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

by Jeff Sutherland

Scrum, instead, is akin to evolutionary, adaptive, and self-correcting systems.

Now as then, the reports become more important than the reality they’re supposed to describe, and if there’s a discrepancy, reality is the problem, not the charts.

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.

That’s what’s called 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. It’s a simple idea, but executing it requires thought, introspection, honesty, and discipline. I’m

At the FBI, the first problem the Sentinel team faced was contracts. Every single change ended up being a contract negotiation with Lockheed Martin.

No one should spend their lives on meaningless work. Not only is it not good business, it kills the soul.

what will bring the most value to the project? Do those things first. In software development there is a rule, borne out by decades of research, that 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.

The term “Agile” dates back to a 2001 conclave where I and sixteen other leaders in software development wrote up what has become known as the “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.

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.

Eliminating waste must be a business’s first objective.

For Scrum to really take off, someone in senior management needs to understand in his bones that impediments are nearly criminal.

Scrum works by setting sequential goals that must be completed in a fixed length of time.

At the end of the Sprint, the team comes together and shows what they’ve accomplished during the time they’ve collaborated. They look at how many of those sticky notes they actually got done. Did they bring too many into the Sprint and not finish them all? Did they not bring enough? What’s important here is that they begin to have a baseline sense of how fast they can go—their velocity.

they discuss not what they did, but how they did it. They ask, “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?”

Besides learning how fast the teams were going, he also wanted to know what impediments were slowing them down. What he really wanted to do was accelerate those teams so they were producing faster—not by working longer hours (I’ll go into why that’s a fruitless rat hole that ends up making things take longer later) but by working better and smarter.

And the most powerful part of Scrum from his point of view? “Demos. Driving toward a demonstrable product on a frequent basis.” Every two weeks the Sentinel team would demonstrate what they’d accomplished. And this show-and-tell wasn’t just to themselves. They were taking what they’d achieved and running it by the people who would actually be using the system. Everyone who had a stake in the project sent someone and that could make for a pretty full house.

“Scrum is not about the developers. It’s about the customers and stakeholders. Really, it was an organizational change.

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, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

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.