Reddit mentions of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

• Clean Code is a really good programming book. It's technical in that it gives you best practice, but you don't need a laptop or to code to follow along, you can just absorb the information and follow along with the simple samples (even if it's not your primary coding language).
  
  
• The Clean Coder is a great book about how to build software professionally. It focuses on a lot of the softer skills a programmer needs.
  
  
• Scrum: The Art of doing twice the work in half the time is a great introduction to scrum and why you want to use it. Agile (and scrum in particular) can have a major improvement on the productivity of development teams. I work for a large technology company and we've seen improvements in the range of 300% for some teams after adopting scrum. Now our entire company is scrumming.
  
  
• Getting Things Done has personally helped me work more efficiently by sorting work efficiently. Having a system is key.
  
  
• How to Win Friends and Influence People I often recommend devs on our team read this because it helps with interpersonal communication in the office.
  
  
• Notes to a Software Tech Lead is a great book so you can understand what a good lead is like and hopefully one day move up in your career and become one.
  
  

If you are interested in Scrum, I'd recommend reading Software in 30 days and/or Scrum, the art of doing twice the work in half the time or at the very least, read the Scrum Guide. For agile in a larger sense, there are plenty of good books, like The Art of Agile Development or Agile with GUTS

Scrum is a form of Agile.

Having a team come in to teach Scrum is ok. I did that once. However, I got a lot more out of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X

Good idea. Currently selling for $13 used on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X

I agree with the other comments here.

What are you trying to achieve by getting your directs to put more time in at the office? Are they not getting projects done on time? In most cases, working additional hours past the normal results in a dramatic reduction in employee effectiveness and satisfaction. Jeff Sutherland (one of the founders of Scrum) has an entire chapter on this in his latest book.

Also, the sandwich feedback method is terrible. It is totally transparent and your directs will not respect the lack of candor. I personally prefer the Manager Tools Feedback Model of 1)asking permission to share feedback 2) stating the action 3) stating the consequences of that action. It is super simple and straight to the point. It works for both positive and corrective feedback.

Thanks for the resource – bookmarked! I'm currently reading Sutherland's book, it's surprisingly really well written. https://smile.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X?sa-no-redirect=1

Our dev team thinks they work in agile, but they're definitely 'scrum but'. Also it's a sensitive political situation for me. The times I've even remotely showed interest in integrating our teams or getting involved, I've been reprimanded. So unfortunately I don't think my current situation is going to provide much in the way of opportunity to learn hands-on. I'm going to continue to see if I can find a creative solution outside of the dev side, but I'm more resigned to making the change wholesale with a new place. Also, I did sign up for the 2-day training in a few weeks, so I am committed, and hopefully soon, certified.

Curious - what kind of stormy waters have you experienced?

Some additional information can help a lot in recommendations. I'd like to know the following:

What is your team size?

Is your team co-located (all in one place)?

Can you describe the type and flow of your work?

Do you have open channels of communication with your customer, and if not, do you have people who can stand in and more or less speak for the customer?

Do you think the leadership would be on board for a drastic change?

It is unlikely that the visibility and continuous improvement of an agile framework will not bring about significant improvements within your company. Also, if you are the type that thrives on facilitating a team and helping them grow to excellence, then this will be a great career change. Personally, I love my job and enjoy every day. With the above simple questions answered, it would be a lot easier to spark a conversation.

Jeff Southerland's book (already mentioned) is a great intro for Scrum, and not a boring read. I also like David Anderson's Kanban, if you have a more steady continuous workflow like a compliance or support team, this can fit better. Also, a good read. The Scrum Guide is rather short and is the definitive guide for the Scrum framework. Exactly how you execute under that framework is largely up to the team, but everything is based on the idea of iterative continuous improvement. Once you get this idea down in practice, you'll be hooked.

This scrum book specifically values regular time off, and even espouses a 4 day week.

SCRUM! a good overall book is SCRUM

Have you ever read Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time? If not, I'd highly recommend picking it up. Scrum is a framework teams can use to complete complex projects.

As the new person on the team, perhaps you could help the company most by bringing entrepreneurial structure and philosophy. Presumably, the consolidation will mean that you're doing more work with less people (and thereby, you need to be more efficient). Most people think of using the Scrum framework strictly for software development, but in reality it's a framework that can be applied to any environment. Given that the team only will have four individuals, using this methodology will ensure that the team remains empowered and maintains the level of transparency necessary to successfully combine entities.

I'm just now implementing Scrum formally within our company. For me, at the time, it's all upside. I have a CEO & COO that are non-technical (at least as far as software development is concerned), that have really been struggling to understand the team's productivity in a meaningful way.

For me, being able to plan sprints and develop a velocity has been a game-changer. It's very easy now for them to prioritize work and know with a high degree of confidence where we will be after our sprint is finished. That's very important to them, so Scrum really simplifies my life because it's much easier to plan with them using the tools it provides.

I personally purchased Jeff Sutherland's book "Scrum", who was a co-creator, through Audible. Worked pretty well as an e-book, since the complexity is pretty low and most of it was conceptual. https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X/

This is the canonical book:

https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X

It's pretty short, just a couple hundred pages if I remember correctly. I think reading it would be a solid prerequisite for the team.

There are a number of companies that offer training classes and videos, though I have not been through one myself so I don't have recommendations!

(In our case, everybody on the team read the book, and management did the training)

At my old job we used Pivotal Tracker for task management. While it facilitates Scrum very nicely, it's certainly not Instant Scrum For Your Team In A Box(tm)! You'd want to have the team familiar with Scrum already.

Upper management is going to have to buy into the Scrum idea. This shouldn't be too hard, since it's got a lot of traction in the last decade or so and it's going to give them visibility and metrics which are things they probably crave.

Good luck!

One of the first books I read which brough my attention to the subject was:
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X

After that - take anything google throws at you ;)

Jeff Sutherland's book Agile: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time is a great read for anyone that hasn't practiced Agile.

http://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X

I think a start with SCRUM requires understanding of roots of this methodology, that is why I would start from reading (or re-reading if you are already familiar with the book) of Doing Twice the Work in Half a Time by Jeff Sutherland.
Then go for the Scrum Guide, it is all there.
I believe that right implementation of SCRUM requires 2 things: discipline (military roots) and shuhari concept from martial arts. In simple words, you need to start doing it step-by-step and it is obligatory to do it by the book, you will not master it in 1 day and SCRUM is always a process of a continuous improvement.

Start with the things that are simple to implement and give the best results:

- working in sprints (1 week is great);
- daily stand up;

- sprint review;

- retrospectives;

- backlog and user stories;

- deliver to production at the end of each sprint;

- focus on 1 user story at a time, etc, etc.


then you can go for certifications: CSM is a good way to start and understand if you want to keep on getting certificates and you would understand that there are many ways to keep on improving your SCRUM further.


don't forget that Jeff Sutherland has a bunch of online lectures about SCRUM @ https://www.scruminc.com ,
someone already recommended to read Mike Cohn, I double that.

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time is the most important. It is Scrum broken down by the creator of Scrum. It’s filled with some good empirical data and is pretty trade-agnostic. Not super specific for tech work just work in general. If you want a good tech use-case of scrum and agile methodologies The Lean Startup is pretty insightful and convinced me that documenting every detail of a product before developing never works.