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

by Jeff Sutherland

Another way to look at work in process or inventory is simply as physical inventory.

At average pricing, those unsold vehicles represented about $7.5 billion.

The industry standard is about sixty days—less than half what

GM had.

The problem is that too much inventory is pretty much the same thing as work in process.

You have to have some inventory; the key is to minimize it.

Jobs that aren’t done and products that aren’t being used are two aspects of the same thing: invested effort with no positive outcome. Don’t do it.

Do It Right the First Time

Lean manufacturing,

“re-work”

The Machine That Changed ...

making cars.

One of the biggest differences between manufacturers was in the luxury-car market. In Japan, such companies as Toyota, Honda, and Nissan spent an average of 16.8 hours making a luxury car. Parts went in at one end of the factory, and, about 17 hours later, a Lexus emerged. And they had 34 defects per hundred vehicles. Not bad.

In Europe, though, the story was different. Such companies as Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and BMW took 57 hours to make a car, and they had 78.7 defects for every hundred vehicles.

When that happens, everyone swarms around where the line stopped—not to yell at the guy for stopping the line, but to fix whatever problem is there. They don’t want any cars coming out the other end with things that have to be fixed. They fix the problem once, and it’s solved forever. If they don’t, that same defect could go into hundreds of vehicles.

At the end of the production line were dozens of people in white lab coats going around fixing all the problems.

That’s great when you’re making a few cars, but when you’re making millions, those costs add up.

the German plant was expending more effort to fix the problems it had just created than the Japanese plant required to make a nearly perfect car the first time.

There’s a reason Toyota became the number one car manufacturer on the planet. They did it right the first time.

We’re human; we make mistakes.

At Toyota, as I said, every worker in the factory can stop the line. The idea is that the process is being continuously improved, and that the right moment to fix a problem is when it is observed, not after the fact.

(PDAs),

The computer tracked this automatically, each and every time.

wouldn’t want to go back and fix that code right away. Instead, he’d vow to get to it later. First, he’d write new code.

But Palm performed daily, automated tests of all their code, so they knew right away when there was a problem.

It took twenty-four times longer.

If a bug was addressed on the day it was created, it would take an hour to fix; three weeks later, it would take twenty-four hours.

As you can imagine, every software developer in the company was soon required to test and fix their code on the same day.

The human mind has limits.

When you’re working on a project, there’s a whole mind space that you create around it.

Re-creating that construct a week later is hard.

Doing that takes time. A long time.

Do things right the first time.

The only thing the data now adds is that if you do make a mistake—and we all make them—fix it as soon as you notice it. If you don’t, you’ll pay for it.

Working Too Hard Makes More Work

Jon said that back in the seventies, when he was starting out, everyone worked seven days a week at McKinsey.

That was the culture; that

was what was e...

While he was working fewer hours, he was actually getting more done than the guys—and they were almost all guys back then—working every single day.

He told Scott that he always wanted to drop down to four or even three days a week to see what would happen, but he wasn’t sure that the company would accept it.

Work fewer hours? Isn’t that slacking off?

He heard that I’d invented Scrum and lived in the same city, so he invited me to breakfast one morning.

“Twenty-five to thirty-five percent? They must be doing it wrong!!!”

OpenView discovered how people actually work instead of how they say they work.

These were aggressive, ambitious people. But they were getting burned out, depressed, and demoralized. It was such a tough environment that some people couldn’t take it and quit.

Working more hours stopped producing more output.

The y-axis is productivity, and the x-axis is hours of work. The peak of productivity actually falls at a little bit less than forty hours a week. Armed with this data, Scott started to send people home early.

He started telling people that working late wasn’t a sign of commitment; it was a sign of failure.

So no more nights, no more weekends. When people go on vacation, they are expected to go on vacation, not check e-mail, not check in with the office. If you can’t actually take time off without having to make sure everything is going right at the office, the thinking goes, you aren’t managing your teams well.

[work-hour limits],”