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

by Jeff Sutherland

“The New New Product Development Game,”

Transcendent:

Autonomous:

Cross-Functional:

And those skills feed and reinforce each other.

After all, you can’t just yell at people to be more self-organized and transcendent; the motivation has to come from within.

The Long Gray Line

“Loose Deuce.”

In 1963, the Loose Deuce had been at the bottom of those rankings for more than a century.

As training officer of the Loose Deuce, I decided that what I could do was make things more transparent. I made colored charts of what went right and what went wrong and posted them in the barracks where everyone in my company would have to see them every day.

There were no punishments or blame; it was simply facts laid out by all the other training officers that were brought up during evaluations. Yet these were the reasons L2 was rated at the bottom.

“The ratings are the ratings. I’m just showing you what they are. The ranks have pulled their shit together. You are now the problem. Do you want to fix it? Or do you want to suck forever?” A few weeks later L2 was the number one company at West Point.

General Douglas MacArthur.

“Long Gray Line”

Duty,

Honor,

Cou...

Duty,

Honor,

Cou...

To this day, every cadet at the Academy has to memorize that speech, line by line, word for word, before they can graduate. That speech has become the spiritual guide for the cadet corps, and for the US officer corps at large:

Duty,

H...

Cou...

My company had achieved transcendence.

Scrum in the Time of Revolt

But while that’s a critical element, it’s only one leg of the three-legged stool.

to have autonomy.

On all great teams, it’s left to the members to decide how to carry out the goals set by those leading the organization.

Oddly, at the square’s eastern edge was, of all things, a KFC, which soon became the backdrop to stone-throwing protestors pushing back police.

What might have been another small protest against a repressive regime caught fire, ignited the Egyptian imagination, and eventually drew millions to the square.

Just by people gathering and saying no, one of the oldest and most powerful dictatorial regimes in the Middle East fell.

For journalists it was a massive story of historical significance.

Caught flat-footed at first, producers and reporters for NPR blew deadlines, missed stories, and scrambled to meet the demands of executives back in Washington.

It wasn’t to tell them what to do—rather, it was to provide them with what they needed.

With constant direct oversight by Washington being impossible and events happening so fast, the team had to organize themselves to get the work done.

One of the key concepts in Scrum is that the team members decide themselves how they’re going to do the work. It’s management’s responsibility to set the strategic goals, but it’s the team’s job to decide how to reach those goals.

Almost daily the NPR team would report a series of stories for the next day that would be rendered instantly obsolete by rapidly unfolding events.

They succeeded by using Scrum.

What did you do since the last time we talked? What are you going to do before we talk again? And what is getting in your way?

And J.J.’s main job, as de facto Scrum Master, was to make sure that those things getting in the team’s way at one meeting were gone by the next.

Mukhabarat.

Instead, team members managed themselves. Over the next few weeks NPR’s squad in Cairo produced more coverage than anyone thought possible.

(to tell one of the biggest stories of their careers)

(the ability to decide for themselves how to produce the many threads of that overall story).

When deadlines are tight, they just need the speed.

One Team to Get the Job Done

In a classically organized structure you might have the team of planners, followed by the team of builders, followed by the team of testers, followed by the production team, followed by the shipping team.

No one team by itself can actually get a product out the door.

“phase-gate”