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

by Jeff Sutherland

organize projects around small teams—and

What went wrong and how the situation got fixed are why I’m writing this book.

Essentially, they’re paying people to lie to them.

reality is the problem, not the charts.

I looked at how people actually work, rather than how they say they work.

Traditionally, management wants two things on any project: control and predictability.

trying to know the unknowable is wasted.

Scrum embraces uncertainty and creativity.

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.

“Inspect and Adapt” cycle.

Companies have two choices: change or die.”

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

Making people prioritize by value

collaborating with customers over negotiating with them;

responding to change over following a plan.

one of management’s key tasks is to identify and remove impediments to that flow.

Suffice it to say here that the effect of eliminating waste is dramatic, but people often don’t do it, because it requires being honest with themselves and with others.

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?”

by working better and smarter.

It’s about the customers and stakeholders.

It’s madness.

to create great things,

How much of your life is wasted on work that both you and your boss realize doesn’t create value?

Just because everyone has always told you that’s the way the world works doesn’t mean they’re right.

The hypercompetitive world of twenty-first-century work has no room for waste and foolishness.

What if there really was a better way to live and work and solve problems differently?

Back then I was just a young jet pilot hoping to survive my required missions.

how I could do a thesis that would be useful and not wind up on a dusty shelf in the library.

When you do this to organizations trying to change, people often freak out.

The only question is whether the new state is better than the old one.

“Sutherland, if you want that kind of headache, take it.”

which means it can adapt to any environment.

“if we could come up with a simple instruction set for teams of people to work together just like those legs? They would self-organize and self-optimize, just like that robot.”

could coordinate independent thinkers with constant feedback about their environment, much higher levels of performance would be achieved.

“How many of them were right?” He paused. “None.”

Management didn’t dictate.

How you get there is to be constantly creating experiments to see if you can achieve improvement. If I try this method, is it better?

Action is important.

something that you can only really learn by doing.

Shu state you know all the rules and the forms.

Ha state, once you’ve mastered the forms, you can make innovations.

Ri state you’re able to discard the forms, you’ve truly mastered the practice, and you’re able to be creative in an unhindered way,

Work doesn’t have to suck. It can flow; it can be an expression of joy, an alignment toward a higher purpose. We can be better. We can be great! We just have to practice.

Teams are what get things done in the world of work.

but in business we all too often focus solely on individuals, even if production is a team effort.

And that, it turns out, is a big mistake.

Well, if you’re a manager, it seems that you want to hire not just the workers who earn A’s, but those who earn them in the shortest amount of time.

But what if you could make all your teams great?

Why is it, I wondered, that some teams change the world, and others are mired in mediocrity?

They have a sense of purpose beyond the ordinary.