The People's Scrum: Agile Ideas for Revolutionary Transformation

Successful product development comes from happy, impassioned individuals and highly motivated, energized teams.

leader as cultivator rather than controller.

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.

One of the kindest services a scrum master can do for his or her team and for the organization as a whole is to create transparency—to radiate information. Transparency allows us to see flaws, and when we see the flaws we can make the choice to do something about them. We can stop being victims of process and start being warriors of change.

We keep wanting to pretend what we do is an engineering discipline, but unfortunately, it’s a craft where the skill of the craftsperson dictates success.

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

The workflow board, when truly understood, becomes the spiritual home of the team, its church if you like. Team members gather around the board to argue, discuss and innovate, to align themselves with each other, to course-correct, to learn, to celebrate.

These three roles constitute the scrum team; their tendency to pull in three different directions—profit, mastery and the greater good—is what generates the healthy conflict and tension required to reach previously unimagined levels of innovation and creativity, and allows scrum teams to deliver true value.