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

by Jeff Sutherland

Plan in just enough detail to deliver the next increment of value, and estimate the remainder of the project in larger chunks.

Scrum, at the end of each iteration you have something of value that you can see, tou...

And if the answer is no, change your plan.

The first thing to do is create a list of all the things that make up a successful wedding.

Now, the next thing to do is to take all those elements and sort them by priority.

The point of the exercise is to figure out the really important things and work on those first.

This is important data to have, because if you start bumping up against date or cost constraints, you know where to start cutting—at the bottom of the list.

At Medco the list wrapped around three walls of a large conference room and was hundreds of items long with six different teams working on them.

Organize by value,

wha...

value that may be. It could be business value in the case of Medco, or it could be bride happiness va...

Size Does Matter, but Only Relatively

another. Picking out the difference between small, medium, and large T-shirts, for example.

“Dog Points.”

Agile thinking,

“dog”

“Okay, this problem—is it a dachshund or a Great Dane? And if that one is a dachshund, this one must be about the size of a Labrador retriever, right?”

“Let’s give each breed a number value; that’ll be easier. Let’s call a dachshund a one and a Great Dane a thirteen. That would make a Lab a five, say, and a bulldog a three.”1

Let’s call it a German shepherd–size problem, a five.

That’s a dachshund, a one, just a phone call.

That’s a Great Dane, a thirteen.

And if something is that big, you should probably cut it down into manageable pieces.

Call that a three.

five.

So that’s relative sizing, comparing tasks ...

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13.

Each number in the series is the sum of the two previous numbers. It’s called the “Fibonacci sequence,”

It is ever...

The sequence is how nature lays itself out, whether it be in the shell of a nautilus, the branches on a tree, the bumps on a pineapple, or the petals of a pinecone. It shows up in cauliflower and the curves of the human brain.

It’s one of those phenomena that, when you think about it, is pretty freaky.

“Golden Mean”

“Golden Ratio.”

We’ve used it to decide the size and shape of pages in a book and the proportions of playing cards.

For our purposes, all that’s important to know is that our species deeply understands the ratios of the Fibonacci sequence.

But the difference between a five and a six? That’s pretty subtle, more than our brains can really register.

We’re better at perceiving jumps from one state to another—and not smooth jumps but jagged ones.

What using the Fibonacci sequence to calculate task size permits is estimates that don’t have to be 100 percent accurate.

Estimating as a group in this manner gives us a far more accurate estimate than we could come up with alone.

The Oracle of Delphi

Unsurprisingly, this is not a new problem.

“bandwagon”

And when you probe people about the decision, it’s almost always the case that each had some reservations, but they didn’t voice them because they figured everyone else was excited.

Remember, this groupthink isn’t an individual failure; this is a human failure.

“informational cascade.”

“An informational cascade occurs when it is optimal for an individual, having observed the actions of those ahead of him, to follow the

behavior of the preceding individual without regard to his own information.”

People assume other people are making sound judgments, even if those judgments contradict their own.

it’s critical to apply your own judgment, and use other estimates to improve your own, not replace it.

“halo effect.”

This was first empirically studied in 1920 by Edward Lee Thorndike.