What’s the scoop?

I’m giving away:

1. a downloadable PDF copy of Peter Saddington’s new book Scrum Pocket Guide: A Quickstart Guide to Practical Agile Software Development (sells for $17)
2. an autographed copy of my book Teamwork Is An Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When sharing Responsibility (sells for $19)
3. a copy of my DVD The Journey to Responsibility and Self Leadership – Personal/Silver Edition (sells for $497)

Why?

Peter offered me a copy of his new Scrum Pocket Guide to give away. I thought it would be a fun thing to do and see what happens. Giveaway details are below.

My Review of the Scrum Pocket Guide

Peter Saddington must be a pretty busy guy. His Agile Scout blog devoted to democratizing agile is full of breaking news, important coverage and commentary. It’s a refreshing addition. If you don’t already subscribe to it, I’d consider it or at least read it regularly.

And now Peter’s published this handy reference guide.

First impressions

Scrum Pocket Guide is well written. Easy to read. Peter doesn’t waste your time. He’s concise. And the information is accurate – Peter represents Scrum well.

I’m not a fan of the cover – my wife said people who wore pocket protectors would like this book. Ouch. If you also don’t care for the cover then I’d invoke the rule that you can’t judge this book by it’s cover. A useful consideration about this impression: who am I to judge a book cover? Teamwork Is An Individual Skill claims one of the ugliest covers ever.

The internal design of Peter’s book is remarkably attractive, as a short reference guide should be. In fact, I made note of the designer to consider for one of my projects. Yes, it is pleasing and colorful, but that’s not all. The colors and icons on the internal pages provide useful flow and markers that make it easy and delightful to find what you are looking for.

My final first impression: It’s a long quickstart guide. Quickstart guides for setting up my bike computer or DVR are 4 pages at most. This one is 53 pages. Calling it a pocket guide is the better of the two metaphors.

What’s cool

Scrum Pocket Guide is organized around the

• characters (Scrummaster, team members, etc.) you will encounter
• vocabulary definitions (when teaching Scrum I find it helpful to capture our Glossary on a flip chart as terms and phrases are uncovered) you will use, and
• meetings you will witness in Scrum

Get the PDF version. That’s the one I’m reading. It has clickable resource links, and plenty of them, to resources like the Agile Manifesto, industry alliances and lots more.

Each chapter averages just over one page in length so you can absorb it fast. Short lists of most important questions – for instance for Scrummasters, Product Owners, etc.) are included in most every chapter.

This book puts the focus on people and interactions — it opens with a chapter on servant leadership. That’s cool.

When appropriate, Peter includes photos from projects and scrum teams so you can see examples of task boards or other tools.

To sum it up

I liked this book and recommend it. I’ll carry it on my drive or in DropBox and refer to it in coaching engagements.

How to enter:

Simply leave a comment below about why you would like to win these three resources.

How to earn up to 3 extra entries:

Leave a separate comment for each extra entry.

1. Subscribe to Christopher Avery blog updates (top right-hand corner) and leave me a comment on this post that you did. (I will never share my readers’ address).
2. Follow me on Twitter and tweet this: “win Scrum Pocket Guide and 2 other prizes at @ChristopherAver’s #book #giveaway #Scrum http://bit.ly/ebCV7f”.
3. Sign up for the next free preview of The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

{I received one book for this review and no other compensation. This is my honest opinion. This giveaway ends Wednesday, February 23, 2011, at 6:00 PM USA Eastern. Three winners, one for each item, will be chosen by Random.org and will have 48 hours to respond to my email. Open to U.S. residents only, will ship to USA addresses only (sorry international friends). Incorrect or incomplete entries are out of luck.}