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.

“Inspect and Adapt”

It’s a simple idea, but executing it requires thought, introspection, honesty, and discipline.

I’ve seen Scrum used successfully to build cars, run a laundry, teach students in a classroom, make rocket ships, plan a wedding—even, as my wife has used it, to make sure that the “honey-do” list gets done every weekend.

The results can be so dramatic that leading research and analysis firms such as Gartner, Forrester Research, and the Standish Group now say that the old style of work is obsolete.

The difference is too great. Venture capital firms like OpenView Venture Partners in Boston, where I’m an adviser, say that Scrum offers too big a competitive advantage not to use it.

Every single change ended up being a contract negotiation with Lockheed Martin.

The core team was even smaller.

They’ve set up a system that forces them to endorse a fantasy.

had no purpose.

But what they need to ask, what the Sentinel teams asked, was, what will bring the most value to the project?

that 80 percent of the value in any piece of software is in 20 percent of the features.

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.

“Agile Manifesto.” It declared

the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. Scrum is the framework I built to put those values into practice. There is no methodology.

It’s something I tell executives all the time: “I’ll know what the date will be when I see how much the teams improve. How fast they’ll get. How much they’ll accelerate.”

An “impediment” is an idea that comes from the company that first formed a lot of the ideas Scrum is based on: Toyota.

“flow.”

Everything that stands in the way is waste.

The Toyota Production System:

It is not an exaggeration that in a low-growth period such waste is a crime against society more than a business loss. Eliminating waste...

For Scrum to really take off, someone in senior management needs to understand in his bones that impediments are nearly criminal.

This goes back to that “Inspect and Adapt” cycle I talked about earlier. Scrum works by setting sequential goals that must be completed in a fixed length of time.

finished

That meant they’d have something working, something that could be shown to anyone who cared to look but certainly the stakeholders and, optimally, the people who’d actually be using the thing.

“Sprints.”

The team decides how much work they think they can accomplish during the next two weeks.

The team decides how many of those work items they can get done during this Sprint.

What’s important here is that they begin to have a baseline sense of how fast they can go—their velocity.

they discuss not what they did, but how they did it. They ask, “How can we work together better in the next Sprint? What was getting in our way during the last one? What are the impediments that are slowing our velocity?”

few months before he could really tell how long the project would take. He wanted to measure the velocity of each team measured over a few Sprints and then see how much they could improve—how much faster they could go.

he could forecast a completion date.

What he really wanted to do was accelerate those teams so they were producing faster—not by working longer hours (I’ll go into why that’s a fruitless rat hole that ends up making things take longer later) but by working better and smarter.

a factor of three.

They were going three times as fast once they got moving as compared ...

Why? They got better at working together, yes, but most important, they figured out the things that were slowing them down, and each cycle, eac...

It eventually took the Sentinel project eighteen months of coding to get the database system deployed, and another two mon...

“Demos. Driving toward a demonstrable product on a frequent basis.”

And this show-and-tell wasn’t just to themselves. They were taking what they’d achieved and running it by the people who would actually be using the system.

“Scrum is not about the developers. It’s about the customers and stakeholders. Really, it was an organizational change. Showing the actual product was the most powerful part.”

Actually showing the product was powerful, because people were, to put it mildly, skeptical of the team’s reported progress.

“I was saying to Congress that with 5 percent of the budget and in twenty months we were going to accomplish what Lockheed couldn’t do with 90 percent of the budget in ten years,”

The guys down in the basement are just going to screw it up again, was the thinking.

Teddy Roosevelt’s speech “Citizenship in a Republic,”

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.5

Finally in July of 2012, they turned Sentinel on.

The data in Sentinel was being used to prosecute people, and its integrity had to be beyond a shadow of doubt.

The effect of Sentinel on the FBI has been dramatic.

In January of 2013 an FBI field office was called in when a small-business account was hacked. A million dollars was transferred to another country before US banks could stop it. Using Sentinel, the local office coordinated with the legal attaché in the destination country’s embassy, who then alerted local law enforcement authorities, who, in turn, stopped the transfer before it hit the banking system. This all happened in a matter of hours, something that simply couldn’t have been done in the days of three paper copies and red pens. It was the difference between catching a crook and letting him get away with it.