More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 1 - October 10, 2021
Just as on a Special Forces team, everyone on a Scrum team has to know what everyone else is doing. All the work being done, the challenges faced, the progress made, has to be transparent to everyone else.
Don’t do it. Keep your teams small.
the Maori warrior ceremony of the haka. The haka is a warrior dance that charges up people about to go into battle.
They came up with four aspects worthy of emulation. The first was intense focus on the goal, built up and energized by the Maori chant. The second was radical collaboration—arms and bodies locked together, pushing for the same goal. The third was hunger to crush—anything in their way was to be obliterated. The fourth was universal excitement when any team member broke through with the ball. Who it was didn’t matter. That it happened was cause for celebration.
The key part of that was to realize that often the impediments aren’t simply that the machine doesn’t work or that Jim in accounting is a jerk—it’s the process itself. It was the Scrum Master’s job to guide the team toward continuous improvement—to ask with regularity, “How can we do what we do better?”
We all perceive ourselves as responding to a situation, while we see others as motivated by their character.
It’s the system that surrounds us, rather than any intrinsic quality, that accounts for the vast majority of our behavior. What Scrum is designed to do is change that system. Instead of looking for blame and fault, it rewards positive behavior by focusing people on working together and getting things done.
Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures,
When the subject wanted to stop, the “scientist” simply said, “Please continue.” And if the subject wouldn’t, the scientist would go on, “The experiment requires that you continue.” If still nothing, the scientist would add, “It is absolutely essential that you continue.”
“The Perils of Obedience”: Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.
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 come from within. But it does live within all of us.
THE TAKEAWAY Pull the Right Lever. Change Team performance. That has much more impact—by several orders of magnitude—than individual performance. Transcendence. Great teams have a purpose that is greater than the individual; e.g., burying General MacArthur, winning the NBA championship. Autonomy. Give teams the freedom to make decisions on how to take action—to be respected as masters of their craft. The ability to improvise will make all the difference, whether the unit is reporting on a revolution in the Middle East or making a sale. Cross-functional. The team must have every skill needed to
...more
when I started the first Scrum at Easel and told the CEO I wasn’t going to show him a long and detailed Gantt chart that we both knew was wrong, he said, “Fine. What are you going to show me?” And I told him that each month I’d show him a piece of working software. Not something that works in the back end. Not some piece of architecture. A piece of software that a customer can actually use. A fully implemented feature. “Okay,” he said. “Do that.”
The heart of Scrum is rhythm.
Toyota’s Taiichi Ohno in the first chapter of this book, where he said, “Waste is a crime against society more than a business loss.” His thoughts about waste deeply influenced mine, and I want to spend some time talking about them. Ohno talked about three different types of waste. He used the Japanese words: Muri, waste through unreasonableness; Mura, waste through inconsistency; and Muda, waste through outcomes. These ideas are highly aligned with Deming’s PDCA cycle, which I wrote about earlier: Plan, Do, Check, Act. Plan means avoid Muri. Do means avoid Mura. Check means avoid Muda. Act
...more
THE TAKEAWAY Multitasking Makes You Stupid. Doing more than one thing at a time makes you slower and worse at both tasks. Don’t do it. If you think this doesn’t apply to you, you’re wrong—it does. Half-Done Is Not Done. A half-built car simply ties up resources that could be used to create value or save money. Anything that’s “in process” costs money and energy without delivering anything. Do It Right the First Time. 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
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Wall Street, to put it mildly, liked this notion. Pretty cool idea, right? Save money and provide better health care. More customers, more sales. Win-win. There was only one problem. While Klepper had checked with his managers that the idea was technically possible, he hadn’t obtained details on how long this plan would take to implement. The people who would actually make it happen only found out about it after their president had promised Wall Street that the new system would be put in place on July 7, 2007. Come hell or high water.
Why it took them six months to figure out that they couldn’t do it in time is something that bears examination.
They thought they could plan everything ahead of time. They spent months of effort making the sort of detailed plans that seem plausible—that are laid out on pretty charts and include carefully precise steps and almost always describe a fictional reality.
the very act of planning is so seductive, so alluring, that planning itself becomes more important than the actual plan. And the plan becomes more important than reality. Never forget: the map is not the terrain.
“We had the luxury of ‘Oh, shit.’ You can use pain and fear as your ally when you walk in as a consultant. When we ran into resistance, we just told them, ‘Hey, you can do things the way you’re doing them, stick with the status quo, and you’ll deliver late, and that’ll be fine.’ And they said, ‘That’s not fine.’ ”
“Definition of Done.” Everyone knows when something is done or not; there are clear standards that any piece of work has to meet.
Size Does Matter, but Only Relatively
“Dog Points.”
Like this: • Labrador retriever • Terrier • Great Dane • Poodle • Dachshund • German shepherd • Irish setter • Bulldog
the “Fibonacci sequence,” and there’s a reason we use it. It is everywhere.
The numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are far enough apart that we can easily tell the difference.
Maybe to be motivated to change, people sometimes need a gun to their head, but it showed what can be done if the will is there (or if you have a guy from Toyota in charge). Nothing is written in stone. Question everything.
THE TAKEAWAY The Map Is Not the Terrain. Don’t fall in love with your plan. It’s almost certainly wrong. Only Plan What You Need To. Don’t try to project everything out years in advance. Just plan enough to keep your teams busy. What Kind of Dog Is It? Don’t estimate in absolute terms like hours—it’s been proven that humans are terrible at that. Size things relatively, by what breed of dog the problem is, or T-shirt size (S, M, L, XL, XXL), or, more commonly, the Fibonacci sequence. Ask the Oracle. Use a blind technique, like the Delphi method, to avoid anchoring biases such as the halo effect
...more
People want to be happy. Not happy in a complacent, sheeplike way, but in a way that is more active. Thomas Jefferson, among many others, extolled the kind of happiness that comes from a pursuit. 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).
