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

by Jeff Sutherland

It’s about setting up the right framework with the right incentives and giving people the freedom, respect, and authority to do things themselves. Greatness can’t be imposed; it has to c...

Blame Is Stupid. Don’t look for bad people; look for bad systems—ones that incentivize bad behavior and reward poor performance.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.1

Later, I’ll get further into the reasons why, but for now just know that interfering and distracting the team slows its speed dramatically.

flowing, and where it wasn’t. This type of mapping is a tool that can be used to spot bottlenecks or information hoarders.

A team has to demand greatness from itself.

Time makes up your life, so wasting it is actually a slow form of suicide.

the cancer that eats at our productivity, our organizations, our lives, and our society.

“Waste is a crime against society more than a business loss.”

Muri, waste through unreasonableness; Mura, waste through inconsistency; and Muda, waste through outcomes. These

you’re tying up a huge amount of value in things that aren’t delivering value,

invested effort with no positive outcome. Don’t do it.

This tendency—for the process of fixing

things to get harder as more

time elapses—re...

fix it as soon as you notice it. If you don’t, you’ll pay

OpenView discovered how people actually work instead of how they say they work.

work. “I’ve been able to attack more and more important-impact opportunities.”

as we’ve seen, can actually take more effort to fix than to create.

choice involves an energy cost.

It’s an odd sort of exhaustion—you don’t feel physically tired, but your capacity to make good decisions diminishes. What really changes is your self-control—your ability to be disciplined, thoughtful, and prescient.

Whatever resource is burned up by making decisions is also used up in self-regulation.

So there’s a limited number of sound decisions you can make in any one day, and as you make more and more, you erode your ability to regulate your own behavior.

Hours themselves represent a cost. Instead, measure output. Who

All that matters is how fast it’s delivered and how good it

team that depends on regular heroic actions to make its deadlines is not working the way it’s supposed to work.

Constantly moving from one crisis to the next causes burnout, and it doesn’t allow for reasoned, continuous improvement.

I’ve tried to make it so that the process itself is the least disturbing framework you can have and still keep people focused.

But as the kung fu master, the monk, the dancer, or the opera star will all tell you, at the root of flow is discipline.

When you make a mistake, fix it right away. Stop everything else and address it. Fixing it later can take you more than twenty times longer than if you fix it now. Working Too Hard Only Makes More Work. Working

No Assholes. Don’t be one, and don’t allow the behavior. Anyone who causes emotional chaos, inspires fear or dread, or demeans or diminishes people needs to be stopped cold.

the map is not the terrain.

inspiration turns to calculation, and some of that energy dissipates. People begin pondering: How do we actually get from point A to point B? And once we’ve figured that out, how long is it going to take?

Buried in there somewhere was what actually needed to be done, but no one actually had a plan for how to do it.

They’ve set up a system that forces them to endorse a fantasy.

since humans are actually awful at estimating work.

I call this standard that must be met a “Definition of Done.”

prioritize the work.

Why are we so terrible at estimating how long something will take? And, boy, are we bad. We’ll get

You can ask them: “Is this what you want? Does this solve at least a piece of your problem? Are we going in the right direction?” And if the answer is no, change your plan.

but what we are good at, it turns out, is relative sizing—comparing one size to another.

this groupthink isn’t an individual failure; this is a human failure.

and use other estimates to improve your own, not replace it.

Who is this task being done for? Whose lens on the world is the one we need to gaze through when we’re building this thing, making that decision, or delivering this piece?

Then you need to think of the what—what we want done in the first place. This is usually where we start and stop. But it’s only the middle of the process we should be following. Finally, you need to think of motivation. Why does this character want this thing? How is it going to serve and delight this particular customer? And, in a way, this is the key part. Motivation colors everything.

Is the story ready? And how will you know when it’s done?

Independent. The story must be actionable and “completable” on its own. It shouldn’t be inherently dependent on another story. Negotiable. Until it’s actually being done, it needs to be able to be rewritten. Allowance for change is built in. Valuable. It actually delivers value to a customer or user or stakeholder. Estimable. You have to be able to size it. Small. The story needs to be small enough to be able to estimate and plan for easily. If it is too big, rewrite it or break it down into smaller stories. Testable. The story must have a test it is supposed to pass in order to be complete. Write the test before you do the story.

We find in real projects that if stories are really Ready, the team will double the speed of implementation. And if the stories are really Done at the end of a Sprint, teams can double speed again. This is one of the tricks needed to get twice as much work done in half the time.

that getting rid of waste was the key to accelerating teams.

Nothing is written in stone. Question everything.