Scrum - Doing Twice the work in half the time - 1

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Book Notes from 'Scrum The art of doing twice the work in half the time' - By Jeff Sutherland

FBI - Software development story

• After 9/11 turned into one of the biggest software debacles of all time.
• CIO - Chad Fulgham : FBI
• 9/11 Commission couldn’t get access to the very information they were supposed to analyze.
• The report singled out lack of technical logical sophistication
• The key reason failed prior to 9/11 -
• The FBI's information systems were woefully inadequate.
• The FBI lacked the ability to know what it knew.
• There was no effective mechanism for capturing or sharing its institutional knowledge.
• It wasn’t that the FBI didn’t have smart people, or the right personnel in place, or the right technology.
• It wasn’t because of work ethic or the right competitive juices.
• It was because of the way people were working.
• Gantt Charts - waterfall method
• Every single step in a project is laid out in detail
• Every milestone, every delivery date.
• The only problem with these charts - they are  always, always wrong.
• There are people whose only job is to update these charts.
• Eisenhower - planning for combat is important, but once that first shot is fired, your plans go up in smoke.

A New Way of Thinking

• The new approach is called Scrum
• There are two ways of doing things.
• The old waterfall method that wastes hundreds of millions of dollars and often doesn’t deliver anything,
• The new way - with fewer people, in less time can deliver more stuff with higher quality at lower cost.
• Giants at Google, Amazon and Salesforce.com this framework has shifted how people get things done.
• Looked at how people actually work - rather than how they say they work.
• Looked deeply at the best teams within those companies
• What made them superior
• What made them different
• Why do some teams achieve greatness and other mediocrity
• The way a team works together to move the ball down the field.
• Careful alignment, unity of purpose, and clarity of goals
• Management wants two things on any project.
• Control
• Predictability.
• Every project involves discovery of problems and bursts of inspirations.
• Scrum embraces uncertainty and creativity
• It places structure around the learning process, enabling teams to assess both what they have created and what how they created it.
• Scrum harnesses how teams actually work.
• Give them the tools to self-organize and rapidly improve both speed of work and quality of work.
• When you start a project
• Why not regularly check in
• See if what you doing is headed in the right direction.
• And if its what people want.
• That is whats called - "Inspect and Adapt" cycle.
• Stop doing what youre doing
• Review what you've done
• See if it's still what you should be doing
• And how you might do it better.
• The results can be so dramatic that leading research and analysis firms now say the old style of work is obsolete.
• Scrum offers too big a competitive advantage not to use it.
• "The results are indisputable. Companies have two choices: change or die"

Fixing the FBI

• The first problem the FBI faced with Sentinel was contracts
• The first week they did what a lot of people would do - printed out requirements
• No one actually reads all those thousand pages
• They cant - that’s the point - they’ve set up a system that forces them to endorse a fantasy.
• That tall stack of futility is one of the reasons Scrum can be such a powerful change for people.
• No one should spend their lives on meaningless work.
• Not only is it not good business, it kills the soul.
• What will bring the most value to the project - do those things first.
• 80% of the value of any software is in 20% of the features.
• Making people prioritize by value forces them to produce that 20% first.
• The FBI stated that it will employ agile to complete the development of Sentinel.
• Agile declares the following
• People over processes
• Products that actually work over documents what the product is supposed to do.
• Collaborating with customers over negotiating with them
• Responding to change over following a plan.
• Scrum in the framework to put these values into practice.
• I'll know what the date will be when I see how much the team improves
• How fast they'll get it
• How much they will accelerate.
• Team members figure out what would stop them from accelerating.
• Production should flow swiftly and calmly throughout the process.
• One of managements key tasks is to identify and remove impediments to that flow.
• Everything that stands in the way is a waste.
• For Scrum to really take off - management needs to understand in its bones - that impediments are nearly criminal.
• Scrum works by setting sequential goals that must be completed in a fixed length of time.
• Are they headed in the right direction.
• Is what they are planning to do next really what they should be doing.
• In Scrum we call these cycles 'Sprints'
• At the end of each sprint. The team comes together and shows what they have accomplished.
• They begin to learn how fast they can go.
• After they have shown what they have done.
• They discuss not what they did - but how they did it.
• They ask "How can we work together better in the next sprint"
• Measure the velocity of each team measured over a few sprints and then see how much they could improve.
• Besides learning how fast the teams are going - they also wanted to  know what impediments were slowing them down.
• Working better and smarter.
• They got better at working together.
• They figured out what was slowing them down, and after each cycle, each Sprint, they'd try to get rid of them.
• The Most powerful part of Scrum from his point of view  - Demo's
• A demonstrable product on a frequent basis.
• Scrum is not about the developers - its about the customers and stakeholders.
• Pig is committed and a chicken is interested.
• Scrum is that the pigs are the ones who are totally committed to the project and are responsible for its outcome.
• The chickens are the people who are informed of its progress, the stakeholders.
• The world is constantly getting more complicated and the work we do is gaining in complexity at an ever-increasing rate.