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

by Jeff Sutherland

What Scrum does is create a different kind of pattern. It accepts that we’re habit-driven creatures, seekers of rhythm, somewhat predictable, but also somewhat magical and capable of greatness.

I’m here to tell you that it shouldn’t be funny. It should be shameful. We should mourn the lives and potential we’re wasting.

Ohno talked about three different types of waste. He used the Japanese words: Muri, waste through unreasonableness; Mura, waste through inconsistency; and Muda, waste through outcomes.

An especially apt example is that daily practice of multitasking: driving and talking on a cell phone. The research is very clear on this. People who drive while talking on cell phones—even the hands-free variety—get into more accidents than people who don’t.

Perceptions of the ability to multi-task were found to be badly inflated; in fact, the majority of participants judged themselves to be above average in the ability to multi-task. These estimations had little grounding in reality. Thus, it appears that the people who are most likely to multi-task and most apt to use a cell phone while driving are those with the most inflated views of their abilities.

The “Loss to Context Switching” column is pure waste. That’s right: if you have five projects, a full 75 percent of your work goes nowhere—three-quarters of your day is flushed down the toilet.

What I want you to do, though, is be conscious of the cost of context switching. It’s very real, and you should try to minimize it.

switch quickly to another project, even just for a moment? You guessed it: that carefully built mental architecture collapses. It can take hours of work just to get back to the same state of awareness. That’s the cost. So minimize that waste by trying to do all at once those tasks that require a specific kind of concentration.

Scrum takes a lot of its thinking from the Japanese manufacturing model that was codified in the classic book Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno.

In the United States this model has been interpreted as “Lean” manufacturing.

In Lean manufacturing, the idea is to minimize the amount of half-built stuff lying around.

Doing half of something is, essentially, doing nothing.

Every iteration, or Sprint, the team tries to get a number of things done. But that “Done” implies a complete, deliverable product that can be used by a customer. If something is half done at the end of the Sprint, you’re worse off than if you hadn’t started at all.

“Done” implies a complete, deliverable product that can be used by a customer. If something is half done at the end of the Sprint, you’re wors...

Having tons of cars sitting on a lot unsold is a problem for an automaker. But not having cars available to be sold is also a problem. So each automaker and dealership operation engages in a careful balancing act.

Jobs that aren’t done and products that aren’t being used are two aspects of the same thing: invested effort with no positive outcome. Don’t do it.

In a Toyota plant when a problem shows up on the line, every worker has the ability to stop the whole line. When that happens, everyone swarms around where the line stopped—not to yell at the guy for stopping the line, but to fix whatever problem is there. They don’t want any cars coming out the other end with things that have to be fixed.

the German plant was expending more effort to fix the problems it had just created than the Japanese plant required to make a nearly perfect car the first time.8

software can be a pretty complicated and involved thing, so what do you think was the difference? It took twenty-four times longer. If a bug was addressed on the day it was created, it would take an hour to fix; three weeks later, it would take twenty-four hours.

Recreating that construct a week later is hard.

Scott says that people who work too many hours start making mistakes, which, as we’ve seen, can actually take more effort to fix than to create. Overworked employees get more distracted and begin distracting others. Soon they’re making bad decisions.

If they’d just gotten to work, or back from a snack break, or back from lunch, they made favorable decisions more than 60 percent of the time. That rate dropped to nearly zero by the time of the next break.

When we don’t have any energy reserves left, we’re prone to start making unsound decisions. This phenomenon has been labeled “ego depletion.” The idea is that making any choice involves an energy cost. It’s an odd sort of exhaustion—you don’t feel physically tired, but your capacity to make good decisions diminishes. What really changes is your self-control—your ability to be disciplined, thoughtful, and prescient.

“bandwagon” effect. You’ve been in meetings like that. That’s when someone comes up with an idea, and everyone starts talking about it. And even if you disagreed with it initially, you go along because the group is going along.

“An informational cascade occurs when it is optimal for an individual, having observed the actions of those ahead of him, to follow the behavior of the preceding individual without regard to his own information.”

If people are more than three cards apart, then the high and the low cards talk about why they think what they do. Then everyone does another round of Planning Poker.

This incredibly simple method is a way to avoid any kind of anchoring behavior, such as the bandwagon or halo effects, and it allows the whole team to share knowledge on a particular task.

the first thing you want to think about when you’re considering a task is character or role—for example, a customer, a bride, a reader, an employee. Who is this task being done for? Whose lens on the world is the one we need to gaze through when we’re building this thing, making that decision, or delivering this piece?

So before you prioritize what needs to be done for your business, you need to define the character, the user, the customer—the person who’s going to use what you’re going to do. You need to know their likes, dislikes, passions, enthusiasms, frustrations, and joys. And then you need to understand their motivations.

What are the things that actually make people happy? They’re the same things that make great teams: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

People in the Shu state follow the rules exactly, so they learn the ideas behind them. People in the Ha state begin to create their own style within the rules, adapting them to their needs. People in the Ri state exist beyond the rules; they embody the ideals. Watching a true master in the Ri state is like looking at a moving work of art.