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

by Jeff Sutherland

The reason this framework works is simple. I looked at how people actually work, rather than how they say they work. I looked at research done over decades and at best practices in companies all over the world, and I looked deeply at the best teams within those companies. What made them superior? What made them different? Why do some teams achieve greatness and others mediocrity?

لماذا تم اختراع السكروم؟

At its root, Scrum is based on a simple idea: whenever you start a project, why not regularly check in, see if what you’re doing is heading in the right direction, and if it’s actually what people want? And question whether there are any ways to improve how you’re doing what you’re doing, any ways of doing it better and faster, and what might be keeping you from doing that.

Inspect and adopt

Scrum works by setting sequential goals that must be completed in a fixed length of time.

“Scrum is not about the developers. It’s about the customers and stakeholders. Really, it was an organizational change. Showing the actual product was the most powerful part.”

What's Scrum for?

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.

Change or Die. Clinging to the old way of doing things, of command and control and rigid predictability, will bring only failure. In the meantime, the competition that is willing to change will leave you in the dust.

Scrum is a lot like that. It requires practice and attention, but also a continuous effort to reach a new state—a state where things just flow and happen.

Size Does Matter, but Not the Way You Think

Brooks’s Law says “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”8

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.

Time makes up your life, so wasting it is actually a slow form of suicide.

#Scrum #Time

Multitasking Makes You Stupid. Doing more than one thing at a time makes you slower and worse at both tasks. Don’t do it. If you think this doesn’t apply to you, you’re wrong—it does.

Only Plan What You Need To. Don’t try to project everything out years in advance. Just plan enough to keep your teams busy.

If you can’t trust the people you’re hiring to be on board with what you’re doing, you’re hiring the wrong people, and you’ve set up a system that has failure built in.

Imagine a company that everyone thinks of as my company, where every day is a chance to get better, to do something better, to learn something new.

It’s the Journey, Not the Destination. True happiness is found in the process, not the result. Often we only reward results, but what we really want to reward is people striving toward greatness.

Happy Is the New Black. It helps you make smarter decisions. Plus, when you’re happy, you’re more creative, less likely to leave your job, and more likely to accomplish far more than you ever anticipated.