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

by Jeff Sutherland

If the best team could perform a task in one week, how long do you think it took the worst team? You might guess the same ratio as was observed at Yale—10:1 (that is, the slow team took more than two months to accomplish what the fast team knocked off in a week). The actual answer, though, is that there is a much larger difference in team performance than there is in individual performance. It actually didn’t take the slow team ten weeks to do what the best team could do in one week. Rather, it took them two thousand weeks. That’s how great the difference is between the best and the worst.

characteristics of the teams they saw at the best companies in the world:

Transcendent:

Autonomous:

Cross-Functional:

ask three very simple questions:

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?

What’s fascinating is that the data shows that if you have more than nine people on a team, their velocity actually slows down. That’s right. More resources make the team go slower.

The problem with Miller’s work is that later research has proved him wrong. In 2001, Nelson Cowan of the University of Missouri wondered whether that magic rule of seven was really true and conducted a wide survey of all the new research on the topic. It turns out that the number of items one can retain in short-term memory isn’t seven. It’s four.9 People often think that they can memorize more than that, using a mnemonic device or by just concentrating harder. But the research is fairly clear that we can only remember four “chunks” of data.

We all perceive ourselves as responding to a situation, while we see others as motivated by their character.