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

“How do you eat an elephant? - One bite at the time.”

“Don’t blame the asshole, blame the system creating the asshole.”

This book is helpful for EVERYONE! The book provides numerous life hacks that will enable you to work faster and more efficient, for you individually but primarily in team projects. Thus, any manager or project leader is especially guaranteed to be inspired by this book

The book in short: The book is about the project management system Scrum who Sutherland co-created. The book is describing the efficiency of the system and is applying cases and science to advocate that every organization should implement Scrum. The system is in short evolving around disentangling projects and working focused in teams to solve the parts of the projects with most value – fast! Along the process the teams are supposed to learn from each other and increase the speed of working by implementing a culture of transparency.

Scrum is simple, in essence – very simple. Because it is very simple, and many of the facets are quite intuitive, I would argue it isn’t even necessary to read the full book to understand and apply its wisdom. It is adequate to read the four-page appendix describing the implementation for putting it to use. That being said the book is a very quick and good read so it can only be recommended to be read in full. 

The book is rather similar to Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup”, however, Sutherland’s book gives a broader perspective and application for this way of working and he has 30+ years head start on the model. Hence, even if you have read “The Lean Startup” this book is still highly recommendable.

Full Review:

“Scrum” is a term that origins from rugby. “the scrum” is the formation the team forms when pushing the ball up the field, positioned shoulder by shoulder, forming a wedge-like figure. Scrum in the context of this book is a system focusing on team performance and project processes to reach superior output efficiency.

The book’s primary objective is clearly to convince the reader why the Scrum system is the best project management system every built. It is providing a lot of different cases in which Scrum has been applied with astounding success. These are cases like digitalizing the FBI’s database, the setup of Medicare, reaching an impossible deadline for Medco, and the way WIKISPEED and Toyota are building cars. Mr. Sutherland is also including a lot of scientific research to backup several elements of the system, which gives a lot of credibility to his argumentation.

Scrum’s underlying statement is to go away from the conventional project planning method called the “waterfall” approach. This often excessive meticulous planning includes a long process of creating timelines, Gantt charts, product specifications, deadlines and other tools that requires a lot of energy and time and will rarely correspond to the reality over the course of the project.

Instead of your typical Gantt chart Scrum advocates to have a whiteboard, a flip chart, etc. where post-it notes with tasks can be tracked through the below 5 stages:

Backlog --> To Do --> In Progress --> In Review --> Done

Scrum dissects the project into a multitude of subtasks or backlogs, which can be tested once completed these subprojects are called “Sprints”. The order of the sprints is determined by a continuous prioritization of the backlogs listed in the beginning. The prioritization is like everything else not fixed as it is continuously up for reassessment. The grand idea is to learn from insights that are being obtained over the course of the project. The insights are then applied to direct focus towards activities that brings optimal value. Hereby everything is fluid.

In order to know if attributed functions, elements, services, etc. are bringing value, they need to be tested. To gather insight on this fast a “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP), or a function adding to the MVP, should be the outcome of every dissected part or “sprint” of the project.

Scrum on Building Teams:

Inherent to the success of Scrum is teams. The book talks about how it is a very tedious and time-consuming process to enhance the productivity of individuals, whereas an effective system, like Scrum, relative easily can ensure a productive team.

The characteristics that preferably should be present to make Scrum work at its full capacity is the following:

Size: The team should not be larger than 7 and preferably it should be close to 4. There are several reasons to this. The most surprising one is that psychologist have found that the human brain has a great degree of difficulty in keeping track of more than 4 objects at a time. It implies that in a large team, the participants are unaware of the competencies of all the team members and what everyone is working on. The other, more obvious reason is that communication becomes gradually worse the more people you add to a team.

Work should be meaningful: The team should have a sense of what they are doing has purpose.

Posses the necessary skills: The Team should be cross-functional to an extent that makes it able to solve the task at hand.

Work with autonomy: The team should be self-organizing and self-managing, which only can take place if management encourage that behavior and excessive company compliance policies doesn’t choke autonomy.

Scrum on Prioritization and Creating Value:

One of the big fallacies of the waterfall approach to project management is that the things that seemed important at the setout can prove to take much longer than planned for, have contingencies that needs to be addressed separately, or all together prove to be less important than initially thought. The book gives a lot of different tricks on how to evaluate the required effort having to be put into a backlog and how to evaluate its incremental value addition relative to other backlogs. One way that is mentioned to assist ranking how complicated each backlog is, is to rank them by Fibonacci numbers, sizes of different dog breeds, clothing sizes, etc. This way the conclusion will be more accurate since a 1-10 ranking tends to give an arbitrary assessment.

Scrum on Feedback and Continuous Improvement:

There are three elements integral to the Scrum system that highlights feedback as a tool for saving time, working faster, and creating value for customers.

1)   During the Sprints every day a daily meeting with the length of no more than 15 minutes is conducted at which the everyone is giving an update to the team. The purpose of this is to enlighten where contingencies are situated and to avoid they become bottlenecks that potentially can slowdown other parts of the team.

2)   After every Sprint the team is asked to assess the process and the outcome. It is again for the purpose of jointly reaching a state of better working conditions and process.

3)   Feedback on the output. After an minimal viable outcome is presented instantaneous feedback reveals necessary improvements, success, or failures. To get this knowledge fast is immensely powerful and enables the team to iterate rapidly and thereby avoiding wasting valuable time. It is also what Eric Ries talks about in his book “The Lean Startup”.

The book also highlights feedback for the reason of personal improvement for people engaged in your project. The aspects on constant improvement both personal and process oriented are highly inspired by the Japanese concept of Kaizen. Additionally, the philosophy of iterating and being transparent have roots in Jeff Sutherland’s past in the US Air Force where he was trained in the observe, orient, decide, act (OODA). OODA forms a feedback loop. The faster the loop can be established in new circumstances, is the single most important factor for competitive advantage because it dictates how fast you can deliver additional value thus expanding your value reach or the domains in which you can deliver value.

Conclusion

Scrum is all about creating flow, and instilling a culture of transparency thereby having everyone on the same page, and make everyone get better everyday. Scrum is a great tool that everyone should have knowledge of. Life is too short to work inefficiently.