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

by Jeff Sutherland

Changing that culture, though, is what allows true excellence to emerge.

Humans think in narratives, so give them one.

Set Audacious Goals. With Scrum it is not that hard to double production or cut delivery time in half. If you do it in the right way, your revenue and stock price should double as well.

Pursuits do seem to be what make us happy. Scrum done in the right way will make workers, customers, managers, and stockholders happy (usually in that order).

But if you ask them when they were happiest, they’ll tell you it was in those moments of trial—of pushing their bodies, minds, and spirits to the limit. That’s

“We are not rewarded for enjoying the journey itself but for the successful completion of a journey. Society rewards results, not processes; arrivals, not journeys.”

But our day-to-day life is mostly made up of journeys. We don’t summit peaks every day, or make the big score, or get a big bonus. Most of our days are taken up with striving toward our goals, whatever they may

realized that true greatness is deeply rooted in joy. And that to be

joyful is to take the first step toward success.

That’s because happiness is crucial to your business and is actually a better forward predictor of revenue than most of the metrics your CFO provides.

happiness precedes important outcomes and indicators of thriving.”

they’re successful because they’re happy. Happiness is a predictive measure. And performance improves even if people are

only a little bit happier.

even small gestures can have great impact.

It’s not enough to think people are happy.

With my team I want that social aspect to move directly into performance. And it does.

At the same time, people have to have the fortitude to bring up the issues that are really bothering them in a way that is solution oriented rather than accusatory. And

productivity. Unlike with financial metrics, I’ve found the Happiness Metric to be predictive. Financials look at what happened in the past, but when you ask people how happy they are, they actually project into the future.

And when they think about how happy they are with the company, they start

projecting out how they think the company is doing. As a result, you’ll get indications before a problem arise...

pay close enough attention to what your team is telling you, you can take action and fix the issue be...

the graph on this page, for instance, a drop in happiness precedes a drop in velocity or productivity by weeks. If you were only looking at productivity, you wouldn’t know that there was a problem until it dropped off a cliff. But if you see a team-wide drop in happiness, even as productivity...

They’re the same things that make great teams: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Or to say it more expansively, it’s the ability to control your own destiny, it’s the feeling that you’re getting better at something, and it’s knowing that you’re serving something bigger than yourself. But there are also some easy, concrete steps management can take to get the culture of the company to encourage those qualities.

and purpose is transparency.

Scrum, through its Retrospectives and transparency, illuminates this kind of behavior almost immediately. It becomes obvious where the roadblocks are, where the waste is. When I run a company, I tell those people with “miser” habits that they don’t have the luxury of holding the team and the company hostage. They can either change their mind-set or go work for someone else.

Its pillars are transparency, teamwork, and collaboration.

each thriver is vital and passionate, and each is trying to perfect their craft, whether

they belong to an airplane crew or are a busboy in a restaurant.

This usually happens after a team has achieved some big success or increased their productivity greatly by using Scrum.

prioritization, single-tasking,

cross-functionality, review rituals—but they’ve stopped improving.

I want teams to measure their velocity every Sprint.

uncomfortable questions or raises uncomfortable truths.

People high up on that pyramid are not only happier and more fulfilled, they’re more effective and innovative. And they’re able to deliver greatness.

measure of value

a

If you don’t get inside your competition’s decision loop, they’ll get inside yours.

“Minimum Viable Product,” or MVP.

as early as is feasible! This will get you the feedback you need to power your decision loop

But what it gets you is feedback.

Then, when you do an official release, or a rollout of a big program, you’ll have already adjusted and found out what people actually value.

Every hour spent polishing the apple is lost opportunity for value.

What’s great about this process is that it’s iterative: just “rinse and repeat.” Once people have your product or service or change in their lives, they’ll tell you what the next most valuable things are. Then develop 20 percent of that, and deliver again. And again.

That footbridge costs a few hundred dollars. It looks a lot less impressive than a big plant.

A few companies have taken to a new level this idea of only delivering to a customer high-value features. A few

Let’s do a little math here to see how everyone won. In the first three months of the contract the customer paid out $1.5 million to the Scrum firm. Terminating the contract early required them to pay 20 percent of the remaining $8.5 million—that’s $1.7 million. They paid out $3.2 million for a piece of software they thought would cost $10 million, and they got it seventeen months early.

And they weren’t the only winner. The Scrum company bid on the contract with an expected profit margin of 15 percent. So they spent $1.3 million on development in those first three months. But they received $3.2 million. Their profit margin went from 15 percent to 60 percent. That’s a 400-percent increase in earnings. And now, with their developers idle, they could bid on other projects. That’s not just good business. That’s an early-retirement strategy.

Everyone works toward the same goal and with the same vision: deliver real value as fast as possible. I’m a big believer in win-win situations, and making more money delivering better products at a lower price strikes me as a pretty good deal.

market risk, technical risk, and financial risk.