Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

by Jeff Sutherland

It was because of the way people were working. The way most people work.

The way we all think work has to be done, because that’s the way we were taught to do it.

accomplished

boilerplate, but no one actually reads all those thousands of pages. They can’t. That’s the point. They’ve set up a

should spend their lives on meaningless work. Not only is it not good business, it kills the soul.

Making people prioritize by value forces them to produce that 20 percent first.

declared the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. Scrum is the framework I built to put those values into practice. There is no methodology.

one of management’s key tasks is to identify and remove impediments to that flow.

It is not an exaggeration that in a low-growth period such waste is a crime against society more than a business loss. Eliminating waste must be a business’s first objective.

but people often don’t do it, because it requires being honest

with themselves and with others.

their velocity.

they discuss not what they did, but how they did it. They ask,

but by working better and smarter. Jeff

Johnson says his teams increased their productivity by a factor of three.

Why? They got better at working together, yes, but most important, they figured out the things that were slowing them down, and each cycle, each Sprint, they’d try to get rid of them.

“Scrum is not about the developers. It’s about the customers and stakeholders. Really, it was an organizational change. Showing the actual product was the most powerful part.”

and why working overtime will make your project late.

That absolute alignment of purpose and trust is something that creates greatness.

Often when people talk about great teams, they only talk about that transcendent sense of purpose.

But while that’s a critical element, it’s only one leg of the three-legged stool. Just as critical, but perhaps less celebrated, is the freedom to do your job in the way that you think best—to have autonomy. On all great teams, it’s left to the members to decide how to carry out the goals set by those leading the organization.

One of the key concepts in Scrum is that the team members decide themselves how they’re going to do the work.

It’s management’s responsibility to set the strategic goals, but it’s the team’s job to decide how to reach those goals.

What did you do since the last time we talked? What are you going to do before we talk again? And what is getting in your way?

Scrum Master, was to make sure that those things getting in the team’s way at one meeting were gone by the

Whenever there are handoffs between teams, there is the opportunity for disaster. As

Instead of being aligned with

the interests of the greater good, they’re aligned with their own motivations, which often boil down to greed and ambition.

The classic formulation is seven people, plus or minus

In software development there’s a term called “Brooks’s Law” that Fred Brooks first coined back in 1975 in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month. Put simply, Brooks’s Law says “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”8 This

Groups made up of three to seven people required about 25 percent of the effort of groups of nine to twenty to get the same amount of work done.

The first is the time it takes to bring people up to speed.

As you’d expect, bringing a new person up to speed slows down everyone else. The second reason has to do not only with how we think but, quite literally, with what our brains are capable of thinking.

Don’t do it. Keep your teams small.

So we set up this framework of Sprints and Daily Stand-up meetings and Reviews and Retrospectives, and I realized we needed someone whose job it was to make sure the process itself was effective.

“Fundamental Attribution Error.”

When the students talked about themselves, they talked not about themselves personally but, rather, what they were asked about.

This way of perceiving the world is funny when you see it in others. It’s so obvious

that they’re making misjudgments.

One amusing side effect is that when we’re asked to report on our personality traits and those of our friends, we always paint ourselves as far more boring. We say we have dramatically

What Scrum is designed to do is change that system. Instead of looking for blame and fault, it rewards positive behavior by focusing people on working together and getting things done.

What Scrum does is accept this reality, and, instead of seeking someone to blame, it tries to examine the system that produced the failure and fix it.

Yet people want to blame individuals, not systems. It just feels better.

The Fundamental Attribution Error appeals to our sense of justice.

If we can blame someone else, we insulate ourselves from the possibility that we’d do the same thing—that we’re just as likely to press that button as a...

It reminds me of how much of a “default position” it is for people to start looking for someone to blame for a problem rather than search for a solution.

They want to know how their money is going to be spent. How the company spent the other guys’ money isn’t important. It’s only the future—only the solutions—that matter.

When a team starts to align and synchronize, it can seem magical. You feel it when you walk into a room with them. You see it as they take the field. They look as if they’re floating; they’ve become greater than themselves.

It was the kind of synchronicity that is inspiring to watch.

And that’s a place I want to help people reach with Scrum. It’s not impossible. It’s