Agile Circus

What happens when a team buys the board, holds the ceremonies, and completely misses the point?

The team at EM Solutions Inc. officially went Agile. They have the Scrum board. They have the standups. They have the retrospectives. They even have an Elmo doll.

What they don't have is the mindset.

Meet Brett - the Product Owner who treats the backlog like a throne. Dina - the Scrum Master, five-foot-three and impossible to move. Henry - who eats half the croissants before anyone else arrives and grabs the cleanest stories before planning starts. Shri - who built a checklist for the checklist. Vlad - for whom everything is a fire alarm. Dominic - whose Daily Scrum updates reference events from 2019. Paula - who cannot write a single line of code without a pairing partner. Julia - who turns every sprint review into a three-course meal when everyone ordered a snack. And Barry - the VP who says he supports Agile and then tries to bribe Vlad in the parking lot.

Into this beautifully broken team walks Phill - trainer, coach, and a man who has the laminated cards to prove he has seen all of this before.

Agile Circus is a business fable built around twelve real dysfunctions that real teams live with every day. Every chapter delivers the chaos in full, hilarious detail - then lands the coaching lesson: Manifesto values, sprint mechanics, planning poker, velocity, user stories, retrospectives that produce real commitments, and the truth no certification exam covers: the badge is not the achievement. The behavior is.

The Agile book that makes the learning stick because you will not stop laughing long enough to put it down.

Perfect for: PMP® and PMI-ACP® candidates, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Agile coaches, project managers, engineering leaders, and anyone who has ever survived a forty-seven-minute Daily Scrum.

Phill Akinwale - OPM3, PMP®, PMI-ACP®, PMI-RMP®, CSM - trainer, coach, host of pmradio.org.

Get your copy. Update your Elmo. Let's move on.