard response when they realize they won't meet their Sprint goals: 1) Change how the work is done, 2) Get help, 3) Reduce scope, or 4) If necessary, abort the Sprint and replan. This approach prevents teams from continuing down a path to failure. Make impediments visible to leadership. Create a board in a prominent location showing which impediments have been raised to leadership, who is responsible for fixing each one, and how many days have passed since it was identified. This visibility creates accountability and demonstrates commitment to improvement. The most important impediment to remove might be the belief that things cannot change. Organizations often become accustomed to dysfunction, accepting it as "just the way things are." The reality is that every impediment can be addressed through systematic, continuous improvement. By removing one obstacle at a time, Sprint after Sprint, you can transform what your organization is capable of achieving. Remember that speed has a quality all its own. By systematically removing impediments, you create an environment where teams can achieve twice the work in half the time - not through heroic effort, but through the elimination of waste and the enhancement of flow.

Summary

Throughout these pages, we've explored how Scrum can fundamentally transform not just how work gets done, but what becomes possible for organizations and individuals. The framework provides a powerful antidote to the paralysis that often sets in when facing complexity and rapid change. As we've seen in examples ranging from fighter jet manufacturing to restaurant management, the principles of Scrum apply universally wherever humans come together to create value. The true power of Scrum lies not in rigid adherence to practices but in embracing its core values and principles: transparency, inspection, adaptation, courage, and connection. As Carsten Jakobsen of Systematic put it after implementing Scrum and seeing defects drop 41% while velocity doubled, "It's the only time I've ever seen all those metrics improve at once." The choice is now yours - to continue with traditional approaches that increasingly fail to deliver in our complex world, or to embrace change as your competitive advantage. Remember that Scrum is not about managing complexity - it's about harnessing it. The future isn't fixed, and with these tools in hand, you can begin changing what's possible for your organization today.

About Author

Loading...

J.J. Sutherland

Read more