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

by Jeff Sutherland

I’ve seen this in project after project—people cut and paste and throw in boilerplate, but no one actually reads all those thousands of pages. They can’t. That’s the point. They’ve set up a system that forces them to endorse a fantasy.

And the most powerful part of Scrum from his point of view? “Demos. Driving toward a demonstrable product on a frequent basis.”

How much of your life is wasted on work that both you and your boss realize doesn’t create value?

Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.

I spent some time early on trying to figure out how things worked. You can imagine how upper management treated my guys. There was a lot of screaming and micromanaging and passive-aggressive behavior and demands for harder work and overtime. But no matter how much management pressed, the projects were still chronically late, still over budget, and not delivering what they were supposed to.

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.”