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

by Jeff Sutherland

Everything is top priority. The adage to keep in mind comes from Frederick II of Prussia, later to be called “the Great”: “He who will defend everything defends nothing.” By not concentrating both your resources and your mental energies, you thin them out to irrelevancy.

You want to do this with something that delivers at least a tiny bit of value. I call this a “Minimum Viable Product,” or MVP.

In our camera example, maybe it turns out that picture takers said that having a landscape mode and being able to share photos on Facebook were equally valuable, but when they actually started using it, they never used the landscape mode but always wanted to post photos on Facebook.

They went like this: An American platoon comes into town, looks around, and says, “These people are raising chickens. Let’s build them a chicken-processing plant.” So they spend millions of dollars building a state-of-the-art chicken plant. They don’t consider that there’s almost no regular electricity, or that the townsfolk are mostly illiterate and can’t easily be trained on the equipment.

You have a list with dozens of features on it: a clock, a snooze button, a timer, a loud alarm, a radio, an iPhone dock, a GPS—whatever. But being a savvy Product Owner, you prioritize what people really want: an easy-to-set-up alarm, sufficient loudness, a radio, and a display vivid enough to be seen whether the room is bright or dark. And when your team is done with that, you realize that they’ve actually created the most elegant alarm clock ever made.

In this way Scrum aligns everyone’s interests: those of the team, the Scrum Master, the Product Owner, the customer, and the company. 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.

What Scrum allows you to do is reduce the risks of failure. The three most common types are market risk, technical risk, and financial risk. Or, to put it another way: Do people want what we’re building? Can we actually build it? Can we really sell what we’ve built?

Apple famously does this with all their products, often building a dozen fully functioning prototypes before organizing a shoot-out to see which one is the best. This allows different ideas to be expressed quickly without a massive investment.

This idea of providing content or a service for free, and then making money on the advertising, is still prevalent in tech start-ups to this day. Entrepreneurs look at Facebook or Google and say, “I can do that.” The problem is that there just aren’t that many Facebooks and Googles. In the Internet’s early days, when online space first allowed companies to target particular customer segments, “hyper-focusing” was seen as valuable. But as more and more platforms have arisen to facilitate it, the capability doesn’t quite have the same allure.

Then, as the Product Owner, put together a road map of where you think things are going. What do you think you can get done this quarter? Where do you want to be this year?

Scrum is designed so that you can boot up a team in a couple of days. Get your Backlog, plan your first Sprint, and away you go. You don’t need to devote a lot of time to planning, reflection, meditations, mission statements, or five-year projections. Leave all that to the competition, and let them eat your dust. And along the way, why don’t you make the world a better place? In the next chapter, I’ll show you how.

The Product Owner: Has knowledge of the domain and the power to make final decisions. He or she is available to answer questions and is accountable for delivering value.

Get Your Money for Nothing, and Your Change for Free. Create new things only as long as those new things deliver value. Be willing to swap them out for things that require equal effort. What in the beginning you thought you needed is never what is actually needed.

I’m often amazed that a process I pioneered in 1993 to aid software development has proven itself universally applicable. Scrum accelerates human effort—it doesn’t matter what that effort is.

Then there’s our system of education, which is failing students the world over. Instead of teaching twenty-first-century skills, we’ve mired our young people in ways of teaching and learning created in the nineteenth century. And the other out-of-whack element that comes to mind is government, which has seized up in many ways, predicating itself on ideas formed hundreds of years ago that no longer seem to fit with the way we live our lives.

It’s easy to throw your hands up at the latest news of people dying in Africa, violence in our schools, or the endless posturing of people in power. It just seems like too much at times. But those problems, the hard problems, are precisely what Scrum is designed to address. In each of those cases people are now turning to Scrum to help solve those problems, and, just as in the business world, they’re showing remarkable success.

Let’s face it, in the American classroom, where chemistry leads, daydreaming often follows.

That’s not what happens in Wijnands’s classes, though. “See,” he says as the students burst into the room and hurry to their desks—oddly, without sitting down. “I don’t do anything.” It’s 8:30 a.m. on a normal Wednesday in September, and Wijnands’s classroom does not look like one. None of the desks are in rows facing the front of the room. Instead, they’re positioned so groups of four students can face one another.

The students open their books and start to teach themselves. Perhaps more important, they teach one another. Wijnands walks the room, looking at the Scrum boards and Burndown Charts. Occasionally, he’ll spot a place where the students are having a problem, or he’ll quickly explain a tricky concept, or he’ll randomly take a story from the Klaar column and quiz each student on it, making sure all understand the concepts. If they don’t, he moves it back to Te doen. Part of the Definition of Done, you see, is that everyone understands the material.

“You don’t have to be the police,” says Wijnands. “We now have another way to deal with managing students. They do everything. They even assign themselves homework!” Each team knows where they are in the material, the dates by which they have to accomplish interim steps, and if they’ll need to do work outside of class to learn all the material in time. “They are self-organizing; they develop smarter and faster ways to study. One team started with the test and worked backward. A bunch of eleven-year-olds. ‘Not good,’ I told them. Their faces fell.” Wijnands grins his contagious smile. “Then I said, ‘Excellent!’

Scrum, or eduScrum, as Wijnands calls his approach, is introduced to the students on the first day of class.

Then the students are told to form teams that are cross-functional, that have all the skills needed to learn the material. This, says Wijnands, teaches them something just as important as the chemistry—it teaches

“Scrum helps the outsiders connect with the other parts of the class,” chimes in her equally pretty and stylish friend Maneka Bowens. “Sometimes you choose the team, and sometimes you get chosen. You learn they are better than you at some qualities.”

Willy learned about Scrum from his son-in-law, who works at a large technical company in the Netherlands that uses it. Willy’s been a teacher for nearly four decades, and he says this is what he’s been searching for the whole time: an approach that teaches children to teach themselves and to value their own skills and those of others. Also, to have fun while doing so.

His group uses Scrum to develop their applications. He says that each time a group asks for a feature set, his team rates it on a scale of 1 to 7 on three questions: 1. How important is this work to the mission of helping the poor? 2. How will this feature contribute to the work of the CKWs? 3. Is there partner support for the feature? (The Foundation prefers to work with partners such as the Gates Foundation rather than alone.)

Now, Kamara says, every team has a Scrum board. Before the meeting, problems and blockages become easily apparent. These days the director of the office can simply walk around and instantly see where things are being blocked or stymied, just from checking out the state of the Scrum board.

If you talk to people in the world of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), a common complaint is that their ranks are filled with people who share purpose and commitment but lack discipline. What Scrum can do is take people’s passion and, by giving them clarity regarding what they should prioritize, harness it.

Scrum gives people the ability to measure progress easily. At the Grameen Foundation they have what they call the “Progress Out of Poverty Index.” It measures just how effective each program is. They can poll and see exactly the impact those Community Knowledge Workers with cell phones in rural villages are having. They can experiment with different ways of doing things. They can help people innovate their way out of poverty.

Nonprofits are just one area where we can innovate social good. What about how we organize ourselves? What about government?

But as I emphasized in chapter three, it’s pointless to look for evil people; look instead for evil systems. Let’s ask a question that has a chance to actually change things: “What is the set of incentives that drives bad behavior?” I truly doubt that any of the Beltway bandits sees themselves as bad people, and I’d bet that most are truly well-meaning. It’s the system that has failed them, and us. But how do we change it? How do we encourage transparency, priorities,

One group of lawmakers looks at education, another at crime, another at the budget, and yet another at social services. “They are fractured. They never look at the whole picture,” says Rick Anderson. He’s a consultant to state agencies, counties, and cities in Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii. He has worked with the legislatures, and he says that while change may take a while, it has to happen.

In 2008 a completely avoidable financial crisis hit the world. Big banks spun prices out of control, leveraging themselves over and over again by taking on more bad debt than could ever be repaid. One of the countries hit hardest was Iceland. Privatized banks there had been spun off by the government and had taken huge risks in the financial markets. As they say on Wall Street, if you don’t know who the sucker in the room is, you’re the sucker. In this case, Iceland was the sucker. The amount of money they borrowed was staggering for such a small country. Eventually, the banks had valuations twelve times the size of the national budget. When it all came crashing down, the Icelandic “economic miracle” was in tatters.

“Implementing Scrum—How to Begin,” and I’ve written chapter after chapter on why those rules exist, encouraging you, I hope, to apply them in your personal life, your company, and your community. The paradox of those rules, though, is that they eliminate boundaries, they create freedom—and for many, freedom can be terrifying.

It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management, and nobody “reports to” anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn’t your manager. This company is yours to steer—toward opportunities and away from risks. You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products.

“This is a capitalist innovation as powerful as many industrial innovations that changed the nature of work,” he says. “It is so useful and so successful that there is no way it can’t be a force of change in the world.” Do they use Scrum? Well, says Greg, you walk down the hallway, and you see a lot of whiteboards on wheels covered with sticky notes. But they don’t force people to use it; they let people decide what process is right for them. As with most matters, Greg and the other founders refrain from telling anyone what to do. But a lot of Valve’s workers have decided that, given the choice to do anything, they choose Scrum. And that’s enough for me.

The cynic will sigh knowingly and say, “That’s just the way the world works. Humans are essentially corrupt and selfish—pretending otherwise is just naive.” In that way they justify constraints and rationalizes limits.

That’s what Scrum does. It sets goals and systematically, step by step, works out how to get there. And even more important, it identifies what is stopping us from getting there.

Scrum is the code of the anti-cynic. Scrum is not wishing for a better world, or surrendering to the one that exists. Rather, it is a practical, actionable way to implement change.

Scrum Accelerates All Human Endeavors. The type of project or problem doesn’t matter—Scrum can be used in any endeavor to improve performance and results.

Rip Up Your Business Cards. Get rid of all titles, all managers, all structures. Give people the freedom to do what they think best and the responsibility to be accountable for it. You’ll be surprised at the results.