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

by Jeff Sutherland

“Agile”

“Lavender”

The idea in Scrum is that the “pigs” are the ones who are totally committed to the project and are responsible for its outcome. The “chickens” are the people who are informed of its progress, the stakeholders.

Whenever people are involved in a complex, creative effort, whether they’re trying to send a rocket to space, build a better light switch, or capture a criminal, traditional management methods simply break apart.

dystopias

It’s madness.

The launch of Healthcare.gov, the website where Americans are supposed to be able to sign up for health insurance, is a great example.

It was completed in three months using Scrum.

The

back end, though—that was t...

The reason they could do that was that they weren’t aligned—weren’t united in a common purpose.

What Scrum does is bring teams together to create great things, and that requires everyone not only to see the end goal, but to deliver incrementally toward that goal.

They used Scrum.

There is a different way of doing things—a different way of working.

The hypercompetitive world of twenty-first-century work has no room for waste and foolishness.

the Scrum way—doesn’t

There are people using Scrum to address each of those problems I’ve mentioned, and they’re making a powerful impact.

Planning Is Useful. Blindly Following Plans Is Stupid.

Inspect and Adapt.

Change or Die.

Fail Fast So You Can Fix Early.

The Origins of Scrum

reconnaissance.

That training taught me to do four things:

Observe,

Or...

De...

Act.

I didn’t know that my flight experience, and the training I’d received on how to think and act in a life-or-death situation, would shape the way I would work for the rest of my life.

When I returned from the Vietnam war, I pursued a Master’s degree from Stanford in statistics and spent as much time as possible at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

From there I became a professor of mathematics at the Air Force Academy, where I embarked on a PhD program in biometrics at the University of Colorado Medical School.

Bailar said that if I could explain why they were all different, he’d award me a doctoral degree. So that’s what I did, and I got that degree.

Years later it occurred to me that organizations, teams, and people are all complex adaptive systems.

When you do this to organizations trying to change, people often freak out.

But remarkably quickly, just like a cell, an organization settles into a new steady state.

How, I wondered, can we figure out some simple rules that will guide teams to settle into a more productive, happier, supportive, fun, and ecstatic state? I spent the next fifteen years trying to figure that out.

As I was figuring out what to do, a company called MidContinent Computer Services contacted me because they heard I was the leading expert in the area of their newest technology.

“Automatic Teller Machine”

ATMs were going to solve this hassle, but back then MidContinent was having problems getting its networks to talk to one another.

Their network computers were the same machines I’d spent years running my doctoral programs on, so it was a good fit.

There were hundreds of computer programmers who sat at their desks all day ostensibly working, but they couldn’t deliver anything on time or on budget.

The inefficiencies were mind-boggling.

But no matter how much management pressed, the projects were still chronically late, still over budget, and not delivering what they were supposed to.

The operation was too broken to fix piecemeal, so I decided to make a company within a company.

“Sutherland, if you want that kind of headache, take it.”

“The first thing we need to do is to stop doing stuff that is killing us.”

Bonuses weren’t based on individual performance; they were based on total company performance.

We came up with tools that found their way into Scrum ten years later—for

In six months, we were the most profitable division in the company. Revenue was 30 percent higher than expenses. Our Nonstop Tandem systems were the first online transaction computers that banks trusted enough to use.

My team had a lot to do with that. And, yes, you’re welcome.