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

by Jeff Sutherland

things on any project: control and predictability. This leads to vast numbers of documents and graphs and charts, just like at Lockheed. Months of effort go into planning every detail, so there will be no mistakes, no cost overruns, and things will be delivered on schedule. The problem is that the rosy scenario never actually unfolds. All that effort poured into planning, trying to restrict change, trying to know the unknowable is wasted. Every project involves discovery of problems and bursts of inspiration. Trying to restrict a human endeavor of any scope to color-coded charts and graphs is foolish and doomed to failure.

Planning Is Useful. Blindly Following Plans Is Stupid.

Inspect and Adapt. Every little while, stop doing what you’re doing, review what you’ve done,

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. Fail Fast So You Can Fix Early. Corporate culture often puts more weight on forms, procedures, and meetings than on visible value creation that can be inspected at short intervals by

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.

Autonomous: 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.

Cross-Functional: The teams have all the skills needed to complete the project. Planning, design, production, sales, distribution.

Whenever there are handoffs between teams, there is the opportunity for disaster.

The first is the time it takes to bring people up to speed. As you’d expect, bringing a new person up to speed slows down everyone else. The second reason has to do not only with how we think but, quite literally, with what our brains are capable of thinking. The number of communication channels increases dramatically with the number of people, and our brains just can’t handle it.

Given the right situation, we’re all capable of being Nazis.

Autonomy. Give teams the freedom to make decisions on how to take action—to be respected as masters of their craft.

Blame Is Stupid. Don’t look for bad people; look for bad systems—ones that incentivize bad behavior and reward poor performance.

I want aggressive teams—ones that come out of the daily meeting knowing the most important thing they need to accomplish that day.

Demo or Die. At the end of each Sprint, have something that’s done—something that can be used

Throw Away Your Business Cards. Titles are specialized status markers. Be known for what you do, not how you’re referred to.

Everyone Knows Everything. Communication saturation ...

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

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.

You’re holding a pretty complicated construct in your head. Recreating that construct a week later is hard. You have to remember all the factors that you were considering when you made that choice. You have to re-create the thought process that led you to that decision. You have to become your past self again, put yourself back inside a mind that no longer exists. Doing that takes time. A long time. Twenty-four times as long as it would take if you had fixed the problem when you first discovered it.

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.

The first is “Absurdity.” You want to give your team challenging goals—to push them to reach for more. But you don’t want them striving for absurd, impossible goals.

A team that depends on regular heroic actions to make its deadlines is not working the way it’s supposed to work. Constantly moving from one crisis to the next causes burnout, and it doesn’t allow for reasoned, continuous improvement.

Ohno called the third type of waste “Overburden.” It’s the sort of behavior that Scott Adams regularly lampoons in his Dilbert cartoons. It includes onerous company policies that get in the way, unnecessary reporting that has people filling out forms for the sake of filling out forms, and meaningless meetings that suck up time and don’t deliver any value.

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.

Half-Done Is Not Done. A half-built car simply ties up resources that could be used to create value or save money. Anything that’s “in process” costs money and energy without delivering anything.

Do It Right the First Time. When you make a mistake, fix it right away. Stop everything else and address it. Fixing it later can take you more than t...

Strive for Flow. Choose the smoothest, most trouble-free way to get things done. Scrum is about enabling the most flow possible.

As Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch, the authors of the paper “A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades” put it: “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.”

The Map Is Not the Terrain. Don’t fall in love with your plan. It’s almost certainly wrong.

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

Work Is a Story. Think first about who’ll be getting value from something, then about what it is, and then why they need it. Humans think in narratives, so give them one. As an X, I want Y, so that Z.

Know Your Velocity. Every team should know exactly how much work they can get done in each Sprint. And they should know how much they can improve that velocity by working smarter and removing barriers that are slowing them down.

“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.”

What are the things that actually make people happy? They’re the same things that make great teams: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Or to say it more expansively, it’s the ability to control your own destiny, it’s the feeling that you’re getting better at something, and it’s knowing that you’re serving something bigger than yourself.

The “Wise Fool” is the person who asks uncomfortable questions or raises uncomfortable truths. These workers aren’t always easy to have around, since they can be seen as troublemakers or not part of the team, but they need to be cultivated and used.

People tend to fall into four types according to Ben-Shahar. The first type, the “Hedonist,” is someone who is doing what makes them happy right now. Tomorrow? Let tomorrow worry about tomorrow. I’ll just enjoy today. I see this kind of behavior a lot in start-ups: a bunch of people in the figurative garage just making stuff, because it’s cool and it’s fun. But there isn’t a lot of attention paid to creating a sustainable product.

It sucks today, and they think it will suck forever. Call them now the “Nihilists.

The fourth type of person is the one that Scrum tries to identify and encourage—the individual who is working at stuff that is fun today but has an eye toward a better future and who is convinced it will be fun forever.

Secrecy Is Poison. Nothing should be secret. Everyone should know everything, and that includes salaries and financials. Obfuscation only serves people who serve themselves.

Make Work Visible. Have a board that shows all the work that needs to be done, what is being worked on, and what is actually done. Everyone should see it, and everyone should update it every day.

Pop the Happy Bubble. Don’t get so happy that you start believing your own bullshit. Make sure happiness is measured against performance, and if there is a disconnect, be prepared to act. Complacency is the enemy of success.

If a company isn’t making money, you don’t have a successful venture; you have a hobby.

The key, though, is what you decide to do first. The questions you need to ask are: what are the items that have the biggest business impact, that are most important to the customer, that can make the most money, and are the easiest to do?

In product development there’s a hard-and-fast rule that has been proven over and over again. I talked about this earlier: 80 percent of the value is in 20 percent of the features.

An individual’s responsibility for leadership is not dependent on authority.… the deep-rooted assumption that authority should equal responsibility is the root of much organizational evil. I believe misunderstanding around this issue is rampant, problematic, and runs so deep in our consciousness that we don’t even realize it.1

leadership has nothing to do with authority. Rather, it has to do with—among other things—knowledge and being a servant-leader. The Chief Engineer can’t simply say something has to be done a particular way. He has to persuade, cajole, and demonstrate that his way is the right way, the best way. It usually takes someone with thirty years of experience to fill the role. I wanted that in Scrum, but I’m also well aware that very few people have that level of skill and experience. So I split the role in two, giving the Scrum Master the how and the Product Owner the what.

The Product Owner needed to be able to deliver feedback to the team from the customer each and every Sprint. They needed to spend half their time talking to the people buying the product (getting their thoughts on the latest incremental release and how it delivered value) and half their time with the team creating the Backlog (showing them what the customers valued and what they didn’t).

One, the Product Owner needs to be knowledgeable about the domain.

Two, the Product Owner has to be empowered to make decisions. Just as management shouldn’t interfere with the team, the Product Owner should be given the leeway to make decisions about what the product vision will be, and what needs to be done to get there.