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

by Jeff Sutherland

Scrum embraces uncertainty and creativity. It places a structure around the learning process, enabling teams to assess both what they’ve created and, just as important, how they created it.

At its root, Scrum is based on a simple idea: whenever you start a project, why not regularly check in, see if what you’re doing is heading in the right direction, and if it’s actually what people want? 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.

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 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.

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

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.

Often when people talk about great teams, they only talk about that transcendent sense of purpose. But while that’s a critical element, it’s only one leg of the three-legged stool. Just as critical, but perhaps less celebrated, is the freedom to do your job in the way that you think best—to have autonomy. On all great teams, it’s left to the members to decide how to carry out the goals set by those leading the organization.

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.

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

all perceive ourselves as responding to a situation, while we see others as motivated by their character. One amusing side effect is that when we’re asked to report on our personality traits and those of our friends, we always paint ourselves as far more boring.

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

Any policy that seems ridiculous likely is. Stupid forms, stupid meetings, stupid approvals, stupid standards are just that—stupid. If your office seems like a Dilbert cartoon, fix it.

Once you know how fast you’re going, you’ll know how soon you’ll get there.

“When a company has optimized itself around innovation, they usually change in a fundamental way by eliminating internal structures and hierarchies, any internal structure,”