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April 2 - April 9, 2019
they are always, always wrong.
Anyone who has studied that war knows that efficient organizational capability was not exactly a salient feature. Why a World War I artifact has become the de facto tool used in twenty-first-century project management has never been quite clear to me.
as soon as the first shot is fired, your plans go up in smoke.
I called this framework for team performance “Scrum.” The term comes from the game of rugby, and it refers to the way a team works together to move the ball down the field. Careful alignment, unity of purpose, and clarity of goal come together. It’s the perfect metaphor for what I want teams to do.
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.
an “Inspect and Adapt” cycle. Every little while, stop doing what you’re doing, review what you’ve done, and see if it’s still what you should be doing and how you might do it better.
Scrum offers too big a competitive advantage not to use it.
what will bring the most value to the project?
80 percent of the value in any piece of software is in 20 percent of the features.
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.
“Agile Manifesto.” It 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.
It was also crucial, of course, that team members figure out what would stop them from accelerating.
“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.
Eliminating waste must be a business’s first objective.4
waste and impediments that can get in the way of production.
impediments are nearly criminal.
the effect of eliminating waste is dramatic, but people often don’t do it, because it requires being honest with themselves and with others.
Scrum works by setting sequential goals that must be completed in a fixed length of time.
there would be a finished increment of product.
Is what they’re planning to do next really what they should be doing, given what they’ve discovered during that cycle?
“How can we work together better in the next Sprint? What was getting in our way during the last one? What are the impediments that are slowing our velocity?”
And the most powerful part of Scrum from his point of view? “Demos. Driving toward a demonstrable product on a frequent basis.”
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst,
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a new Ford has more lines of code in it than Facebook and Twitter combined.
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.
Inspect and Adapt. Every little while, stop doing what you’re doing, review what you’ve done, and see if it’s still what you should be doing and if you can do it better.
Working product in short cycles allows early user feedback and you can immediately eliminate what is obviously wasteful effort.
I credit this to the training I got from the Air Force on how to control risk. That training taught me to do four things: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.
Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.
“How many Gantt charts have you seen in your career?” I asked. “Hundreds,” he replied. “How many of them were right?” He paused. “None.”
“The New New Product Development Game.”
the best teams acted as though they were in a scrum: “… the ball gets passed within the team as it moves as a unit up the field.”
“SCRUM Development Process,”
we regularly see somewhere between a 300- to 400-percent improvement in productivity among groups that implement Scrum well. The best teams can achieve productivity increases of up to 800 percent and replicate that success over and over again.
no matter how excellent your technicians, you who are leaders must strive for advances in the improvement of product quality and uniformity if your technicians are to be able to make improvements. The first step, therefore, belongs with management. First, your company technicians and your factories must know that you have a fervor for advancing product quality and uniformity and a sense of responsibility for product quality. Nothing will come of this if you only speak about it. Action is important.
PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act).
The problem was, at that point the customer no longer wanted what they’d said they wanted. Circumstances had changed. Business cycles were getting shorter, and customers were demanding more responsive services.
in Japan Scrum isn’t seen as the latest work fad. They regard it as a way of doing, a way of being, a way of life.
Scrum is a lot like that. It requires practice and attention, but also a continuous effort to reach a new state—a state where things just flow and happen.
Work doesn’t have to suck. It can flow; it can be an expression of joy, an alignment toward a higher purpose.
Great Teams Are. They are cross-functional, autonomous, and empowered, with a transcendent purpose.
Don’t Guess. Plan, Do, Check, Act. Plan what you’re going to do. Do it. Check whether it did what you wanted. Act on that and change how you’re doing things. Repeat in regular cycles, and, by doing so, achieve continuous improvement.
Transcendent: They have a sense of purpose beyond the ordinary.
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.
Cross-Functional: The teams have all the skills needed to complete the project.
The classic formulation is seven people, plus or minus two, though I’ve seen teams as small as three function at a high level. What’s fascinating is that the data shows that if you have more than nine people on a team, their velocity actually slows down.
The Mythical Man-Month.
George Miller study in 1956 showing that the maximum number of items the average person can retain in their short-term memory is seven.
the number of items one can retain in short-term memory isn’t seven. It’s four.
