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

by Jeff Sutherland

If the best team could perform a task in one week, how long do you think it took the worst team? You might guess the same ratio as was observed at Yale—10:1 (that is, the slow team took more than two months to accomplish what the fast team knocked off in a week). The actual answer, though, is that there is a much larger difference in team performance than there is in individual performance. It actually didn’t take the slow team ten weeks to do what the best team could do in one week. Rather, it took them two thousand weeks. That’s how great the difference is between the best and the worst. So where should you focus your attention? At the level of the individual, where you might be able to get an improvement of ten times if you can magically make all your employees geniuses? Or at the team level, boosting productivity by an enormous magnitude even if you merely make your worst teams mediocre?