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

by Jeff Sutherland

The early step-by-step plans, laid out in comforting detail in Gantt charts, reassured management that we were in control of the development process—but almost without fail, we would fall quickly behind schedule and disastrously over budget.

Scrum.

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

And that is why I wrote Scrum: to reveal and explain the Scrum management system to businesses outside the world of technology.

And how Scrum incorporates the concepts of continuous improvement and minimum viable products to get immediate feedback from consumers, rather than waiting until a project is finished.

Jeff Johnson

March 3, 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation killed its biggest and most ambitious modernization project—the one that was supposed to prevent another 9/11 but that had devolved into one of the biggest software debacles of all time.

Little did Jeff know he’d end up in a windowless cinder-block office in the basement for much of the next two years, trying to fix something that everyone believed to be unfixable.

“But it needed to be done and done well.”

In 2010—the era of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google—the FBI was still filing most of its reports on paper.

Automated Case Support

It was just too cumbersome and too slow in an era of terror attacks and swift-moving criminals.

the process wasn’t that different from what it had been thirty years earlier.

“You would write up a document in a word processor and print out three copies. One would be sent up the approval chain. One would be stored locally in case that one got lost. And with the third you’d take a red pen—I’m not kidding, a red pen—and circle the key words for input into the database. You’d index your own report.”

When a request was approved, that paper copy would drift down from upstairs with a number on it. A number written on a piece of paper is how t...

No one in the Bureau ever put it all together.

Analysts, said the Commission, couldn’t get access to the very information they were supposed to analyze.

But the report singled out lack of technological sophistication as perhaps the key reason the Bureau failed so dramatically in the days leading up to 9/11.

there was no effective mechanism for capturing or sharing its institutional knowledge.”

The plan was called the Virtual Case File (VCF) system, and it was supposed to change everything.

Three years later, the program was killed.

The whole thing was an unmitigated disaster.

People’s lives were, quite literally, on the line.

We had information that could have stopped 9/11. It was sitting there and was not acted upon.… I haven’t seen them correct the problems.… We might be in the 22nd century before we get the 21st-century technology.

In 2005 the FBI announced a new program, Sentinel.

What could possibly go wrong? In March of 2010 the answer landed on Jeff Johnson’s desk. Lockheed Martin, the contractor hired to make the Sentinel system, had already spent $405 million. They’d developed only half of the project, and it was already a year late. An independent analysis estimated it would take another six to eight years to finish the project, and the taxpayers would have to throw in at least another $350 million.

Finding some way around that was Johnson’s problem.

It was because of the way people were working. The way most people work. The way we all think work has to be done, because that’s the way we were taught to do it.

These charts are called Gantt charts, after Henry Gantt, who developed them.

The only problem with them is that they are always, always wrong.

Henry Gantt invented his famous charts around 1910. They were first used in World War I by General William Crozier, who was the Chief of Ordnance for the US Army.

Why a World War I artifact has become the de facto tool used in twenty-first-century project management

has never been quite clear to me.

We gave up on trench warfare, but somehow the ideas that organized ...

The trouble is, once that beautifully elegant plan meets reality, it falls apart.

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

A complete mirage.

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.

And I’d remember that Eisenhower once observed that planning for combat is important, but as soon as the first shot is fired, your plans go up in smoke. At least he had enough sense not to use a Gantt chart.

a complete fabrication.

The skepticism in the usually dry IG reports to Congress is palpable.

“Scrum.”

There are two ways of doing things: the old “Waterfall” method that wastes hundreds of millions of dollars and often doesn’t deliver anything, or the new way, which, with fewer people and in less time, can deliver more stuff with higher quality at lower cost.

None of it is rocket science; it’s all been talked about before.

The reason this framework works is simple. I looked at how people actually work, rather than how they say they work. I looked at research done over decades and at best practices in companies all over the world, and I looked deeply at the best teams within those companies.

“Scrum.”

It’s the perfect metaphor for what I want teams to do.

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

The problem is that the rosy scenario never actually unfolds.

Instead, it leads to frustrated people not getting what they want. Projects are delayed, come in over budget, and, in too many cases, end in abject failure.