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In the future, historians may look back on human progress and draw a sharp line designating “before Scrum” and “after Scrum.” Scrum is that ground-breaking. It already drives most of the world’s top technology companies. And now it’s starting to spread to every domain where leaders wrestle with complex projects.

If you’ve ever been startled by how fast the world is changing, Scrum is one of the reasons why. Productivity gains of as much as 1200% have been recorded, and there’s no more lucid – or compelling – explainer of Scrum and its bright promise than Jeff Sutherland, the man who put together the first Scrum team more than twenty years ago.

The thorny problem Jeff began tackling back then boils down to this: people are spectacularly bad at doing things with agility and efficiency. Best laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross purposes to each other. And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars. Drawing on his experience as a West Point-educated fighter pilot, biometrics expert, early innovator of ATM technology, and V.P. of engineering or CTO at eleven different technology companies, Jeff began challenging those dysfunctional realities, looking for solutions that would have global impact.

In this book you’ll journey to Scrum’s front lines where Jeff’s system of deep accountability, team interaction, and constant iterative improvement is, among other feats, bringing the FBI into the 21st century, perfecting the design of an affordable 140 mile per hour/100 mile per gallon car, helping NPR report fast-moving action in the Middle East, changing the way pharmacists interact with patients, reducing poverty in the Third World, and even helping people plan their weddings and accomplish weekend chores.

Woven with insights from martial arts, judicial decision making, advanced aerial combat, robotics, and many other disciplines, Scrum is consistently riveting. But the most important reason to read this book is that it may just help you achieve what others consider unachievable – whether it be inventing a trailblazing technology, devising a new system of education, pioneering a way to feed the hungry, or, closer to home, a building a foundation for your family to thrive and prosper.

Takeaways

Gantt charts are beautiful and a complete fabrication of reality. Get working product over a broken chart. Traditional approach is “waterfall” methodology. All requirements upfront. Waterfall is always late, doesn’t meet the changing requirements and over budget.

Scrum

  • Derived from Rugby, it is a collection of concepts a team follows to accomplish objectives. “The ball gets passed within the team as it moves as a unit up the field”.
  • Blindly following a plan is dumb
  • Inspect and Adapt
  • Change or Die ^b8e49a
  • Fail fast to Fix Early ^85d7a8
  • Incentivize based on company performance, not individual or team.
  • It is better to:
    • Observe
    • Orient
    • Decide
    • Act
  • Organize individual thinkers with constant feedback about their environment so that efficiencies can be achieved like never before.
  • Must be autonomous
  • Must eliminate handoffs
  • Must have all components represented on the team: sales, marketing, product, specialists, etc
  • 3-7 is the optimal team size based on research across 491 different medium sized teams
  • Scrum Master
    • Not a manager, but a team captain / coach
    • Lead all meetings, maintain focus, solve issues
    • Continuously inspecting the process
    • Constantly looking at the process and asking:
      • What can we change about how we work
      • What are our biggest sticking points

        It is the system around us that accounts for the vast majority of our behavior.

    • Scrum accepts this and attempts to review the system, not the person, that produced the failure and attempts to fix it. It is a default position for people to blame people for failures rather than the system.
  • Pull the Right Lever. Change Team performance. That has much more impact—by several orders of magnitude—than individual performance.
  • Transcendence. Great teams have a purpose that is greater than the individual; e.g., burying General MacArthur, winning the NBA championship.
  • Autonomy. Give teams the freedom to make decisions on how to take action—to be respected as masters of their craft. The ability to improvise will make all the difference, whether the unit is reporting on a revolution in the Middle East or making a sale.
  • Cross-functional. The team must have every skill needed to complete a project, whether the mission is to deliver Salesforce.com software or capture terrorists in Iraq.
  • Small Wins. Small teams get work done faster than big teams. The rule of thumb is seven team members—plus or minus two. Err on the small side.
  • Blame Is Stupid. Don’t look for bad people; look for bad systems—ones that incentivize bad behavior and reward poor performance.

    Time

  • People are terrible at estimating how long something takes.
  • Time Is Finite. Treat It That Way. Break down your work into what can be accomplished in a regular, set, short period—optimally one to four weeks. And if you’ve caught the Scrum fever, call it a Sprint.
  • Demo or Die. At the end of each month, have something that’s done—something that can be used (to fly, drive, whatever).
  • 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 accelerates work.
  • One Meeting a Day. When it comes to team check-ins, once a day is enough. Get together for fifteen minutes at the Daily Stand-up, see what can be done to increase speed, and do it.

    Waste is a Crime

  • People love to get into a rhythm. They gravitate toward patterns. However, patterns are not always positive nor do they make us feel good.
  • Usually in companies, 85% of the work is wasteful. Only 1/6 of effort produces something of value.
  • 3 kinds of waste:
    • Muri, waste through unreasonableness;
    • Mura, waste through inconsistency;
    • Muda, waste through outcomes.
  • 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 twenty times longer than if you fix it now.
  • Working Too Hard Only Makes More Work. Working long hours doesn’t get more done; it gets less done. Working too much results in fatigue, which leads to errors, which leads to having to fix the thing you just finished. Rather than work late or on the weekends, work weekdays only at a sustainable pace. And take a vacation.
  • Don’t Be Unreasonable. Goals that are challenging are motivators; goals that are impossible are just depressing.
  • No Heroics. If you need a hero to get things done, you have a problem. Heroic effort should be viewed as a failure of planning.
  • Enough with the Stupid Policies. Any policy that seems ridiculous likely is. Stupid forms, stupid meetings, stupid approvals, stupid standards are just that—stupid. If your office seems like a Dilbert cartoon, fix it.
  • No Assholes. Don’t be one, and don’t allow the behavior. Anyone who causes emotional chaos, inspires fear or dread, or demeans or diminishes people needs to be stopped cold.
  • Strive for Flow. Choose the smoothest, most trouble-free way to get things done. Scrum is about enabling the most flow possible.