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

by Jeff Sutherland

PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act). You can apply this cycle to the production of just about anything, be it a car, a videogame, or, heck, even a paper airplane. When I train people how to do Scrum, that’s what I use: paper airplanes. I divide people up into teams and tell them that the goal is to build as many paper airplanes as they can that will fly across the room. There are going to be three roles on the team. One person will check how many planes are built that can actually fly. Another will work as part of the assembly process but will also pay attention to the process itself and look for ways that the team can make better planes and speed up their production. Everyone else will concentrate on building as many planes that can actually fly the distance in the assembly time allowed. I then say we’re going to do three six-minute cycles of paper-airplane building. The teams have one minute each cycle to Plan how they’re going to build the airplane, three minutes to Do—to build and test as many airplanes as they can that can actually fly. And finally they’ll have two minutes to Check. In this phase the team looks for how they could improve their paper airplane–building process. What went right? What went wrong? Should the design be changed? How can the construction process be improved? And then they will Act. In Deming’s world “to act” means to change your way of working based on real results and real environmental input. It’s the same strategy used by Brooks’s robot. Go ...