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

by Jeff Sutherland

Scrum embraces uncertainty and creativity. It places a structure around the learning process, enabling teams to assess both what they’ve created and, just as important, how they created it.

At its root, Scrum is based on a simple idea: whenever you start a project, why not regularly check in, see if what you’re doing is heading in the right direction, and if it’s actually what people want? And question whether there are any ways to improve how you’re doing what you’re doing, any ways of doing it better and faster, and what might be keeping you from doing that.

Making people prioritize by value forces them to produce that 20 percent first. Often by the time they’re done, they realize they don’t really need the other 80 percent, or that what seemed important at the outset actually isn’t.

one of the key concepts that Ohno introduced is the idea of “flow.” That is, production should flow swiftly and calmly throughout the process, and, he said, one of management’s key tasks is to identify and remove impediments to that flow. Everything that stands in the way is waste.

What Scrum does is bring teams together to create great things, and that requires everyone not only to see the end goal, but to deliver incrementally toward that goal.

Change or Die. Clinging to the old way of doing things, of command and control and rigid predictability, will bring only failure. In the meantime, the competition that is willing to change will leave you in the dust.

By streamlining the flow of information among “legs” of a group, we could achieve efficiencies that had never been reached before.

the best companies used an overlapping development process that was faster and more flexible. The teams were cross-functional. The teams had autonomy. They were empowered to make their own decisions. And they had a transcendent purpose. They were reaching for something bigger than themselves. Management didn’t dictate. Instead, executives were servant-leaders and facilitators focused on getting obstacles out of their teams’ way rather than telling them what and how to do product development.

When I train people how to do Scrum, that’s what I use: paper airplanes. I divide people up into teams and tell them that the goal is to build as many paper airplanes as they can that will fly across the room. There are going to be three roles on the team. One person will check how many planes are built that can actually fly. Another will work as part of the assembly process but will also pay attention to the process itself and look for ways that the team can make better planes and speed up their production. Everyone else will concentrate on building as many planes that can actually fly the distance in the assembly time allowed. I then say we’re going to do three six-minute cycles of paper-airplane building. The teams have one minute each cycle to Plan how they’re going to build the airplane, three minutes to Do—to build and test as many airplanes as they can that can actually fly. And finally they’ll have two minutes to Check. In this phase the team looks for how they could improve their paper airplane–building process. What went right? What went wrong? Should the design be changed? How can the construction process be improved? And then they will Act. In Deming’s world “to act” means to change your way of working based on real results and real environmental input. It’s the same strategy used by Brooks’s robot.

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

Great Teams Are. They are cross-functional, autonomous, and empowered, with a transcendent purpose.

Don’t Guess. Plan, Do, Check, Act.

1. Transcendent: They have a sense of purpose beyond the ordinary. This self-realized goal allows them to move beyond the ordinary into the extraordinary. In a very real way the very decision to not be average, but to be great, changes the way they view themselves, and what they’re capable of.

2. Autonomous: The teams are self-organizing and self-managing, they have the power to make their

own decisions about how they do their jobs, and are empowered to make those decisions stick. 3. Cross-Functional: The teams have all the skills needed to complete the project. Planning, design, production, sales, distribution. And those skills feed and reinforce each other. As one team member that designed a revolutionary new camera for Canon described it: “When all the team members are located in one large room, someone’s information becomes yours, without even try...

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.

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

If you want to calculate the impact of group size, you take the number of people on a team, multiply by “that number minus one,” and divide by two. Communication channels = n (n−1)/2. So, for example, if you have five people, you have ten channels. Six people, fifteen channels. Seven, twenty-one. Eight, twenty-eight. Nine, thirty-six. Ten, forty-five. Our brains simply can’t keep up with that many people at once.

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 anyone else, given the right circumstances.

people to start looking for someone to blame for a problem rather than search for a solution.