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February 4 - February 9, 2023
Dr Jeff Sutherland is the creator of Scrum and was a signer of the Agile Manifesto, which marked the start of the Agile movement. A graduate of West Point, he began his career as a fighter pilot in the US Air Force, and went on to join the faculty at the University of Colorado Medical School.
Traditionally, management wants two things on any project: control and predictability. This leads to vast numbers of documents and graphs and charts,
The cathedral at Chartres took fifty-seven years to build. It’s a safe bet that at the beginning of the project the stonemasons looked at the bishop and said, “Twenty years, max. Probably be done in fifteen.”
Planning Is Useful. Blindly Following Plans Is Stupid.
no matter how excellent your technicians, you who are leaders must strive for advances in the improvement of product quality and uniformity if your technicians are to be able to make improvements. The first step, therefore, belongs with management.
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Know where you are, assess your options, make a decision, and act!
Don’t Guess. Plan, Do, Check, Act. Plan what you’re going to do. Do it. Check whether it did what you wanted. Act on that and change how you’re doing things. Repeat in regular cycles, and, by doing so, achieve continuous improvement.
Shu Ha Ri. First, learn the rules and the forms, and once you’ve mastered them, make innovations. Finally, in a heightened state of mastery, discard the forms and just be—with all the learning internalized and decisions made almost unconsciously.
The teams are self-organizing and self-managing, they have the power to make their own decisions about how they do their jobs, and are empowered to make those decisions stick.
The teams have all the skills needed to complete the project. Planning, design, production, sales, distribution. And those skills feed and reinforce each other.
They’ll call me up in a panic when they have a mission-critical project that is in trouble. They’ll have me train dozens of their people in Scrum, have me start up teams that are capable of addressing their emergency. They direct people from across the organization into cross-functional teams to address the issue. And then they solve it. Once the crisis is past, they disband the teams to their respective silos and managerial fiefdoms. The transparency and sharing of a truly fantastic team threatens structures rooted in secrets and obfuscation.
Managers often don’t want other managers, their own teams, or other people within the power structure to know exactly what they’re doing or what is being accomplished and how fast. They see keeping that knowledge secret as critical to their power. Instead of being aligned with the interests of the greater good, they’re aligned with their own motivations, which often boil down to greed and ambition.
just because cross-functionality can achieve great results, you shouldn’t play Noah and throw two of everything into a team. The team dynamic only works well in small teams. The classic formulation is seven people, plus or minus two,
We’re lousy focusers, we spend far more hours in the office than needed, and we’re horrible estimators of how long things will take. This is all people I’m talking about—it’s how we humans simply are.
If people have a special title, they tend to do only things that seem a match for that title. And to protect the power of that role, they tend to hold on to specific knowledge.
Doing half of something is, essentially, doing nothing.
If something is half done at the end of the Sprint, you’re worse off than if you hadn’t started at all. You’ve expended resources, effort, and time and gotten nothing to a deliverable state. You have a half-constructed car. It might have been better to create something smaller—something that really works.
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. It didn’t even matter if the bug was big or small, complicated or simple—it always took twenty-four times longer three weeks later. As you can imagine, every software developer in the company was soon required to test and fix their code on the same day.
there’s a limited number of sound decisions you can make in any one day, and as you make more and more, you erode your ability to regulate your own behavior. You start making mistakes—eventually, serious ones. As the Maxwell Curve shows, those bad decisions impact productivity. So go home at five. Turn off the cell phone over the weekend. Watch a movie. Perhaps, most important, have a sandwich. By not working so much, you’ll get more and better work done.
Constantly moving from one crisis to the next causes burnout, and it doesn’t allow for reasoned, continuous improvement.
In a theoretically perfect world, there would be no process, no meetings, no forms, no reporting. Instead, there’d be the creation of exactly what the customer wants, even if the customer didn’t know they wanted it yet. Any “process” that people use is wasteful, and that includes Scrum. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and bad processes are so ingrained in our thinking that, as an alternative, we need the lightest-weight process with the greatest impact on work.
Doing more than one thing at a time makes you slower and worse at both tasks. Don’t do it.
When you make a mistake, fix it right away. Stop everything else and address it. Fixing it later can take you more than twenty times longer than if you fix it now.
Goals that are challenging are motivators; goals that are impossible are just depressing.
If everyone is within two cards of each other (say a five, two eights, and a thirteen), the team just adds them all up and takes the average (in that case 6.6) and moves on to the next item. Remember, we’re talking estimates, not ironbound schedules. And estimates on small pieces of the project. 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.
Planning Poker
As a customer, I want the world’s biggest online bookseller so that I can buy any book I want at any time I want.
User story negative example
“As a customer, I want to put a book into a shopping cart, so that I can buy it.”
User story positive example
the INVEST criteria: Independent. The story must be actionable and “completable” on its own. It shouldn’t be inherently dependent on another story. Negotiable. Until it’s actually being done, it needs to be able to be rewritten. Allowance for change is built in. Valuable. It actually delivers value to a customer or user or stakeholder. Estimable. You have to be able to size it. Small. The story needs to be small enough to be able to estimate and plan for easily. If it is too big, rewrite it or break it down into smaller stories. Testable. The story must have a test it is supposed to pass in
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We find in real projects that if stories are really Ready, the team will double the speed of implementation. And if the stories are really Done at the end of a Sprint, teams can double speed again.
once you have your velocity, you can figure out the most important thing in Scrum: what is keeping you from going faster? What is keeping you from accelerating?
Scrum done in the right way will make workers, customers, managers, and stock-holders happy (usually in that order).
“We are not rewarded for enjoying the journey itself but for the successful completion of a journey. Society rewards results, not processes; arrivals, not journeys.”
happiness is crucial to your business and is actually a better forward predictor of revenue than most of the metrics your CFO provides.
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 team takes that one top improvement and makes it the most important thing to do in the next Sprint—with acceptance tests. How can you prove you’ve made that improvement? You need to define what success is in a concrete, actionable way, so that in the next Sprint Retrospective it’s really easy to see if you achieved the kaizen.
Managers should also have zero tolerance for incivility and never allow an employee to poison corporate culture through abuse or disrespect.
Nothing should be secret. Everyone should know everything, and that includes salaries and financials. Obfuscation only serves people who serve themselves.
The Product Owner decides what the work should be. He or she owns the Backlog, what’s on it, and, most important, what order it’s in.
The Product Owner has to be reliable, consistent, and available. Without access to him, the team won’t know what to do, or what order to do it in. They rely on the Product Owner for “the vision” and, also, market intelligence on what is important. If the Product Owner isn’t available to the team, the whole process can fall apart.
If you’re in an equilibrium condition, you’re dead.
“He who will defend everything defends nothing.”
Create new things only as long as those new things deliver value. Be willing to swap them out for things that require equal effort. What in the beginning you thought you needed is never what is actually needed.
“When a company has optimized itself around innovation, they usually change in a fundamental way by eliminating internal structures and hierarchies, any internal structure,”
fundamentally, humans want to be great. People want to do something purposeful—to make the world, even if just in a small way, a better place. The key is getting rid of what stands in their way, removing the impediments to their becoming who they’re capable of becoming. That’s what Scrum does. It sets goals and systematically, step by step, works out how to get there. And even more important, it identifies what is stopping us from getting there.
