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The Enterprise and Scrum by Ken Schwaber is a great addition to agile project management literature. This book is similar in structure to it’s predecessor: Agile Project Management with Scrum (Microsoft Professional) where we were provided with a the core concepts of the agile project management framework known as Scrum and then the book elaborated these concepts in a set of illuminating case studies.

This book picks up where Chapter 9 of Agile Project Management with Scrum (Microsoft Professional) left off and deals with the challenges of scaling Scrum to deal with large “enterprise” projects.  The difference between this book and it’s predecessor is that the methods of scaling Scrum cannot be quite as easily reduced to a few basic concepts.  So the book relies more heavily on the case studies.

This book is thinner than it’s predecessor, and when you take out the appendix you are left with 90 pages of real content.  This being the one downside of the book. That does not change the fact that the case studies presented demonstrating how to apply scrum to large teams are not fascinating and extremely informative, though I could have done with a couple more.

This book is definitely an advanced text. I would not recommend it unless you have read Ken’s previous book and digested the material and applied it on several projects.

Books like these are what make project management an exciting field. It takes the project manager beyond the administrative activities typically associated with project management such as work breakdown structures, Gantt charts and charters and requires the project manager to demonstrate creativity, problem solving, interpersonal skills and judgment.

There may not be a single template that can be applied to all circumstances for scaling the project teams, but this book is an invaluable resource for those looking to scale the size of agile and Scrum project teams.