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

by Jeff Sutherland

First,

Then

Then

“requirements people”

Then

then

Then

the development phase,

Then

testing.

then

And this is how NASA used to build things.

When they implemented the same

procedures back in Japan, they immediately saw quality drop, the failure rate go up, and their ability to deliver sink like a stone.

Rogers Commission

Each team has all the people on it do everything, soup to nuts.

“secret sauce.”

What she looks for in a team is diversity—of skill set, thinking, and experience.

When a specialist identifies with their specialty more than with the product they’re actually making, Dourambeis knows she still has work to do.

Scrum at War

American Special Operations Forces (SOF)

As a result there’s constant communication among the people collecting the intelligence, those planning what to do with it, and those who’ll be going through the door.

Between 2003 and 2007 they carried out thousands of successful missions aimed at disrupting the Iraqi insurgency, especially Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Their cross-functional, highly trained teams were among the most lethal forces the world had ever seen.

During some of the darkest days of the war there were over one hundred attacks a day on American forces, and even the lethality of the American Special Forces couldn’t stem the tide.

“Surge,”

This new strategy had a remarkable impact.

“Sons of Iraq,”

“collaborative warfare.”

As the Washington Post described it on September 6, 2008:

What they did was create a cross-functional team that had all the skills necessary to get the job done.

Those practicing the handoff model discovered what Fuji-Xerox discovered decades earlier when the Japanese tried to implement NASA’s phase-gate system, and it’s one of the main reasons Scrum was developed in the first place.

Whenever there are handoffs between teams, there is the opportunity for disaster.

“organizational blink”

Giving up day-to-day micromanaging and control is hard to do, but to do it in the secretive world of intelligence and special operations is even more difficult—so difficult that, despite their effectiveness, the teams in Iraq were quickly disbanded after the Surge was deemed a success.

“Secret Weapon: High-value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation,”

was set aside because of parochial departmental concerns and the worries of middle managers who were concerned for their careers.

Once the crisis is past, they disband the teams to their respective silos and managerial fiefdoms.

The transparency and sharing of a truly fantastic team threatens structures rooted in secrets and obfuscation. Managers often don’t want other managers, their own teams, or other people within the power structure to know exactly what they’re doing or what is being accomplished and how fast.

At many companies, actions were based solely on what was in it for the individual on a short-term basis. There was no thought of what would benefit everyone, or of limiting harm to the global economy.

Size Does Matter, but Not the Way You Think

The team dynamic only works well in small teams.

The classic formulation is seven people, plus or minus two, though I’ve seen teams as small as three function at a high level.

More resources make the team go slower.

“Brooks’s Law”

The Mythical Man-Month.

“adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

His work kept showing that projects with twenty or more people on them used more effort than those with five or fewer.

Once the teams grew larger than eight, they took dramatically longer to get things done.

Groups made up of three to seven people required about 25 percent of the effort of groups of nine to twenty to get the same amount of work done.