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

by Jeff Sutherland

they have the power to make their own decisions about how they do their jobs, and are empowered to make those decisions stick.

The teams have all the skills needed to complete the project.

the motivation has to come from within.

is the freedom to do your job in the way that you think best—to have autonomy.

J.J.’s job was to help the team do the best work they could. It wasn’t to tell them what to do—rather, it was to provide them with what they needed.

One of the key concepts in Scrum is that the team members decide themselves how they’re going to do the work.

It’s management’s responsibility to set the strategic goals, but it’s the team’s job to decide how to reach those goals.

What did you do since the last time we talked? What are you going to do before we talk again? And what is getting in your way?

Instead, team members managed themselves.

It was a feat that wouldn’t have been accomplished had the team not been imbued with a sense of purpose (to tell one of the biggest stories of their careers) and not possessed autonomy (the ability to decide for themselves how to produce the many threads of that overall story).

they have all the skills necessary to get things done.

there isn’t this separation of roles. Each team has all the people on it do everything, soup to nuts.

What she looks for in a team is diversity—of skill set, thinking, and experience.

She wants teams that are unselfish and autonomous, but she also needs them to be cross-functional.

Whenever there are handoffs between teams, there is the opportunity for disaster.

They see keeping that knowledge secret as critical to their power.

The team dynamic only works well in small teams.

What’s fascinating is that the data shows that if you have more than nine people on a team, their velocity actually slows down.

A large team would take about five times the number of hours that a small team would.

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.

Meetings that took minutes now take hours. Don’t do it. Keep your teams small.

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?”

What it says is that we’re all creatures of the system we find ourselves embedded in.

They look as if they’re floating;

Don’t look for bad people; look for bad systems—ones

We know our time is limited. As such, isn’t it the greatest of crimes to waste it?

Our goal was not just to be a good team, but the best.

1. What did you do yesterday to help the team finish the Sprint? 2. What will you do today to help the team finish the Sprint? 3. What obstacles are getting in the team’s way?

So we got rid of all titles.

they would have everyone on the team meet every single day to discuss how they were performing.

The meeting was held at the same time every day, and everyone had to be there.

The point was to give the team a regular heartbeat.

The second rule was that the meeting couldn’t last more than fifteen minutes.

The third rule was that everyone had to actively participate.

I want aggressive teams—ones

Time makes up your life, so wasting it is actually a slow form of suicide.

Time Is Finite. Treat It That Way.

that my work will have purpose, that what I do will actually matter.”

We should mourn the lives and potential we’re wasting.

Your brain can’t process those two things at the same time.

but just by doing one thing exclusively before moving on, the work takes a little more than half as much time. Half.

what happens if you’re interrupted or have to switch quickly to another project, even just for a moment? You guessed it: that carefully built mental architecture collapses. It can take hours of work just to get back to the same state of awareness. That’s the cost.

multitasking not only wastes your time but makes you stupid.

Doing half of something is, essentially, doing nothing.

Jobs that aren’t done and products that aren’t being used are two aspects of the same thing:

They viewed themselves not as manufacturers but as craftsmen, artisans making a thing of beauty. That’s great when you’re making a few cars, but when you’re making millions, those costs add up.

But we don’t always do things perfectly the first time. We’re human; we make mistakes.

Do things right the first time.

Work too long, he said, and you get less done.

You get more done. You are happier. And you have higher quality.”