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

by Jeff Sutherland

Learning to Think Like a Robot

But that outsider’s perspective was one of my most valuable assets.

a six-legged robot, the size of a cat, ran into my office and began chasing me around my desk.

On Friday afternoons I always served wine and beer at the office so that everyone could unwind and socialize after a hard week.

Brooks, a professor of artificial intelligence at MIT, was one of the founders of the robot company. I asked him how the roving robots worked.

The neural-network chip in the head of the robot

knew these rules and acted as referee for all the parts.

It figures everything out for the first time each time it is switched on. It bumps into things and figures things out based on the actual surroundings, which means it can adapt to any environment.

Here was something that was doing exactly what I was trained to do flying in Vietnam: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. It was taking in its environment and behaving decisively based on the data from that environment.

Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls

More and more I realized that, if I could create a system that, like that robot, could coordinate independent thinkers with constant feedback about their environment, much higher levels of performance would be achieved.

that spidery robot I met, dubbed “Genghis Khan,” now sits in the Smithsonian as a collector’s item.

iRobot,

The executives at Easel wanted my team to develop a completely new product line in six months that would be aimed at some of their biggest customers—such as the Ford Motor Company, which used their software to design and build internal applications.

That old methodology was the Waterfall method I described in the last chapter:

They were also complete fabrications.

We had to come up with a completely different way of doing things. I went to the CEO and told him we were scrapping the Gantt chart. He was shocked and demanded to know why.

That’s when I told him I was going to give him working software at the end of the month instead of a broken Gantt chart. He could try it out for himself and see if we were on track. We had to try it, if we were going to meet our deadline.

Then one day, one of the developers came in with a Harvard Business Review paper from 1986, written by two Japanese business professors, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka.

It was titled, “The New New Product Development Game.”

Waterfall system—was

overlapping development process that was faster and more flexible.

The teams were cross-functional. The teams had autonomy. They were empowered to make their own decisions. And they had a transcendent purpose. They were reaching for something b...

Instead, executives were servant-leaders and facilitators focused on getting obstacles out of their teams’ way rather than telling them w...

the ball gets passed within the team as it moves as a unit up the field.”

The average American manager was unable to make sense of it even though Toyota was rapidly increasing market share using this approach.

a descriptive process of how humans work together best in any endeavor. It flowed into all the other experiments I’d conducted, going back to my first job in the private sector at MidContinent.

“Scrum.”

I got so excited about the possibilities of this new form of project management that all my future work focused on refining Scrum for companies.

“SCRUM Development Process,”

Inspect and Adapt

“hyperproductivity.”

The best teams can achieve productivity increases of up to 800 percent and replicate that success over and over again. They also end up more than doubling the quality of their work.

Since Scrum comes out of techniques used in Japanese manufacturing, it pays to learn a bit about where the Japanese learned them.

W. Edwards Deming.

MacArthur’s approach to rebuilding the economy was to fire most of the senior management in Japanese companies, promote line managers from the ranks, and bring in business operations experts like Deming from the United States.

“statistical process control.”

“continuous improvement.”

Never, ever settle for where you are.

Deming famously gave a talk to Japanese business leaders in 1950. In the audience were people like Akio Morita, the founder of Sony. In that talk Deming told them:

PDCA cycle

(Plan, Do, Check, Act).

When I train people how to do Scrum, that’s what I use: paper airplanes.

I then say we’re going to do three six-minute cycles of paper-airplane building.

Plan

D...

Check.

Act.

It’s the same strategy used by Brooks’s robot.

This PDCA cycle, a radical idea when Deming pitched it to the Japanese, is how Toyota became the number one