Best Introductions to SCRUM

Five people in the past week have asked me for an introduction to SCRUM. After putting together a few emails I realized this called for a blog posting.

First up I offer Ken Schwaber’s (one of the originators of Scrum) recent talk at Google. With good wit and better speaking skills than most of us this video is makes an excellent way to spend an hour: https://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7230144396191025011

Prefer to read? Try Peter Deemer and Gabrielle Benefield’s: “Scrum Primer” https://www.amdika.com/scrum_primer_1_0.pdf. Why are Peter and Gabrielle qualified to write about Scrum? Because they are in charge of Yahoo’s large scale global adoption of Scrum.

If an hour is too much time to spend watching/reading then try Scrum in a Nutshell. It should take you less than five minutes to read. Caveat Emptor my teaching and presentation style has changed completely in the past 3 1/2yrs. The presentation is an adequate intro to read however I do give an entirely different one now.

Need to give a Powerpoint presentation to management? No problem Mike Cohn has it covered: https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/pres/RedistributableIntroToScrum.ppt. A note of caution this Slide Deck has no notes and so you need to know that slide 12 comes from Harvard Business Review article that first described SCRUM in 1986. The blocks in the top half illustrate a sequential development process. While the lines/arcs in the bottom half show the same tasks overlapping in Scrum.

BTW The presentation section on Mike’s site is chock full of presentations ready for you to read and reuse: https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/presentations.php.

Let me know if you can think of any great introductions to Scrum.