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

by Jeff Sutherland

done completely.

Team WIKISPEED came in tenth, beating out more than a hundred competitors from big auto companies and universities.

On it are dozens and dozens of one of the most common artifacts found in Scrum: sticky notes.

Each Sprint, Team WIKISPEED’s members put into the Backlog column as many Post-its as they think can get done that week. As the week goes by, a member of the team will take up one of those tasks and move the sticky to Doing. When it’s finished, it’ll get moved to Done. Everyone on the team can see what everyone else is working on at every moment.

An important point: nothing gets moved to Done unless it can be used by the customer.

Sprints are what are often called “time boxes.”

You want to establish a work rhythm where people know how much they can get done in a set period of time.

One crucial element of an individual Sprint, though, is that once the team commits to what they’re going to accomplish, the tasks are locked in. Nothing else can be added by anyone outside the team. Later, I’ll get further into the reasons why, but for now just know that interfering and distracting the team slows its speed dramatically.

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

the daily meeting.

Daily Stand-Up

And it is a business, not merely a billionaire’s pipe dream.

Avionics tell the rocket where it is, where it’s going, and how to get there. Think of it as the rocket ship’s mind.

Listed in the columns are only the things that the team needs to get done in this Sprint.

The Scrum Master, the person in charge of running the process, asks each team member three questions:

1.

2.

3.

If it takes more than fifteen minutes, you’re doing it wrong.

There’s no assigning of tasks from above—the team is autonomous; they do that.

Anyone in

management or on another team can walk by and look at the avionics Scrum board and know exact...

that people spent a lot of time studying why, and there was data on everything.

“The Cope,”

They took thirty-one months to produce and were the output of eight people. That means each team member produced one thousand lines of code each week. That’s the fastest of any team on record, and Jim wanted to know how they did it.

This type of mapping is a tool that can be used to spot bottlenecks or information hoarders.

Basically, the metric spun off by this type of analysis measures how well everyone knows what they need to get

their work done.

The thing that cripples communication saturation is specialization—the number of roles and titles in a group.

So we got rid of all titles. I called everyone in and told them to rip up their business cards. If someone wanted to put a title on their resume, they could do it for external use only. In here, where the work was done, there were only team members.

“secret sauce”

Getting everyone together in a room was key, because it gave the team the opportunity to self-organize around challenges.

At Borland the daily meeting was an hour at least. That struck me as too long, so I looked at the core things that need to be communicated in that huddle and came up with the three questions.

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 idea was to get the most actionable and valuable information in the least amount of time.

The third rule was that everyone had to actively participate.

This is the reason such a meeting is often called the Daily Stand-up or Daily Scrum.

The problem that I frequently see crop up is that people have a tendency to treat the Daily Stand-up as simply individual reporting.

The idea is for the team to quickly confer on how to move toward victory—i.e., complete the Sprint. Passivity is not only lazy, it actively hurts the rest of the team’s performance. Once spotted, it needs to be eliminated immediately.

I want teams emerging from that meeting saying things like, “Let’s nail this. Let’s do this.” The team needs to want to be great.

Because it’s a choice, you know—you don’t have to be that way.” A team has to demand greatness from itself.

“Wow.”

Time and Time Again

It’s the design goal of Scrum.

You can get more stuff done faster and cheaper—twice the work in half the time.

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

Each Sprint is an opportunity to do something totally new; each day, a chance to improve.

Well, a couple of years ago my friend and fellow Agile thinker Eelco Rustenburg told me at dinner that he’d decided to redo his house—the whole thing, soup to nuts. He’d be tackling all the rooms, installing new wiring, putting in new appliances, slapping a fresh coat of paint on everything. And it was only going to take six weeks.

“Nope,” he said. “It’s going to be on time and on budget. I’m going to do it using Scrum.”