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

by Jeff Sutherland

Making people prioritize by value forces them to produce that 20 percent first. Often by the time they’re done, they realize they don’t really need the other 80 percent, or that what seemed important at the outset actually isn’t.

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

What did you do since the last time we talked? What are you going to do before we talk again? And what is getting in your way?

Whenever there are handoffs between teams, there is the opportunity for disaster. As an article titled “Employing ISR: SOF Best Practices” in Joint Force Quarterly put it:

the “Happiness Metric.” It’s a simple but very effective way of getting at what the kaizen should be, but also which kaizen will make people the happiest. And I’ve used it with pretty remarkable results. Here’s how it works. At the end of each Sprint each person on the team answers just a few questions: On a scale from 1 to 5, how do you feel about your role in the company? On the same scale, how do you feel about the company as a whole? Why do you feel that way? What one thing would make you happier in the next Sprint?

The idea goes by the somewhat ludicrous name of the OODA loop. That’s short for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. And