AGILERAUSCH

AGILERAUSCH means „to be intoxicated by agility“! Its a blog or website about useful stuff that any Agilist might want to use. Its a growing knowledge base of useful books that you might want to read at any point of your Agile Way. All books have been read by me and will be recommended in good faith also trying to explain the value you might receive from reading it.

The books collected here are the ones that helped me on my path from a rookie Scrum Master to a Certified Scrum Professional. I only listed books that I have in my shelf and that I have read myself. They are mostly related to Scrum and applying the Scrum Framework. They are my choice and therefore the list is not final. I didn’t list books I have read and thrown out again. You might ask „Why the hell a Scum Master reads more than the Scrum Guide and so many books?“ – Continuous improvement and continuous learning. Especially when you need to work as a Coach, Mentor, Trainer or Consultant with many organizations, these books help you to find arguments, tell stories, convince people and have material on hand that you can give others to read. Sometimes I have the same book in English and German. Additionally many titles have very good audiobooks. Click the Read More option if you want to find our why the book is good and how it could help you.

I am a German but I try to keep this blog in English. When I recommend a German book I will do so in German. However most great stuff is in English.

About me

Hello Agilists!

My name is Nico Rausch and I came to Scrum by accident a few years ago. I was member of a lean project management crew in an energy company and just after finishing a project my boss came up to me and told me there was an option to take over a dead project… Last chance to either turn it around or to terminate it. Hard choice! The project was running already for about three years and had seen about seven different project managers and now we are going to change it to Scrum…

Scrum? I googled it. I read the Scrum Guide. I got a coach – thank you Florian! This was the starting point for my journey – Scrum, agile ways of working, Kanban and all the other stuff have just been waiting for me… the perfect match between my mindset and tools, practices and useful other stuff on hand, to work efficiently, have fun and don’t waste time, money, nerves…

We turned the team around! A dead call center software nobody was using became a valuable user centered tool that is still in place and used. Once demotivated team members stayed and had again fun at work. I am still in contact with most of them, we shared cool 14 months! Scrum and agile became sort of famous within the company and after the CEO used the word „agile“ more than four times in his annual speech colleagues came to us to learn. Overnight we became an agile training center. My colleagues and me trained several hundred employees, coached new Scrum Masters and Scrum Teams, helped new Product Owners to start. Since that time I read every book that I get recommended by intelligent algorithms or colleagues or magazines. I just can’t stop learning and reading. Sometimes I throw the book in the garbage, sometimes I know 98% of the content but get value from the other 2%- especially for arguments, trainings or just to have again a reminder on all important aspects of agility. By now I train and introduce Scrum and/ or Kanban, I worked in Scaled Scrum settings, got my share with SAFe and have a lot of these certificates that you can get out there (feel free to check me on linked.in). In my trainings I mention many concepts and people starve for recommendations what to read. Especially if anyone has 1st hand experience reading the material herself.

Writing a book on topics where hundreds of books already exist is a waste of time I guess. But I would like to share my insights on the agile stuff to read out there. I would like recommend books by every stage of your personal agile development level, framework and how a book or content can help you. I will only present material that I am confident of that it is worth reading and that is part of my own library. Since I live by the standards of Marie Kondo – I really only keep books that I like – in this case books that are so good that I want to give them to anyone in need.

I hope you enjoy my blog- pls do not hesitate to recommend me any book!

Nico